In the Darkroom

by Susan Faludi

  The Grünbergers vacationed at spas in Baden-Baden, skied in the Tatra Mountains, and ordered their clothes, bespoke, from boutique tailors in Bratislava and Budapest. The four sons were sent to universities in Paris and Prague, the four daughters to music lessons and finishing schools. Among the family’s many emblems of privilege (along with the first running water, gaslight, refrigeration, and electricity) was the town’s first telephone—phone number “1.” The Grünberger home was a showpiece of gentility, from its fountain-adorned courtyard and gardens to its chandeliered salon with a grand piano draped in a Shiraz rug and an extensive Rosenthal and Limoges porcelain collection, from its full retinue of maids, cooks, and governesses to its stable of groomed horses. Persian rugs hushed footsteps in every room. The linens were from Paris and monogrammed.

  The region’s lumber trade had become a lucrative industry, thanks to the invention of steam-powered electricity and railway construction in the late nineteenth century, which turned the virgin Slovak forests into a commercial honeypot. More than 90 percent of the lumber mill owners and wholesale suppliers in the region were Jewish. The area’s artisans, merchants, and professionals were, likewise, predominantly Jews, and had been ever since the ban on Jews in towns and cities was lifted by government edict in the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1920s, the Jews of Spišské Podhradie owned thirteen of the nineteen grocery and general stores, six of the seven taverns and restaurants, all of the liquor stores, all of the tool and iron shops and small factories, the saw mill and flour mill. They were the doctors, the lawyers, the pharmacist, and the veterinarian.

  The Jews in the Hungarian countryside no longer had to live in remote primitive villages or skulk around the edges of towns, peddling their wares. They no longer had to pay a “tolerance tax” to the nobles for the privilege of renting a hovel on their estates. Some of them even owned agricultural land. My great-grandfather’s property included a working farm with cornfields and livestock. Spišské Podhradie also became a flourishing rabbinical center for Orthodox Jewry, with its own synagogue, cheder, yeshiva, beit midrash, mikveh, and charitable and community associations, and (on a patch of hillside two miles out of town, granted because it was too steep to be arable) a walled cemetery. In 1905, after the town’s first synagogue burned down, my great-grandfather marshaled the funds to build a new temple, with a Neo-Classical façade and a Moorish interior. It was installed a few doors down from the Grünberger family home—on Stefánikova Street.

  When I visited Spišské Podhradie in 2015, the synagogue (which became a furniture warehouse in Communist times) had recently been restored but sat unused: the town’s last postwar Jewish resident, a dentist named Ferdinand Glück, either left or died (no one seemed to know) in the 1970s. The Grünberger manse, now shabby and painted in Day-Glo colors (with a satellite dish on the roof and curtains for doors), was subdivided and occupied by several generations of a poor and devout Christian family. The old carriage entrance displayed a dozen Madonna icons. In the courtyard, a giant plaster Jesus hung on a four-foot cross. On the outskirts of town, weeds flourished in the Jewish cemetery. Many tombstones were missing, looted over the years, or fallen. The lone Grünberger headstone, marking the grave of Moritz Grünberger, firstborn son of Leopold and Sidonia, who died at sixteen, lay on its back in the grass.

  Leopold bestowed a lavish dowry upon each of his four daughters. So endowed, the eldest daughter, my grandmother Rozália, or Rozi as she was usually called, merited the attentions of my grandfather Jenő Friedman, who belonged to one of the wealthiest Jewish families in the largest city of the region, Kassa (later renamed, in Slovak, Košice). Jenő’s father, Sámuel Friedman, owned Kassa’s biggest wholesale goods business. Like Leopold Grünberger, Sámuel was head of his city’s Jewish community and held the post for his affluence, not his religiousness. Unlike Leopold, he fancied himself something of a silk-stocking socialite. “My grandfather Sámuel was a man of leisure,” my father said. “I remember my grandmother saying all the time, ‘Go get your grandfather from the casino!’ He was always in there with the other rich men, playing cards and smoking cigars.”

  By the time of Jenő and Rozi’s engagement, the groom was a man of leisure, too. He had begun purchasing luxury apartment buildings in Pest—with a bonanza payout from the Friedmans’ real estate investments in Hamburg. The origins of that bonanza were hardly savory, according to accounts from my few surviving Friedman relatives. My father’s cousin Viktor Schwarcz told me the Friedmans intentionally torched their company warehouse in Kassa and used the fire insurance money to buy properties in Hamburg. “The legend from the Jews in town,” Viktor said, “is that Samu and his sons burned the shop to get the money. No one told the police because they didn’t want to turn in fellow Jews. The Friedmans got rich from it—they bought whole streets of houses in Hamburg and sold them during the great inflation. And from that came your grandfather’s buildings in Budapest.”

  However ill-gotten her fiancé’s gains, Rozi had landed, at twenty, the richest catch of the four sisters. She didn’t have much to do with the landing: the marriage was arranged—based on a desire of the patriarchs of both families to meld their wealth. The bride and groom barely knew each other when they were wed in an extravagant ceremony in the Grünberger home and headed off, first by horse-drawn carriage and then by first-class coach, to a fairy-tale honeymoon in Venice. They returned to a sumptuously appointed apartment in one of Jenő’s buildings in Pest, where they spent their days at cards in the casino, their nights at the opera. Their only child was raised by a succession of nursemaids, governesses, and tutors. Rozi’s one other pregnancy, my father told me, ended in miscarriage.

  Once in a while when I was young, my father would allow me a glimpse into the vanished world of his childhood, a pinprick or two of light in a landscape otherwise dark. “The parents,” he would say, opening the pasteboard family album my mother had created and pointing to a creased and curling-at-the-edges tinted picture of his progenitors, the lone representative in the album of my father’s side of the family. The photo is a formal studio portrait, vintage ’20s with its soft-focus lighting and pretensions to motion-picture glamour. A halo of light wreathes the heads of two newlyweds, a vignette effect fading into shadow at the edges. Bride and groom stare straight at the camera, not smiling. My grandmother Rozi has the severe dark beauty and hooded eyes of a silent-movie star. Her eyebrows are tweezed to pencil-thin crescents and she sports a Joan Crawford hairdo, cropped and set in a tight wave, dark lipstick, and a double-stranded choker of pearls with matching pearl earrings. My grandfather Jenő looks older—which he was, by nine years—and wears an expensively tailored suit; his thinning black hair is oiled and slicked back.

  As for the post-wedding life of Rozi and Jenő, their bitter separation when my father was twelve, their forced wartime reconciliation, and their miserable last years in Israel, my father had little to say. But it was clear to me whom she held responsible for her parents’ troubled marriage. Rozi, my father told me, was a “spoiled diva” and a “phony” who “put on airs,” read “lowbrow” books, and was either at the hairdresser or out chasing “rich men.” “She wasn’t interested in a relationship with her child.” Jenő, on the other hand, was “very cultured,” a “true gentleman” who delivered occasional poems at dinner parties and wrote letters in “pearly handwriting,” a man who knew how to mingle in “educated circles.” Jenő was a prominent figure in the Jewish community, an observant but modern Jew who enrolled his son in the most prestigious Jewish educational institutions for boys in Budapest: the elementary school run by the Rabbinical Seminary of Hungary and then the Zsidó Gimnázium, the elite Jewish high school in Pest celebrated for its world-class teachers. “But my father was not Orthodox,” my father stressed, a statement that perplexed me; the Friedmans belonged to the Kazinczy Street Synagogue, which was Orthodox. What she meant was that Jenő didn’t look like an Orthodox Jew, whose appearance might, as she put it, “provoke.”

  My f
ather liked to parse out the same several set pieces of this early domesticity, more interior design than life experience, decorative backdrops to a privileged and assimilated bourgeois lifestyle. “My father had all his suits tailored in London.” Or: “We were the first on our street to own a car,” a Renault with leather seats, wood paneling, “a lace curtain on the back window,” and a dashboard vase that “held one rose.” Or she’d recall their “wind-up record player, spring driven,” and the first tune young Pista had played on it, “The Fox and Goose Song”:

  Fox, you have stolen the goose.

  Give it back to me.

  If not, the hunter will get you

  With his gun.

  More than anything, my father talked about the family real estate: the summer villa in the Buda Hills with its swimming pool and gardening staff, the two apartment houses in posh sections of Pest, and, most of all, the “royal apartment” at Ráday utca 9. The Friedmans’ majestic domicile featured a double balcony, soaring ceilings, French doors between every room, a “salon” to receive guests, and maid’s quarters. My grandfather’s study, which contained “first-edition collectibles” in a locked bookcase, featured heavy carved-wood furnishings with red and brown upholstery in what my father called a “Napoleonic Empire style.” The salon boasted emerald-velvet love seats and chaise longues, a vitrine stocked with Rosenthal porcelain, and a writing table in a “Louis the XVI theme.” One wall displayed three near-life-sized family portraits commissioned from the then noteworthy Hungarian artist Jakab Ödön. The paintings depicted the Friedmans in aristocratic poses: my grandfather in a smoking jacket, my grandmother in a floor-length evening gown, and my ten-year-old father in velvet cutaway coat and matching knee pants. Until, that is, my father “came of age,” at which point the artist was recalled—at the insistence of the adolescent subject—to paint on a pair of long trousers. Young István was already Photoshopping. “It wasn’t manly to be in short pants,” she explained.

  In the salon presided over by these imposing regal portraits, my grandparents hosted “balls,” the name my father gave to their dinner and dance evenings. Sent to bed early, Pista would lie in the dark, a crystal radio he’d built by hand pressed to one ear “to drown out the noise.” On other nights, the parents would don their finery to make the rounds of high society and attend opening nights at the theater and the Hungarian Royal Opera House. The Golden Age had been good to Jenő and Rozi Friedman.

  “Finally, O Jew, your day is dawning!” József Kiss, son of poor Orthodox parents and acclaimed as turn-of-the-century Hungary’s “most popular” poet, exulted in his first collection of verse, published in 1868. “Now you, too, have a fatherland!” By the end of the century, Jews had full religious standing, too. The 1895 Law of Reception elevated Judaism to a “received” religion, recognized by the state.

  The Magyar nobility had its reasons for facilitating the rise of a Jewish bourgeoisie. To accomplish such liberal reforms as civil marriage and nationalized education, the aristocrats enlisted Jews to counter the influence of the Catholic clerics. Also, Hungary desperately needed to modernize and industrialize. In the enterprise vacuum that yawned between its complacent nobles and gentry and its wretched peasants, the Jews formed an essential bourgeois class. The Christian noblemen also had political reasons for aiding Jewish assimilation: the nineteenth-century Magyar electorate was 5 percent short of a majority in a multicultural region teeming with restive Germans, Slovaks, Romanians, Ruthenians, Serbians, Slovenians, Croatians, and other ethnic minorities, all contesting for their rights. The Magyars made up the deficit through artful use of an 1868 “nationalities” law—originally intended as an act of tolerance for minority cultures and languages—to enforce a linguistic Magyarization. Henceforth, anyone who declared Hungarian as their primary language in the national census would be declared a Magyar. Jews, more than other minorities, took the option. By the century’s end, more than 75 percent of Hungary’s Jews claimed Hungarian as their mother tongue (compared with only 54 percent of its Catholics), and the Magyar population had thus magically risen to 51.4 percent. In a country where voting was limited to educated and propertied taxpayers, affluent Jews in urban districts enjoyed significant electoral clout; in Budapest, Jews were more than 20 percent of the population, and 40 percent of the voters.*

  Whatever the self-serving motives of the old aristocracy, the benefits for the bourgeois Jews of Hungary were unparalleled. “No country in Europe was more hospitable to Jewish immigration and assimilation and no country had more enthusiastic support from its Jews than the pre–World War I Hungarian kingdom,” prominent historian István Deák observed. And maybe no Jewish population did more to bring its country into the industrial age. By the 1900s, Hungarian Jews had launched and were running most of the country’s major banks, heavy industries, mining concerns, and the largest munitions plant. Thirty of the fifty founding members of the National Association of Hungarian Industrialists were Jews. For their contributions, the patriarchs of 346 Hungarian Jewish families were granted the ultimate compliment in the aristocracy-obsessed empire: titled ennoblement.

  Wealth was only one aspect of the Golden Age’s yield. The era also ushered in a remarkable flowering of creative and professional talent. By the 1910s, the 5 percent of the population that was Jewish represented half of Hungary’s doctors, 45 percent of its lawyers and journalists, more than a third of its engineers, and a quarter of its artists and writers. Hungarian Jews established, financed, and wrote for many of the nation’s important newspapers, literary journals, publishing houses, theaters, cabarets, and cinema, and forged the modern practice of photography.* And they were instrumental in creating a cultural environment in which artists and intellectuals, both Jewish and Christian, could thrive. A notable segment of the gentile literati embraced that collaboration, pinning to it their greatest hopes for a cultural renaissance. “I see before me the prototype of a new people,” Christian poet Endre Ady exulted in 1917. “This would be the solution to all our problems and History’s outstanding event, if it could be true.” And disastrous if it failed: “We either produce a new people,” he concluded, “or the deluge will follow.”

  Hungary’s assimilating Jewish population dedicated itself with a formidable intensity to producing that new people. Its most prominent members led a decades-long and wildly successful campaign to “Magyarize” the country, modernizing and promulgating Hungarian as the mother tongue, championing Hungarian handicrafts and viniculture (the worldwide fame of Hungarian Matyó embroidery and Tokáj wine are thanks largely to their Jewish promoters), and organizing the fusion of the three provincial backwaters of Buda, Pest, and Óbuda into a city capital that, by the end of the millennium, would be a cultural mecca rivaling Paris and Vienna. “Their contribution to the development of their country was greater than that of any other European Jewish community,” historian Jacob Katz wrote. More than anyone else, the Jews invented what it meant to be Hungarian. And with that, invented “a fatherland” into which their day could dawn.

  But that dawn, like an Aztec sunrise, demanded a sacrifice, an amputation. Under the terms of the “social contract of assimilation,” as historians of the Golden Age call it, Jews were recognized as Hungarians only if they “corrected” themselves. That is, if they betrayed no evidence of being Jewish in appellation, allegiance, attitude, mannerism, speech, or dress. They had to pass. It was a treacherous arrangement. “Perhaps in no other Central European country,” István Bibó observed, “was the inner world of the assimilator community as disharmonious, and the cause of Jewish assimilation so burdened by falsehoods and contradictions, as in Hungary.”

  On New Year’s Day of 1896, church bells all over Budapest rang in the start of the “Millennial Jubilee,” a nationwide celebration of the thousand-year anniversary of the Magyar Conquest. Several thousand Jews in Budapest gave thanks at the Dohány Street Synagogue, known as the “Israelite Cathedral,” a giant temple designed as a basilica, boasting the country’s largest or
gan, a choir, an entrance dominated by a giant rose window, and a facade adorned with eight-pointed stars (pointedly not the six-pointed Stars of David). In honor of the Jubilee, Rabbi Sámuel Kohn opened the millennial assembly of the Israelite Magyar Literary Society with the proud declaration that “Israelite” is now but “the adjective of the word Magyar.” The Israelite Women’s Association hosted a “pre-Lenten” ball in the White Cross Café. And three thousand Jews renounced their family names and adopted Magyar identities as an “offering on the altar of the homeland.” By 1918, nearly forty thousand Jews had followed their example, “naturalizing” their names to sound more Magyar. (The poet József Kiss, originally József Klein, was one of them.) Even to call yourself Jewish was too much. They were now, as Jewish community leaders claimed, “Hungarians of the Mosaic persuasion.”

  Young assimilating Jewish men, in particular, hastened to efface their Jewishness with patriotic displays, dueling scars, and “Christian” sporting feats. They served in disproportionate numbers in World War I (and were nearly 19 percent of army officers), and more than ten thousand gave their lives on the battlefield. Their fathers donated millions of crowns to the war effort. In peacetime, young Jews were the brightest stars of Hungarian sports, and their fathers leading patrons of the nation’s athletic teams. Jewish athletes won for Hungary its first Olympic gold medal (in swimming, in 1896), its first world championship (in figure skating), and its only Helms Award for the world’s best athlete (a long-distance runner). In the first five Olympic Games, Jewish athletes received five of Hungary’s nine individual gold medals (and were nearly 60 percent of the gold-winning team members) and won the country international fame for its fabled fencing team. Attila Petschauer, the Hungarian Jewish prodigy widely regarded as one of the world’s top fencers, led his team to two World Championship gold medals and two Olympic gold medals. He was anointed “Hungary’s Best Fencer” and “the new D’Artagnan,” the Magyars’ musketeer.