No Live Files Remain

by Andras Forgach

  REPORT

  Budapest, 13 April 1984

  I report that at 3 pm on 9 April 1984 I had a meeting in the Ferenc Rózsa Nursing Home with the secret colleague code-named MRS PÁPAI.

  At the meeting we set out to discuss the following topics:

  • László Rapcsány: his book Jerusalem

  • The matter of Gregor Zwi Havkin

  MRS PÁPAI expressed her deep indignation that Rapcsány’s book, whose every page exudes Zionism, was allowed to be published in the Hungarian People’s Republic. MRS PÁPAI handed over the draft letter attached, which she wishes to send to Comrade Berecz. (Attachment no. 1)

  In the discussion that unfolded concerning the letter and the need to write it I sought to persuade MRS PÁPAI that while I understand her indignation, I would regard it as neither expedient nor useful if she were to send the letter in this form anywhere at all, because doing so could hit back on her own person and also on our operative co-operation.

  MRS PÁPAI said she understood the reasons for my concern and said she would abandon the idea of signing the letter herself. But she would like a book review to appear in some form that would set right the value and faults of the ‘work’.

  We agreed that we will examine what opportunity we see for an appropriate critique of the book.

  MRS PÁPAI asked that we make it possible for her relative Gregor Zwi Havkin to visit Hungary. Havkin is an Israeli citizen who has lived for several years in the United States and works in research on animal psychology, and she submitted Havkin’s data. (Attachment no. 2)

  At the end of the meeting we discussed MRS PÁPAI’s children. 1

  Assessment:

  I recommend that we contact Department III/III-1 of the Interior Ministry in the matter of the Rapcsány book.

  And the handler attaches the ominous letter about the Rapcsányi book, which perfectly sums up that schizophrenic situation, that labyrinth without an exit, in which Mr Pápai and Mrs Pápai, my father and my mother, existed and floundered here and in the big wide world.

  Pápai’s three dossiers went missing, true enough, but his reports can be found lying low in various other dossiers, such as the media review from 1972 that popped up a couple of days ago, which is obviously one of his last reports. It concerns a monthly magazine published in Italy, Ha-tikwa (from hatikvah, the transliterated form of the Hebrew word for ‘hope’, ‘Hatikvah’ also being the name of the Israeli national anthem). In this report Pápai offers a scintillating analysis that reveals the publication’s duplicity: the magazine pretends it isn’t Zionist, and yet it is just that. Pápai sees through the ruse. His merciless iron logic (which reads more like a parody – sorry, Dad, but I had to say it) rests on a single, imperishable pillar: his own immutable loyalty to the prevailing position of the great Soviet Union. In vain is this seemingly high-minded magazine open to other ideas, for as Papa’s, er, Pápai’s summary of its contents makes clear, it is nothing but cunning trickery – vile, veiled propaganda. Only one truth is possible. The report is a veritable X-ray image of that labyrinth in which both Mr Pápai and Mrs Pápai had lost their way, in their early youth, and from which, alas, they never would find their way out:

  REPORT

  Budapest, 26 January 1972

  Ha-tikwa is the magazine of the Italian Jewish Youth Federation. Its November edition covers the Federation’s 24th congress.

  From the resolutions taken it is clear that while the Federation emphasizes its ‘independence’ from Zionist organizations, it serves Zionist policies and Israel directly and indirectly.

  Knowing as it does the leftist orientation of Italian youth, it promulgates a decidedly ‘leftist’ programme [. . .] Cunningly it claims to seek that the rights of Palestinian Arabs are ensured and says military installations need not be established in the occupied territories, and yet it does not explain how Palestinians can enforce their rights and it places emphasis on guaranteeing the rights of Israelis.

  It undertakes a pointed attack at Syria, Iraq and the Soviet Union for so-called ‘anti-Semitism’. And while repeatedly insisting that it is not Zionist, it gives publicity to Israel in myriad ways, runs paid ads for Israeli firms, and organizes Hebrew language courses and seminars on Israel, as well as study trips to Israel.

  Under the title ‘Open Debate’ it communicates the stance of well-known Zionists, interviewing [. . .] one of the leaders of the World Congress of Jewish Youth, who [. . .] calls for co-operation between Zionists and non-Zionists. (Of course he is quick to clarify that non-Zionists are not anti-Zionists.)

  SC CN PÁPAI, OH

  Note:

  We will study the magazine Ha-tikwa in the framework of the mapping of Zionist organizations in Italy.

  János Szakadáti, Police Major

  To the lieutenant, the official line was merely a line, which, if drawn elsewhere, would then be, well, elsewhere. To my mother, that ‘line’ was a matter of life and death, an electrified barbed-wire fence. It would be good to leave the next letter out of the book, but, alas, I can’t: even as Bruria, using needles and multi-coloured threads, devotes her nights to recreating Bruegel’s painting with astonishing sensitivity, she doesn’t notice that the logic of Rapcsànyi’s Jerusalem – which she sees, rightly, I think, as a one-sided and superficial piece of propaganda – is the same as that of her letter. A sentence she finally crossed out, which compared Golda Meir to Rudolf Hess, is precisely the absurd consummation of this mirror logic. And there is another rather interesting sentence – the style and grammar of which suggest that it is the amalgamation of phrases from propaganda publications and newspaper articles read over the decades, and thus reveals the letter-writer’s own inner chaos, too:

  To skim over that fact does not clarify reality but only stirs helter-skelter in people’s minds.

  And yet the letter-writer has a point – Rapcsànyi’s book is indeed one-sided. But the letter is just as one-sided. Yes, the false mirror logic works in reverse, too, because it could be used to argue that the Arabs are all Nazis. When the letter-writer’s father, my deeply religious grandfather, arrived in Jerusalem in 1922, he was surprised to find that the country was not empty, as he’d been told – Arabs lived there. Moreover, those Arabs – Bedouins, that is – lived like biblical Jews, and because of that, following an Arabic custom, he took on the name ‘Father of Saul’ after his firstborn son, which is how he became Avi Shaul. And the great Soviet Union had barely got off the ground back then, not to mention the Nazis! And yet by the indignant letter-writer’s mirror logic, the idea of suffering, which until then – for thousands of years, in fact – the Jews had claimed for themselves, now belonged to the Palestinians, while the terrorists – and there is no appeal against this designation – are the Israelis. It’s not even this conclusion that’s frightening – this mode of thinking, mechanical in all respects, automatically arrives at it – but rather that Bruria fails to notice, and is unable to notice, what flimsy foundations this reasoning rests on given that every conclusion has been arrived at in advance (even if genuine suffering and a profound knowledge of the city and its inhabitants – the city of her birth –underlies it). Bruria shuts her eyes. After all, she is squirming in the hands of men who write about her like this:

  She undertakes work for us – the gathering of information and the processing of individuals – based on the information needs we provide.

  This, then, was Mum, a ‘processor of individuals’, Mum, whose gentle hand could make my headache go away? Mum, who, on reading Rapcsànyi’s book, which had been tacitly supported by the regime, let out the following, virtually inarticulate scream in half-baked Hungarian, addressed to ‘Comrade Editor-in-Chief’, which was tempered only by her iron discipline as a Party worker:

  Most Respected Comrade Editor-in-Chief,

  I would be so bold as to make a few critical observations concerning a book published amid much ado: László Rapcsány’s ‘Jerusalem’.

  The author dedicates the book to ‘his brethren or
god’. The book’s contents, however, make clear that the much suffering Palestinian people do not belong among the writer’s brethren. I will not address the book’s historical assertions through 1948, though what it supposedly says about the Balfour declaration is quite antipathetic, for the Balfour declaration served the interests not of the Jewish people but that of English imperialism, Great Britain’s colonization policies. To skim over that fact does not clarify reality but only stirs helter-skelter in people’s minds.

  The author repeatedly states that he will not politicize – but is not not politicizing also a form a politics? Is there such a thing as an objective historical perspective? Does not a historian or newspaper reporter need to be loyal to the policies of the Hungarian People’s Republic to accept a minimal commitment to the policies, the ideology that is ours?

  At the same time, the book is biased and tendentious, seeking to smuggle in the notion that Jewry survived through the centuries because it was unified by the ‘idea of Jerusalem’. I do not wish to issue rebuttals, though I could. However, if what the writer writes is true – and as Zionist political-ideological books have described before, and has been discussed at numerous Zionist congresses, yielding one declaration after another about magical Jerusalem – then it is an obvious conclusion of this book (first paragraph page 20) – that the Israeli state was justified in occupying the Old City of Jerusalem and the entire West Bank, for God promised this in the Bible to Abraham.

  Rapcsány takes this occupation for granted to such a degree (though obliquely indeed, and thus more dangerously) that he even describes the city of Nablus, occupied in 1967, as Israeli: ‘One of Israel’s most interesting settlements’ (p. 147), whereas even the average Hungarian newspaper reader knows that Nablus is a centre of Palestinian resistance to this day. Not long ago a Jewish terrorist group carried out an assassination attempt on the city’s mayor in which he lost both his legs. This bloody terror attack was denounced not only by the Arabs and the communists but also by the UN. But Rapcsány doesn’t politicise. [. . .]

  The university that invited the writer, Bar-Ilan, is a bigoted religious institution that keeps itself sustained mainly by American money.

  Yehuda Lahav, who received and accompanied him, is a renegade who in 1965 left the Israeli Communist Party and since then has been the wildest anti-communist spokesman for instigation against the socialist countries. But the Israeli Communist Party would have a lot more to say about Lahav.

  On pp 300–301 the book’s enthusiasm for the united (Israeli) Jerusalem becomes completely clear as it nicely describes the enthusiasm of the Jewish leaders. As for the ‘bulldozer’ action, all it writes is that ‘this sparked a sharp reaction from Arab public opinion and the international media’ – but was mention made of how many Arab houses, which had likewise stood in their places for centuries and whose inhabitants had likewise been in Jerusalem for centuries, were razed, or that a legion of Jewish progressive, humanist, communist people living in Israel had protested this? No – there is no room for that in a book that doesn’t politicize.

  The author describes the mayor of occupied Jerusalem as an exceptional cultural scholar. Of course Mr Kolek is that, too, and he loves Jerusalem, but is not the mayor of an occupied city a politician par excellence? Rapcsány didn’t even bother to meet residents of occupied Jerusalem, for that would have been to politicize. Indeed, the only Arab he did meet (p. 74) was the owner of an Arab café who told him tales. [. . .]

  No, he didn’t pay a visit to the former mayor of Arab Jerusalem, Amin Majaj. Descended from an ancient Jerusalem family, this physician and director of Makased Hospital, who lives in an ancient Jerusalem house by Herod’s Gate, could have told the writer a lot about his city. But that would naturally have been politicizing, and Mr Kolek is more competent a source, since he was born in Hungary. [. . .]

  But is not the author – who certainly travelled to Jerusalem to meet with archaeologists – politicizing by speaking with archaeologists and historians of an occupying power on the occupied territory, people whose work and research is illegal? Of course, had he mentioned this, he would also have had to mention the 1967 occupation, which, it seems, does not exist for the writer, indeed, as he writes, ‘it has now become clear to me that it is not a bizarre idea if we seek the reviving continuity of stones and thoughts’ (p. 161, cf p. 20).

  Thus it is that he smuggles into the whole book that false consciousness that Jerusalem is one and indivisible, moreover, in Israeli hands.

  On p. 156 he mentions that the Israeli authorities opened Jaffa Gate and that this ‘eases the traffic’ – but would the author react the same way if the German Federal Republic attacked the capital of the German Democratic Republic and then opened the wall to ease the flow of traffic?!

  [. . .]

  The method the writer uses is to not speak about many things, and so what he does not write about does not exist. The actions of Motta Gur and his soldiers do not exist, the terrorist acts of the occupying forces do not exist, and expelled Palestinians do not exist who live in refugee camps and wait to make good on the several dozen UN decrees in the matter that have been brought since 1947. But that is all politics – what’s not is that in the writer’s book Golda Meir figures as a ‘good grandmother’; that same Golda Meir who initiated several of Israel’s wars of aggression. History knows several politicians who loved music, their wives, and indeed even their grandchildren, but history keeps a record not of their acts as grandfathers but of their political actions. Even Rudolf Hess, commandant of Auschwitz, loved his family.

  It is neither my goal nor my responsibility to mention every passage of the book similar to those above – this should have been the responsibility of others. However, I do by all means consider it necessary that the book be read also by competent individuals and that reviews of it be published from a political perspective, which could somewhat clarify that the book does not reflect the thinking of official Hungarian policy – at least I would like to hope so.

  Respectfully

  Mrs Marcell Forgács

  Avi Shaul Bruria

  Budapest, 6 April 1984

  So there we are, lock, stock, and barrel, Mum’s worldview. She is led neither by calculation nor some hidden agenda, but wants only to scream the truth. And then she gives in.

  Three weeks later, on 2 May, Lieutenant Dóra reports:

  In the matter of the RAPCSÁNY book MRS PÁRAI said that she has spoken with a staff member of the Foreign Affairs Institute, Comrade ENDREFI, who was of the same opinion as we; that is, that she should not send her letter critiquing the book to anyone.

  Following through on this thought, I managed to persuade MRS PÁPAI that in this case, the letter – wherever she might send it – would trigger only a negative effect.

  The result she seeks can be achieved only with very thorough, slow, persistent work, which, however, falls under our purview.

  I thanked MRS PÁPAI for bringing our attention to this dangerous book and assured her that we would do everything to ensure that in the future this sort of thing hopefully will not occur, though this can be realized as the result of a struggle, and so we cannot expect spectacular results right away.

  At the close of our conversation PÁPAI’s health came up, and then we discussed the May Day festivities.

  Our meeting ended at 3:30 pm with us agreeing that I would return P. GAME’s letter as soon as possible to MRS PÁPAI.

  Assessment:

  The effect of reasoning and time seems to have calmed MRS PÁPAI, who will call off her plan to publicly disseminate her critique.

  Defeat on the back of defeat. But at least the lieutenant and Mrs Pápai discussed the May Day festivities.

  Did my learned grandfather, in giving that very rare and beautiful name, Bruria (a name more or less corresponding to the Latin name Klara: clear, bright), to his girl by chance bequeath her with a propensity for tragedy, for catastrophe by way of the fate of another Bruria (spelled Bruriah in English), the daugh
ter of renowned Rabbi Haninah ben Teradion (who was burned slowly at the stake by the Romans), who would become the wife of the great Rabbi Meir?

  According to legends born centuries after the events, that dazzlingly clever Bruriah – who was given to converse with the scholarly rabbis, and whom the Babylonian Talmud quotes in numerous places, and who was possessed of brains and beauty – supposedly died when her husband, Rabbi Meir (who, according to a legend, had to flee to Babylon because he had rescued Bruriah’s younger sister, who was, notably, still a virgin, from a brothel established by the Roman occupiers), out of pure scholarly curiosity, sent one of his students to seduce Bruriah. He wished to prove the Talmudic assertion that women are easily swayed; which is to say, a woman who whiles away too much time with the Talmud and is too clever for her own good is more lecherous and susceptible to sin. Bruriah had shown this reasoning to be ludicrous on many occasions. But although she resisted the young student’s advances for some time, finally she gave in, and so sad and sorry was she, so the legend goes, that she hanged herself. A number of scholarly commentaries proposed mitigating circumstances. One has Rabbi Meir himself disguised as the student. The commentaries concur that Bruriah need only have said that the Talmud’s assertion about women was true, and that she was merely an exception, but that she was unwilling to do this, and so had to be put to shame. Bruriah was in this respect one of the first feminists. ‘By which road should we travel to Lod?’ a rabbi once asked her. Bruriah berated him, saying that if it were really true, as the same rabbi had said not long before, that learned men should speak as little as possible with women, why then he should have asked ‘Which road to Lod?’