Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  How strange it was to find a Jewish woman here who had grown up in the same circumstances as my grandmother but who by some reverse twist of fate had never left home, and despite that, had become completely disconnected from her heritage. I recalled my thoughts from earlier that morning—how easily this could have been me; would that have meant I could have turned out like the children or grandchildren of this woman? How to qualify something like that? Certainly a blessing, but at such a high price!

  As we left, the Roma woman, her brows knitted together in her dark and wrinkled forehead, gripped my hand tightly. “What does she want?” I whispered to Angelika.

  “She said she just wanted to hold your hand.”

  I flipped over my palm to see if she wanted to read it. The woman dropped my hand suddenly, as if it had grown hot, and her cheeks turned red.

  “She says she doesn’t do that anymore,” Angelika said. I tried to apologize, also embarrassed at my own assumptions. I had recalled when Roma women had tried to read Isaac’s palm outside the mosque in Córdoba, which was ignorant of me.

  The mayor had continued his conversation with Zoltán about the town. “There is no anti-Semitism here,” he repeated. “Jews, Gypsies, and Hungarians have always lived well together here.” It was as if he was presenting the town as a model for tolerance. “We never had this problem of racism,” he said proudly. We said good-bye then, and I thanked him heartily, and he stood in the dirt road as we drove off, waving until we had rounded the bend that led out of town.

  We continued on to Levelek, whose mayor appeared slightly more sophisticated. He was younger and well dressed and had bright blue eyes. He said that his family had come to Hungary during the Polish revolution. “That’s why he’s good-looking,” Zoltán joked.

  Ledgers were open on the mayor’s table, and he invited me to peruse them. There was the marriage certificate of Laura Schwartz from Levelek to Jacob Fischer from Nyíregyháza, my grandmother’s parents. Their names, places of origin, and occupations were all listed clearly. Jacob was a Talmud scholar, which confirmed my belief that his parents had been wealthy—only the wealthy could afford not to work. I saw the record of my grandmother’s birth, on January 8, 1927, a few years after their marriage. They had come to report it five days later, on the thirteenth—the very same day my grandfather had been born.

  “Perhaps they lived here in Levelek for the first few years, if that’s where Laura was from originally. Then it makes sense that their first child would be born here, before they left to open a store in Kántorjánosi.”

  “The mayor says he can take us to the Jewish cemetery,” Zoltán said. “Perhaps you’ll find more information on your family there.”

  We drove to the cemetery in the mayor’s car. He was decidedly more upbeat than the Kántorjánosi mayor and seemed very excited to talk to Zoltán and Angelika. It felt vaguely surreal to know that I, a twentysomething woman who easily blended into a crowd in New York City, was the cause of so much excitement and fuss in a small village thousands of miles from home.

  A shirtless man met us at the entrance, the sweat glinting like dewdrops on his hairless chest. Angelika translated for me, explaining that the man and his wife had decided to voluntarily take care of the cemetery about ten years ago, as their home abutted the property. We followed him down a dirt path to a brick wall with a small gate in the middle and waited as he unlocked it.

  My hopes deflated as soon as I was on the other side of the wall. All I saw was an empty field, the grass mostly yellow straw. Then I noticed stubs of hacked-off tombstones poking out from the brush.

  “Most of the stones were stolen by Gypsies before he started taking care of it,” Angelika said, listening closely as the caretaker explained sheepishly. “They are considered very valuable for the quality of the rock.”

  “So they’re all gone?” I asked.

  “Almost.”

  I had noticed two on the other end of the cemetery and one in the far western corner. I approached the single one first but noticed as I got closer that all of its writing had eroded. I trudged back.

  “I can’t read the writing anyway,” I said. “It doesn’t matter; they’re probably not here.”

  “Don’t you want to take a look at those other two before we leave?” Zoltán asked.

  “All right,” I said and began wading through the weeds.

  Somewhere close to the stones I must have brushed against stinging nettle. I had never encountered the plant before, and didn’t know what it looked like, but the painful feeling spread quickly around my ankles and up my calves—it felt like I was being bitten by a colony of ants.

  “Ow!”

  Angelika laughed. “She stepped on some csalán!” she said to Zoltán.

  “Don’t worry, Deborah,” he said. “It will go away in ten minutes.”

  When I straightened up, I noticed I was standing in front of the stones. Perhaps it was my stinging legs that prevented me from grasping what I was looking at right away. The writing on the two stones was perfectly legible.

  woman of valour, faiga leah, read one. saintly woman, faiga pessel, read the other. The only two legible stones in the cemetery belonged to my great-grandmother and my great-great-grandmother.

  “Oh my God!”

  The others looked over, pausing their conversation briefly. Angelika looked up from her phone.

  “It’s them!” I shouted.

  They hiked over. “That’s Laura’s grave,” I said, pointing. “Of all the stones in the cemetery, these are the only ones here still in decent shape! There has to be an explanation, Angelika. Can you ask him if anyone ever came by and paid money to have these graves maintained?”

  The caretaker insisted no one had ever visited this cemetery or interfered in its upkeep. “It’s just a coincidence,” he said. “These were the only ones left when I started taking care of the place.”

  It couldn’t be a coincidence, I thought. Then I noticed the message on the bottom of the tombstones: descended from the holy leibel from oshvari. Reb Leibel, the hidden saint! His name inscribed upon the stone as if it was a magic ward! The stories from my childhood about this mysterious ancestor came rushing into my memory now like blood into a wound. No, it was too much. It couldn’t be this real, right there, literally carved in stone.

  I wondered now if, given what I understood to be a superstitious stereotype attributed to the Roma, it was possible to suppose that they too might have stayed away from those stones, just like other Jews had learned to do, out of fear of that very same legend I had been told as a child, passed down among their own. But the caretaker claimed to know nothing about it, and I knew I would have to live with that uncertainty.

  * * *

  • • •

  On the way out of the cemetery, we stopped to pick sour cherries from slender trees with dark green leaves that grew wild along the path. I watched as Angelika sucked a whole bunch of them effortlessly off their pits, stopping to grind them into the ground again with her shoe. For each cherry she consumed, a whole lot of them might grow in its place. How incredible, I thought, to have food growing wild on the street. I tasted a cherry, and it was perfectly ripe, emerging from its thin, still-delicate skin in one tart, juicy burst on my tongue. I closed my eyes and remembered the taste of my grandmother’s cold sour cherry soup, the one she served on hot summer days like this one. I wondered if she missed picking the fruit from the tree or lamented the quality of store-bought or canned sour cherries. Had she missed her life here? Or had she in some way been grateful to have rebuilt her life in America, in a vastly more civilized and developed place than this hot, dusty village, where the saving graces were wild cherries and potted geraniums?

  On the way back we stopped for lunch in a village called Napkor. I pounced eagerly on a cold pear soup, served with sweet strips of palacsinta, or Hungarian crepes, as noodles. The flavors were impossible to pla
ce, a hint of something like nutmeg, a kind of cream that was neither sour nor sweet but faintly tart, and a dash of zest that might have been from a kumquat. My spoon came up empty all too quickly, but this was soon forgotten, as our duck arrived in clearly identifiable parts, a crispy-skinned leg each for me and Angelika, a breast for Zoltán, and an assemblage of parts and organs for our driver. The duck was served on beds of caramel-colored mashed potatoes with generous sprinkles of sweet paprika and accompanied by shredded cabbage and prunes stained a deep purple. We dug in, and silence reigned at that table until the plates were cleared.

  Afterward, I marveled at how it was possible to eat such meals, meals that easily outranked the ones I had been served at New York City’s fanciest restaurants in those months when my celebrity status had allowed it, in such a far-flung setting and at such ridiculously cheap prices. Was it really as simple as recipes honed for generations, water drawn from deep springs and wells, fertile, unspoiled land that nourished crops and animals? I supposed, in such circumstances, even a Michelin-starred chef would be rendered superfluous. To this day I prefer the honest, nourishing food my grandmother had once cooked for me with so much love to the excessively ornamental dishes served in restaurants so overtly snobbish as to be offensive in their incongruence.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was late afternoon when we arrived back in Nyíregyháza, just in time to visit the synagogue before it closed. The Jews had been rounded up for deportation right in front of it, and it was there that I had most wanted to stand, in the spot where my grandmother’s own exile had so horribly begun. The square was now paved over, with decaying apartment buildings serving as wary witnesses around its perimeter. Their shabby terraces with peeling blue paint strips seemed like so many eyes half-closed in fatigue. This was not the Nyíregyháza my grandmother had seen on that day, but it seemed somehow to retain the memory of that moment in its tired bones nonetheless, and the deserted square and heavy gray sky seemed in agreement with my assessment.

  The synagogue was a stately building with small high windows and a secure gate. I tried to imagine the roundup that had taken place there, but these were events dramatized in movies or vividly evoked in books I’d read; they couldn’t possibly have happened in such a quiet and ordinary place. Reality would have to split apart for a moment to allow something like that. Life as I understood it, the banal pursuit of food, salary, and entertainment, would have to completely collapse; it would have to be replaced with something alien and otherworldly.

  The synagogue was painted pink with white trim. It looked nothing like the shuls I had grown up around, and more like the Reform temples I had glimpsed in Manhattan. Inside, the synagogue had a low, unenclosed women’s gallery, and in such a small building, those women would have been clearly visible to the men below. The synagogues I had grown up with had women’s sections that were fully separated from the main room by height and enclosure. This had been a very Modern Orthodox community, nothing like the one I remembered my grandmother being a part of.

  I posed a question to the rabbi. “Were there any Hasidic Jews living here before the war?”

  Angelika translated. The rabbi shook his head slowly.

  “None that I know of. From what I heard, there was a small group of them over in Satu Mare, now in Romania, and perhaps another small community in the southern region, but there were no Hasids in this area back then. In the eighties, they came to Budapest, the Lubavitchers, and tried to convert everyone. They even tried to convert me. Like I wasn’t a good-enough Jew for them.” Here he scoffed, underlining the ridiculousness of the scenario. Converting a rabbi indeed. It was insulting, he exclaimed, when you considered the long line of rabbis he was descended from, that the Lubavitchers, themselves part of a fringe movement only two hundred years old, would dare to impugn the integrity of his own heritage.

  There was an old mikvah, a ritual bathing place, in the synagogue that the rabbi still carefully maintained, although he himself did not use it. But the Satmars, he told me, came every so often to visit the grave sites of their rabbis, and when they did, they often used it for a fee that helped keep the synagogue going. He offered to show it to me. It was accessible only from the cellar, which we entered from a cement staircase that descended into the earth from the rear of the building. In the cellar we climbed down into a dank and musty space that had been hollowed out, at the bottom of which lay a pool of stagnant rainwater collected by a pump. The smell was overpowering.

  “They actually go in there?” I asked incredulously.

  “Yes,” he answered, somewhat bemusedly. “I try to freshen the water before they come, but it is what it is, you know. And there’s not even a shower in the building where they could rinse off after. But this is enough for them. As long as it’s halachically sound, everything else doesn’t matter.”

  I wrinkled my nose. The one time I had immersed in a men’s mikvah, I had seen a giant water bug floating next to me, and forty-eight hours later I had fallen sick with an illness later diagnosed as shingles, which the doctor ascertained had been caught in those warm waters that I had shared with countless other men and women. What had happened to those stories we had been told, of Jews being spared from the plague because of their hygiene rituals?

  The rabbi and his associate gave us a ride back to the college, as our chauffeur had left for the day. I heard the two of them talking in exuberant Hungarian in the front seat, and I could just about make out that the conversation was about me. I asked Angelika to listen in.

  “He is saying,” she said with a laugh, “that he doesn’t understand how someone can talk so much and listen so well at the same time, that your brain works so fast. But he says you are very sweet.”

  “Ach, you are translating for her?” the rabbi said. “No, don’t be offended. We just don’t often get such intense visitors—we are accustomed to a slower pace here.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, smiling. “It’s not the first time I’ve heard that.”

  Zoltán walked me to my room when we got back.

  “I’m so thrilled that we were able to do this,” he said. “This is what I want to show, that Hungarians can help! There is no anti-Semitism here. There never was.”

  When I left Nyíregyháza some days later, I looked out the window at the passing world, thinking that this planet was like a snow globe that received regular shakes. The war had been a particularly vigorous one, and because of that, my grandmother had drifted over to the other side of the world amid the chaos, forever changing our family’s legacy. And here I was, drifting back, looking for the place where I could land, wondering if it existed at all.

  We wanted to visit my grandfather’s hometown as well. Újfehértó it was called, only twenty-five minutes from the town where my grandmother had been born. The bureaucrat who was being paid to print birth certificates and death certificates and other such documents for people in precisely my position made us come back three days in a row, and each time she had a different excuse. There we were on the third day, with our official stamps procured, all fees paid, and the front door to the town hall locked for an hour already with Angelika and I still in it, and still there was this tut-tutting, the opening and shutting of doors with ancient ledgers peering temptingly behind them, the meandering phone conversations in Hungarian that I couldn’t understand, and still those certificates weren’t printed.

  My translator indicated that I might have to wait and receive the rest in the mail. We’d had no trouble procuring the birth and marriage records of my grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother in Levelek. Indeed, the registrar had produced them with a joyous smile. Here in Újfehértó, I felt the tears come and quickly left the room. My eyes began to swim as the cleaner painstakingly removed the padlock from the double doors so that I could exit the building, and outside the scene blurred into brown and gray as I collapsed onto a bench.

  Zoltán c
ame and sat next to me, inquiring what was wrong. “I don’t understand,” I heaved, wishing I could stop sobbing. “Why does she have to be that way?”

  The translator explained briefly, “Some people are just like that. Bureaucrats. It’s unfortunate but it happens all the time. Not everyone can be a lovely person.”

  I’m so thrilled that we were able to do this, Zoltán had said to me after dropping me off at the college. Hungarians can help. There is no anti-Semitism here. Poor Zoltán. I was sure there wasn’t a shred of anti-Semitism in his heart, nor was there any in the lovely group of people he had assembled to assist me in my research, but I know that he would have felt terrible to realize that on the rest of my trip, I would learn something very different from what he wanted me to.

  Perhaps the first dusting of bitterness set in once I arrived back in Budapest, when I met, for the first time, a Jew who was afraid. I had arranged to meet a friend named Ella, whom I had first connected with online. She took me on a tour of the Jewish quarter, an area of special expertise for her, although she wasn’t Jewish. Here I saw a living Jewish community, a kosher butcher, a Belzer Hasid from Israel who had moved back here with his children and was able to converse with me in Yiddish, women in sheitels escorting young boys with messy side curls, Hebrew writing next to Hungarian, and synagogues and ritual baths and all the familiar paraphernalia. Cholent, a staple dish in Jewish communities worldwide, was listed on most restaurant menus.

  After we toured the Orthodox synagogue together, Ella and I decided to drop by the Judaica shop next door. A young man was working there, sitting behind a desk piled with books. He had curly brown hair and a nice familiar face, very Jewish-looking. So I asked. I did not see Ella’s face behind me go white. Peter—that was his name—drew inward and away from me, his shoulders scrunching up in defense.