In the Darkroom

by Susan Faludi

  “Where is it?” I asked my father.

  She nodded toward the far left of the altar, where a long queue had formed. We joined it. Half an hour later, we arrived at the guards’ station. A velvet rope swung aside and we were admitted to the Chapel of the Holy Right. Paintings of various saints adorned the chamber. Against the far wall, the object we came to see was shrouded in shadow. You had to drop 200 forints in a coin box to illuminate it. The lights went up on what looked like a jewel-studded dollhouse, a heavily ornamented golden reliquary encased in a glass sarcophagus. Inside the arches of the miniature shrine was an amputated hand: Hungary’s cherished Christian relic, the Holy Right, the mummified right hand of Saint Stephen. It was the miracle-dispensing hand with which the dying king is said to have lifted the Holy Crown of Hungary in 1038 and pledged his throne to the Virgin Mary. After a minute, the light shut off.

  On August 20, 1990, and in celebration of the fall of heathen Communism and the restoration of Christianity, the Holy Right was allowed out of its sepulcher for what would become an annual excursion. Actually, it led a parade. Priests bearing aloft the relic in its sealed glass case headed up a procession, tens of thousands of people marching through the streets of Budapest. Hundreds of thousands more watched the live broadcast on television.

  The post-Communist preoccupation with Saint Stephen’s hand was part of a larger reconstruction of a mythological history, the myth of Hungary as originally and quintessentially Christian.* The Communist regime had suppressed religious practice of all stripes. After 1949, the government ceased collecting religious affiliation in the national census and omitted religion from identity cards. Citizens were supposed to be Communists, first and last. The suppression of religion led to a new erasure for Hungary’s embattled Jews. In 1989, the year marking the end of Communist rule, Hungarian historian Peter Kende published a book on Hungarian Jewry that included a chapter titled, “Are There Jews in Hungary Today?” It was a reasonable question. When the post-Communist Hungarian census restored religious affiliation to its count, the results were as follows in 1992: Roman Catholics, 67.8 percent; Calvinists, 20.9 percent; Lutherans, 4.2 percent; Jews, 0 percent.

  Many parents had gone to great lengths to conceal Jewish roots from their children. A 1985 study of children of Holocaust survivors living in Hungary found that they generally stumbled upon their religious origins by accident or happenstance when they were teenagers or older, often when an incident shook loose a parent’s confession. It was a phenomenon so commonplace the study’s authors gave it a name: “How I Came to Know That I Am Jewish.”

  After my parents’ divorce, my father became a devotee of televangelism. The Christian Broadcast Network was his lifeline, and he recorded scores of sermons by Robert Schuller, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and many more, with the exception of Jim Bakker, whom he deemed “an idiot.” The Hour of Power telecast from the Crystal Cathedral played on his thirteen-inch Panasonic TV every Sunday. He put the TV on a lazy Susan so he could watch while he was cooking, or eating, or in bed. He would interrupt the marathon viewing sessions to expound to visitors on Christian morality and “family values.” A favorite topic: the abomination of divorce.

  My father’s evangelical fervor amplified an older fascination with Christianity. Before the divorce, Sunday afternoons in our living room were wall-of-sound masses, baroque sacred music, fugues, passions, requiems. Between records, my father would deliver wearying sermons on the finer points of liturgical history. He would sometimes sing along with the chorus, in German. I sat across from him, desperate to flee, pretending to study the English translation in the liner notes. (“O Lamb of God, wholly innocent / Slaughtered on the trunk of the Cross, / Patient through all ages, / No matter how much provoked.”)

  The only high holidays we celebrated were Christian ones. At Christmas, my father strung lights across the front of our house and installed a large and fastidiously decorated tree in our living room. (One year the decor was a “Danish theme,” with live candles; an errant taper nearly burned the house down.) We’d assemble for a family photo session, posed with fruit cake or tins of Christmas cookies, which my father insisted my mother bake. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio or its equivalent issued from the stereo system. On Easter, he’d enlist us in a pilgrimage to a Roman Catholic—or Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox—church that he’d heard hosted an especially resplendent resurrection ritual. He just liked “the pageantry of the church fathers,” he said, the men of the cloth parading their supreme spiritual authority. After services, as the ecclestiastics processed in their vestments swinging incense censers, my father would capture the pomp and circumstance on film. His desire to commit Christian rites to celluloid was long-standing. A few weeks after receiving the Pathé camera as his bar mitzvah present, young István had set out for Esztergom, the Hungarian seat of the Roman Catholic Church, so he could “make a movie” of churchgoers filing into the largest cathedral (and building) in the country, the Primatial Basilica of the Blessed Virgin Mary Assumed into Heaven.

  My father never attended a service at the lone synagogue in Yorktown Heights. He did, though, pay a call on its offices one day in 1976—to see if the young rabbi could stop my mother from seeking a divorce. “And you know what he said?” my father asked me as we were sitting in front of her computer. We had been looking at photographs of Hungarian cathedrals. “Waaall, Mr. Faludi”—my father delivered the rabbi’s remarks in a high-pitched register—“in modern Judaism, divorce is something that has to be considered.” Whenever my father got on the subject of Jewish male authorities she’d encountered—whether American Reform rabbis or Orthodox caftan wearers or wartime Judenrat representatives—her impersonations turned mincing.

  One summer afternoon when we had taken our coffee to the deck, my father went into yet another of her mocking imitations of the Budapest Jewish community elders who wouldn’t help her reclaim the family property after her return to Hungary: “Oh, we can’t do anything, Mr. Faludi,” she said, channeling Minnie Mouse. “We have to make nice with the authorities.” My father was wearing a rosebud-print housecoat and bedroom slippers—“my hausfrau outfit,” she called it—which only heightened the contradictions. Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.

  One night, my father and I attended a concert performance of Halévy’s La Juive (The Jewess) in the Dohány Synagogue, the “Israelite Cathedral” with the organ and eight-pointed stars that stood at the spot that once marked the entrance to the ghetto. On the way in, my father hesitated at the foldout table heaped with loaner yarmulkes. “No, not for women!” she announced, exclamatory finger in the air, and we proceeded to the main sanctuary, where the opera would be performed officially for the first time in Hungary since 1937. The story was typical convoluted libretto fare, with all the plot twists dependent on mistaken identity between Jews and Christians. A Jewish goldsmith raises the daughter of a cardinal as if she were his own daughter, and when she’s grown, the cardinal (who doesn’t know that “Rachel” is really his daughter) condemns her to death for falling in love with a Christian prince (who has led her to believe he is a Jew). The goldsmith could save Rachel by revealing that she actually is, by bloodlines anyway, a Christian, but he stays mum and the girl dies in a boiling pot of oil, into which the goldsmith soon follows.

  My father was annoyed that we had to sit so far back. Almost half the pews were cordoned off and marked reserved for vips.

  “All the biiig alte kockers,” she said derisively. As we squeezed into the middle of a back row, I was aware of people inspecting my father, some unkindly. She seemed aware of it, too.

  “Do I need rouge?” she asked me, scrounging in her pocketbook for a compact mirror.

  She was wearing her red sheath dress, with black heels and a black scarf with big red cabbage roses and she carried a black pocketbook. (“You can’t bring a white pocketbook to the opera,” she’d advised me earlier in the evening.)

  “No, you look
fine.”

  “Look at all those fat Jewish men with their big bellies and their gold rings and watches,” my father said, gesturing to the reserved pews. She couldn’t seem to get off the subject, and her voice kept getting louder. “They think they’re so important sitting there in the VIP section with all their gold.”

  People were turning around. The concert, sponsored by the Jewish Summer Festival, was a tourist attraction—not particularly well attended by Hungarians—and evidently a fair number of the tourists understood English.

  “Stefi, could you lower your voice?”

  My father fussed with her scarf and then leaned over to deliver a stage whisper into my ear. “I know what they are thinking,” she said, sotto voce. “They are looking at me and saying, ‘There’s an overdressed shiksa.’ ”

  I was mindful of Otto Szekely’s injunction not to conflate religion and gender. There were times when my father seemed intent on making that difficult.

  ————

  In 1922, Hans Blüher, early Nazi ideologue and champion of a German state based on the manly bonds of a theoretical Männerbund, spelled out the sexual distinction between the Aryan and Jewish “races.” “The association between male character and the essence of being German,” he said, “and between the feminine and servile character with the Jewish is a direct intuition of the German people, which becomes more definite from day to day.”

  These canards were aimed at one sex in particular. The feminization of the “race” seemed to render “the Jewess,” particularly of the assimilated and affluent variety, all the more attractive. Even when she was vilified, as she was in the interwar years, it was more often as a seductress, not a failed woman. Generally, she was regarded as beautiful. Visiting Budapest in 1913, the French writer André Duboscq wrote approvingly: “The Jewish women stand out with the voluptuousness of their becoming curves and little gaudy outfits: they flag their hats with feathers and ribbons. One might see them every day at the promenade.” That promenade took place each weekend in Budapest along the Corso, the boardwalk on the Pest side of the Danube. My grandparents and their son used to walk up and down there, too, every Saturday after morning services. In 1908, Budapest journalist Jenő Heltai observed that among the upwardly mobile Jewish couples he knew, the men couldn’t hide their origins, but “Jewishness did not show on their wives.” When it did, it only added to their erotic appeal. Hungarian poet Endre Ady, whose wealthy married mistress and muse was Jewish, exalted “the blood-red lips” of Jewry’s “honeyed women.” In his 1912 novel in verse, Margita Wants to Live, Ady declared “the Jewish girl” to be “a symbol of the new, / fine Hungarian times that hasten to come / … Hungaria and Margita are almost one.”

  In Budapest, thanks to the superior education of the bourgeois “Jewess” (by the turn of the century, 48 percent of the city’s female university students were Jewish) and her cultural appetites (well-off Jewish women quickly became leading consumers of the capital’s arts-and-leisure market), every theater, concert hall, and publishing house in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was hungry for her business. She was also more likely than her male counterpart to marry a Christian of higher social status. A striking number of prominent men of the Christian upper crust (including Baron Géza Fejérváry, Hungary’s prime minister in the early 1900s) and the Christian intelligentsia (Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, and Gyula Krúdy among them) had Jewish wives. (An anti-Semitic interwar writer unhappily reported that he had counted twenty-six gentile aristocrats with the most ancient lineage who had married the daughters of Jewish industrialists.) The Jewess was more than a tolerated assimilant; she was an exemplar of modern Hungarian femininity. As historian Viktor Karády noted in the Hungarian Jewish Museum’s catalogue for its 2002 exhibition “The Jewess,” the Jews of fin de siècle Hungary played an “extraordinarily important” role in defining and legitimating “the behavioral model of the Western middle-class woman.”

  Still, as the hoary expression went, “A Jewess is no Jew.” Leading Christian male writers of the time in Hungary and throughout Central Europe, while extolling the Jewess’s “proud beauty,” simultaneously mocked her Jewish husband’s “ridiculous and unhandsome appearance.” Jewish men were said to be plagued by the female ailments of hysteria and neurasthenia, prone to fainting spells and tubercular pallor (along with flat feet, varicose veins, and hemorrhoids), lacking in reproductive vigor, afflicted with venereal disease, and beset by sexual “abnormalities” of an effeminate and submissive nature. The new age gave these slanders a scientific sheen. “There is a relatively high incidence of homosexuality among the Jews,” Alexander Pilcz, a leading Viennese psychiatrist in the early 1900s and author of the standard textbook on “racial psychiatry,” held. Also, he claimed, a high rate of drug addiction and “periodic insanity.” The theoreticians of the day based their conclusions on such “facts” as a Jewish man’s arm span being less than his height, and thus like a woman’s. Such were the flimsy premises buttressing a resilient prejudice: “a widespread sensibility,” as historian Daniel Boyarin put it in his thought-provoking book Unheroic Conduct, “that being Jewish in our culture renders a boy effeminate.”

  Oskar Panizza, a German psychiatrist-turned-writer, described the type in his 1893 novella, The Operated Jew. The antihero of this “horrifying comedy,” as Panizza characterized his handiwork, is Itzig Faitel, “a small, squat man” with a gimpy walk, a “cowardly” voice, contorted spine and legs, and a chest puffed like a “chicken breast.” Vowing to remake his physique and “become such a fine gentilman just like a goymenera and to geeve up all fizonimie of Jewishness” (as Panizza’s rendition of Yiddish has been translated into English), Faitel hires a team of speech specialists, anatomists, and orthopedists. His crooked bones are broken and reset, his kinky black hair turned into “the golden locks of a child,” and a barbed-wire cage strapped to his pelvis to eliminate a swishy walk. Then, in exchange for “a great deal of money,” seven women from the Black Forest provide a “Christian blood” infusion. Faitel climbs into a bathtub, cuts open an artery, and injects himself with their donation until he falls into a coma. When he awakes, the transformation is complete and Faitel can now “pretend to be a normal human being.” He has his “papers changed,” adopts the name Siegfried Freudenstern, and announces his engagement to a “beautiful flaxen-haired” Christian girl. At the wedding feast, though, the groom downs too many glasses of champagne (Jews can’t handle their drink) and as he rises to deliver his toast, the oh-so-laboriously constructed facade cracks. Out leaps a “monster,” who “began clicking his tongue, gurgling, and tottering back and forth while making disgusting, lascivious, and bestial canine movements with his rear end.” The horrified guests watch as Faitel’s straight blond strands begin to curl and then turn black; his limbs go spastic and crooked; and “a terrible smell spread in the room, forcing those people who were still hesitating at the exit, to flee while holding their noses.” Itzig had not so easily assimilated.

  Panizza’s tale partook of a very long tradition. In the 1180 chronicle History of Jerusalem, Cardinal Jacques de Vitry maintained that Jewish men “have become weak and unwarlike even as women, and it is said that they have a flux of blood every month. God has smitten them in the hinder parts, and put them to perpetual shame.” Bernard de Gordon’s Lilium Medicinae, a medical text of the early fourteenth century, set forth a typical diagnosis: the “immoderate flow of blood” in Jewish men was the result of their unmanly “idleness” and “fear and anxiety”—as well as, of course, a “divine punishment” for killing Christ. As the fourteenth-century treatise by Italian encyclopaedist and physician Cecco d’Ascoli asserted, “After the death of Christ, all Jewish men, like women, suffer menstruation.”

  Such loss of blood required replenishment. In medieval Europe, Jews had long been accused of slaughtering virgin children (mainly prepubescent boys) and using their blood for ritualistic purposes. But starting around the fifteenth century, particular allegations
began to recur: Jewish men, it was said, were seeking Christian blood to treat their menstrual bleeding, their flagging fertility, and their “wound of circumcision.” Jewish men of means, it was said, coated themselves with gentile blood on their wedding day. These beliefs seemed to take especial hold in Hungary. In 1494 in the Hungarian city of Nagyszombat, fourteen Jews were charged with drinking the blood of a Christian girl to stanch their “excessive bleeding” from circumcision, “arouse” their lovemaking, and “cure” their “monthly menses.” They were tortured, then burned at the stake. (Four decades later, the citizens of the same town pursued the same charge against another local Jew and succeeded in having the city’s entire Jewish population expelled “for all times” by royal edict.) In 1529 in the Hungarian town of Bazin, Jewish men were burned to death following claims that they had killed a nine-year-old boy, cutting off his penis and testicles, and sucking out his blood with quills and small reeds. (The boy was later found in Vienna, alive and unmolested.) Even in the modern era in Hungary, as Joshua Trachtenberg noted in The Devil and the Jew, a conviction held sway “that Jews annually strangle a child or a virgin with their phylacteries, draw off the blood and smear the genitalia of their children with it to make them fertile.” Accusations of ritual murder—or “blood libel”—plagued Jewish communities in Central Europe in general, and Hungary in particular, late into the nineteenth century.