We sat at an outdoor café in the blistering heat and drank some chilled Tokaji. Zoltán taught me how to toast in Hungarian. “Egészségedre,” he enunciated slowly—meaning, “To your health!” Later I would constantly ask him to repeat it for me, because invariably I would invert the syllables or contort the pronunciation. Very little of the Hungarian I had heard as a child seemed to have stuck with me. “Paprikajancsi,” my grandfather had sometimes called me when I was being particularly mischievous. Although it literally translated to “pepper jack,” Zoltán said, it was actually the name of a classical clown character similar to Punchinello. Neither of my grandparents had wanted any of us to learn their native language. Hungarian was used only when secrets needed to be kept or in heated conversations behind closed doors. It was the language of the past, to which we were not allowed any access. We were the future, and the future spoke only Yiddish.
We had a three-hour drive ahead of us to the great northern plain bordered by Romania to the east and Ukraine and Slovakia to the north, in which Nyíregyháza was only a small city in a rural outpost. Traffic thinned after we entered the Szatmár-Bereg region, an area that had once been part of Transylvania, and was now a poor and rural place. By the time we arrived in Nyíregyháza, whatever cooling off the rain had provided was gone. Only a few damp spots remained on concrete structures, and steam rose from the asphalt. Once upon a time, gracious town houses and courtyard apartments had lined these orderly boulevards, but no sign remained of the former elegance my grandmother had described. Nyíregyháza seemed economically depressed, barely recovered from the communist regime that had fallen more than twenty years past. There had been no revolution here, no revival—the city seemed to have satisfied itself with a few new coats of paint, evident in crumbling apartment blocks done up in cheerful Mediterranean colors as if in rebellion. We sped through the center of Nyíregyháza, a smattering of stucco houses with clay-pot roofs interspersed among the blocks.
I slept like the dead, regardless of the heat. I was awoken by a mourning dove burbling outside my window. For a moment before I opened my eyes, I thought I was back in Brooklyn. I recalled waking up early on July mornings in my grandparents’ house to that same sound of mourning doves cooing in the tree limbs level with my window, the last refreshing breeze of the night wafting into my room. Then I squinted into the bright early light, remembering where I was. I sat up immediately, walking over to the open windows to glimpse the foreign world in which I’d arrived and confirm it was still real.
Outside, two ancient gingko trees flanked the entrance to the building. Up close, their leaves fluttered tremulously under drops of dew the size of nickels. Every so often, a branch would shake in the breeze, and the dewdrops would quiver and slide along the surface of the leaves, which righted themselves eventually when the breeze died. Along the paths carved out between the lush gardens and lawns were the acacia trees my grandmother had spoken of to me so fondly, their dainty, fernlike leaves gently filtering the sun so that it dappled the grass beneath in lacy patterns.
Here were all the plants of her childhood, some of which she had tried to cultivate in our little backyard garden, and as I walked around the campus, I began to recognize some shrubs and flowers with joy. These were no English gardens at the college. These were the kind of gardens you might imagine had grown wild here and only been tamed, just barely, as an afterthought. Bushes and plants grew riotously into one another’s territory, and the grass in between was twice as tall as grass was usually allowed to grow in America. Willows and poplars competed for space, fat lavender shrubs lined the pathway, and tendrils of creeping fig wound their way around them. I heard another dove gurgle throatily on the branch above me. The atmosphere was lush and fragrant; the sun was already hot on my skin; I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to preserve the moment into an individually packaged memory, complete with vivid sensory details. It seems funny now, how we are never really in control of the moments that do stand out later, with their smells and sounds so immediate and evocative. Afterward, I would not be able recall this one at will; instead, other flashes would return to me, glimpses of dark, suspicious eyes in the face of a Roma woman wrapped in a bright red scarf; fat, unripe walnuts dangling from a leafy tree; two old men playing tennis on a cracked court while wives more than forty years their junior looked on from the sidelines.
Regardless, I was there now, in the world my grandmother had come from. These were her childhood smells and sounds. These trees had been witnesses, and this sun had warmed her on summer days like this one. I hadn’t thought about how it would feel to be walking on ground she might have walked on, under a sky so distinctly different from the one that had seemed so far away in dusty, honking Brooklyn. My eyes filled at the realization, and my vision blurred into a smear of gold and green. Somewhere a lawn mower shuddered to life, and the sound of it made me start. I tried to draw the world back into focus again, watched as a magpie strutted by, a starling pecked at a crevice between the paving stones, and slowly, layer by layer, my surroundings imposed themselves upon me again like the infinitely delicate sheets of flaky dough that my grandmother had deftly layered to create her famous napoleon dessert.
On the way to Kántorjánosi, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village twenty-five miles from Nyíregyháza, I was largely silent as Angelika, the volunteer interpreter, and Zoltán conversed. In my hand I held an old photograph of my grandmother’s childhood home that had been taken by one of my uncles on a 1988 visit. I had scavenged it during a childhood treasure hunt. Of course, I did not know the exact address, so my plan had been to drive through the village and see if any of the houses matched the picture taken twenty-five years earlier.
Not the most ironclad plan, I now realized, as we drove past cornfields, apple orchards, and carefully tended vineyards. The land here was very flat and stretched for miles around us. Every field was full of enormous, healthy crops, seemingly impervious to the unforgiving heat of summer. Had I been crazy to think I could just show up with a few photographs and my grandmother’s past would magically materialize before me? Now that I had actually made it, something I never really believed would happen, it seemed silly, and I was scared to fail after having come all this way. I had wanted to accomplish something specific on this trip. I had thought that if I could piece together the journey my grandmother had taken before she landed in the lap of the Satmar Hasids, then perhaps I could put into context my own journey out and back into the larger world she had once inhabited. In a sense, I would be able to clarify my own displacement only in the context of hers. We are, sometimes, simply reduced to where we come from—if not in the most immediate sense, then in an ancestral one. I was convinced that the angst that flowed in my veins was a result of more than just my childhood; that it was part of a greater composite inheritance that I was only a fragmentary part of, and to quell it, I needed to find the old fractures and mend them.
Kántorjánosi had one main street, which split into two smaller streets after the town square, and a few dead-end roads. We drove through it so quickly, thinking it was bigger, that we had to turn around and go back once we realized there were no more houses. I scanned every house, looking in particular for the unique ironwork in the gate in my photograph, but all the houses looked similar, with stucco sides painted various shades of beige and sloping terra-cotta roofs. They were all gated and had their own gardens.
“I don’t see it! Do you see it?” I showed them the photograph. I had a panicky feeling that I had come all this way for nothing, that we would never be able to identify the exact house, that it was probably long gone by now.
“Is it that one?” Angelika asked, pointing as we coasted by a decrepit house, its gate rusted and warped. I turned back to look, trying to compare it with the one in the photo.
“They all look the same!” I said. “How can I be sure?”
“Never mind,” Zoltán said. “Let’s go talk to the mayor and see what he was able to
find out.” He had called ahead to announce our visit and its purpose, and I looked to him in gratitude. What reason did this man have to be so helpful? We didn’t know each other from Adam, and it wasn’t as if it was likely that we would see each other again after this pilgrimage. What could he possibly be getting from this? I wondered.
The mayor’s office was in a modest but new building that flanked the town square. Inside, some people were lined up in the hallway. They seemed to be waiting for some form of assistance or welfare. “Gypsies,” Angelika said, translating from the old Hungarian term for the Roma and Sinti people.
The mayor’s secretary seemed unnerved by our arrival. I could imagine how she might be put off by the idea that I was some arrogant American expecting them to drop everything and help me. She instructed us to enter the mayor’s office and wait there for his arrival. Inside, we sat at a small table that was covered in a crocheted tablecloth like the ones my grandmother had used for her dining room table. She had told me stories of women who started preparing their own trousseaus from a young age, knitting and sewing their own linens. I wondered who had crocheted this tablecloth.
The mayor was a soft-spoken man who seemed a bit taken aback by all the fuss. I could tell that this town didn’t get many visitors. He had found my grandmother’s house, he told us—there was an old woman living there now who, he said, was quite popular in the town. She sat on a bench outside her house every day and talked to everyone who passed by. She claimed to remember my family, even though she was in her nineties.
“Does she remember my grandmother?” I asked Angelika to ask the mayor.
“Perhaps,” the mayor answered. “She’s a bit fuzzy, but she says she remembers some things. Shall we go to her?”
We walked a little ways down the main street, named after the Hungarian poet János Arany, all of us in a group, and neighbors watched from behind their gates, eyes squinting in suspicion at our ostentatious procession.
“The people in this town always had a good relationship with the Jews,” the mayor said pointedly to Zoltán, instructing him to translate. “Hungarians in general are not anti-Semitic.”
The mayor then talked to Zoltán about his plans for the city, obviously happy to have an official visit his small town, and Angelika whispered the translations to me as we followed. The economy here was farm-based, he said, but somehow the Roma population accumulated enough money to furnish their homes quite lavishly, and even I could hear the sarcasm in his tone. The mayor estimated that the region was now at least fifty percent Roma. But it had once been at least as Jewish, I thought to myself, and I wondered if he would have expressed a similar displeasure at that fact. I supposed it was easy not to trouble oneself with anti-Semitism when there weren’t any Jews left to hate.
A dark-skinned woman with flared nostrils and hair dyed a flaming orange crossed the street in front of us, pushing a stroller loaded with black plastic bags. She paused on the other side of the road and gave us a blank stare as we passed. Soon we came to a stop in front of the decrepit house that Angelika had pointed to earlier. Now I looked at the photograph in my hand again and saw that it was indeed the right house, but very neglected. The house was actually two buildings: a living area in the front and a separate kitchen in the back. The front building had a badly rusted tin roof, and lichens had coated the terra-cotta roof behind it. Both roofs seemed as if they might slide off on either side at any moment.
Outside the gate, an ancient-looking woman with only one visible tooth sat on a bench, her arm resting on a cane. She was wearing a loose flowery dress that buttoned down the front, and her exposed skin was leathery and brown from the sun.
I was not the first one to come visit her, she told Angelika as soon as we were within earshot. She remembered a tall young man many years ago who had asked her some questions.
“That was my uncle,” I said. “He took this picture.”
I showed her the photograph, and she apologized for the condition of the house, explaining that she had not been able to do any necessary repairs. Yet the garden behind her was bursting with color, and I remarked on it. There were numerous carefully pruned rosebushes and lilacs poking through the rusted curlicues in the gate. In particular, a bench lined with potted geraniums caught my eye.
“Tell her my grandmother used to do that,” I said to Angelika. “She used to replant the cuttings.”
Angelika relayed the information, and the old woman smiled and responded eagerly.
“She used to have more things growing,” Angelika said. “But now she is too old.”
Angelika leaned in and started a conversation in Hungarian. I looked past them at the house. I couldn’t believe this was where my grandmother had spent her childhood, in this tiny little village. The fashionable, cosmopolitan woman I knew couldn’t possibly have come from such a far-flung, barren smattering of dwellings.
“So, she remembers an older woman who lived here,” Angelika said, interrupting my reverie, “who was a midwife. She had five children, and one of the daughters was named Laura.”
“That’s my great-grandmother Leah,” I said. “Does she remember Leah’s eldest daughter, Irenka?”
Angelika asked her and then told me, “She’s not sure.”
“Does she remember that they used to pump seltzer from the ground and sell it?”
“Yes. She said they had a little general store in the front room of the house.”
Angelika turned to listen to something the old woman was saying.
“Also, she says she bought the house after the war from a man named Schwartz.”
“That would be Laura’s father,” I said, “but that’s impossible. He didn’t survive the war. No one in my grandmother’s family did.” I motioned to Angelika not to translate that. I felt strangely sorry for the old woman, knowing that she had found it necessary to invent a story like that, to justify her life spent in this home.
“She wants to know if you would like to go inside and see it. She hasn’t changed anything since she bought it, she says.”
“She won’t mind?” I asked, incredulous.
“Not at all. Go ahead.”
* * *
• • •
I made my way gingerly down the path to the side door of the main building. Once inside, however, I immediately regretted my decision. The house was extremely dirty and reeked of human waste. I couldn’t imagine my scrupulously tidy grandmother in a house like that. I emerged a moment later, trying to cling to some of the nicer details. There had been one large room in the front and one in the back. The ceilings were high and beamed; old, cumbersome chandeliers had dangled from between the shallow rafters, dusty crystals catching the faint rays of sunlight that weakly illuminated the darkened interior. I imagine they had all slept there, in one bedroom, the parents and their ten children. No wonder my grandmother had been sent to live in Nyíregyháza as an adolescent. There had been no room for her.
That was why she wasn’t gassed, my grandmother had once told me. Because she had been deported separately from her family and hadn’t been holding a younger sibling when she faced Dr. Mengele at selection. Anyone holding a child was automatically sent to their death. Her whole family had been murdered on the same day. She was the only one who made it past selection and was deemed qualified for labor. But she had never told me anything else, except that she had been liberated from Bergen-Belsen. The time in between her arrival at Auschwitz and her liberation from Bergen-Belsen was a question mark in my mind. How would I ever delve into the secret of her courage and endurance if I didn’t know what had sustained her through that blank period? But I reminded myself that, after all, I was just at the beginning of my journey, and the answers, if they came, would be arrived at in time, if I was brave enough to keep going until then.
* * *
• • •
The mayor asked if I wanted to meet the only Jewish family that st
ill lived in town, and we crossed the square to a house of similar stature. The mayor told the Roma woman working in the yard that we were looking for Orsi Neni. Zoltán whispered to me that the mayor and Orsi were quite close and had an excellent relationship. He seemed to be trying to say that race wasn’t an issue here, especially not now. “She is one of the most beloved people in town,” the mayor said eagerly, motioning for Angelika to translate.
Orsi Neni emerged from her home, a tiny old woman with very round eyes set in a deeply wrinkled face. Her voice was a crackly whisper. I asked her if she spoke any Yiddish. She shook her head no, explaining that her father had spoken it but she had never learned it. She didn’t remember my grandmother, she said, but probably because she had been very young during the war.
“How is it that you were able to come back?” I asked.
“They hid in Levelek,” Zoltán told me, referring to a larger town about fifteen minutes north. “The whole town helped, and they refused to give them to the Nazis.”
“My grandmother said she was born in Levelek. Is there a hospital there or something?”
Angelika translated for the mayor, but he shook his head. “There’s no hospital there that I know of.” He couldn’t say for sure why she would have been born there instead of in Kántorjánosi, where she grew up.
“Levelek is our next stop,” Zoltán said. “I know the registrar there.”
Before we left, I asked whether Orsi Neni still lit candles on Friday night and baked challah.
“Of course!” was her answer.
“Do her children do so as well?” I asked.
“No, just her,” Angelika said. “When she dies, no one will continue the tradition. She herself doesn’t quite understand why she does it; she only remembers that her father told her to do so, before she was deported, and she follows his instructions as best as she can remember. But she can’t obligate her children to do the same. After all, they’ve grown up like everyone else around them. They have no connection to this anymore.”
Exodus, Revisited Page 17
