Blue Genes (2 page)

MY PATERNAL GRANDFATHER
, Samuel William Lukacs (or Lukacs Samu, as the Hungarians say), was a character to be reckoned with. He died crossing the Bowery in New York in 1927, well before I was born. I discovered this fact early one afternoon when Susan and I took Dad to the Nam Wah tea parlor in Chinatown. Nam Wah is the oldest dim sum restaurant in New York.

Leaving the tea parlor, where Dad had gagged on the food (“Don’t they have orange juice and eggs, for Christ’s sake?”), we started to cross the Bowery, that broad avenue that used to be known for its bums and drunkards. Suddenly Dad stopped in the middle and looked up and down the street. It was hot, he had eaten little, had had too much to drink the night before, and was in a foul mood, hungover. But at that moment, a strange, reflective, almost nostalgic look came over him.

“I think it was about here,” he said.

“What?”

“The bus hit my father.”

I had never heard about this accident. In fact, my father had never talked about his father, and while I found this strange—even baffling—having no guidelines about such matters, I never questioned him about his family past. Now Dad looked around, checked landmarks, nodded his head. We went on to catch a taxi so he could get uptown and have a “real breakfast.”

Dad’s younger sister, Aunt Judy (Julia), surprised Tony and me when we were in our forties by relating how she had spent time at a Hearst paper in New York, writing advice to the lovelorn, when she was only nineteen. She had signed on to the paper in 1925 to do typing, but the woman who wrote the advice column was a friend of Mrs. Hearst’s, and the two decided to take a world cruise. The editor told my aunt to write the column. Forget the fact that Judy was a naive young woman with no experience in the world of love or the lovelorn. Perhaps it explains her behavior in later life (she knew Tolstoy and Melville, but nothing about sex and love affairs). She agreed to take on the assignment.

Jump forward fifty years. Aunt Judy, horrified to hear how little I knew about my roots, takes to the typewriter again and writes me a long letter about the Lukas clan. Past—and present. It is very evocative.

Here is some of what I learned from her about the foreigners called Lukacs (the
c
was dropped when they emigrated to the United States).

Before World War I, Nagyvarad was the biggest city in eastern Hungary. That’s where Samuel was born in 1865. Nagyvarad is in Transylvania—Dracula country—and was tossed back and forth between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Romania for decades, depending on who won which war.

Like most Hungarian Jews, Samuel’s family were Reform Jews, which meant occasional attendance at synagogue. At the turn of the century, Hungary had a fast-growing economy, and Jews were to be found in every aspect of business and commerce. In Budapest, every fourth person was a Jew.

Hungarian Jews were preeminent in math and fencing, but in Nagyvarad they were famous in other arenas as well. They taught, they discussed politics, they thought about the big picture. Samuel’s family owned a café, so it was natural that he, even at a young age, joined his elders and sat in cafés, talking big talk. Aunt Judy said, “Father belonged in a café. He had all the qualities to make him popular there: he drank, he smoked, he laughed, he sang, he told endless stories with dramatic flair, he played cards; he teased the girls—young and old—and the girls, young and old, liked to flirt with him.”

One of Samuel Lukacs’s nephews was Paul Lukas, who became a famous actor, playing Shakespeare in Budapest when he was in his early twenties and later migrating to the United States. He, too, was popular with women, and in the 1920s barnstormed in small planes across the United States as he took work in both Hollywood and New York. Cousin Paul won an Academy Award for his portrayal of an anti-Nazi hero in Lillian Hellman’s
Watch on the Rhine
and was on Broadway in numerous plays, including
Call Me Madam
with Ethel Merman. Tony and I used to go see him and have dinner afterward. There was some dissent about him in the family, since he had converted to Catholicism back in Hungary, but he was too talented to ignore. Besides, it was thrilling to have a famous person in our family.

At one of the dinners that Dad, Tony, and I shared with Paul and Daisy (Paul’s alcoholic Hungarian wife), Dad asked him if he preferred movies or plays. Holding out his huge hands on either side of him in a dramatic pose, Paul said, “If a movie is here” (he clutched the putative film in one fist) “and a play comes along” (he opened the film hand to let the movie go, and grasped the “play” tightly in the other), “then I’d take the play.” Even then, at the age of twelve, I remember thinking, he’s putting on an act. I bet he’d take a film if it were more money.

Shortly after he turned twenty-two, Lukacs Samu met a young woman with whom he had a brief romance that broke off when the girl’s parents discovered the dalliance. Which was why he precipitously left for the United States. Entering during the waning decades of the nineteenth century, he encountered Ellis Island but passed through successfully because he had some distant relatives here who could vouch for him. He remembered the experience, however, for later he took a job interpreting for some of the immigrants who aspired to live in the United States. He used the many languages he had picked up in that muddled part of Europe into which he had been born: Serbian, German, Romanian, Czech, French, and Yiddish, among them.

My Hungarian grandmother, Anna Jacobs, born in 1872, spoke German at home because that was the common language in her part of Hungary.

She had come to the States when she was three and learned how to be a seamstress from her mother, who was an expert at it and supported the family. Granny, as we called her, was diminutive and beautiful—so beautiful that in her late teens she took to modeling. She and her three sisters and brother lived with my great-grandmother in an apartment that opened onto the back of a Hungarian café. I think it was the one that Samuel Lukacs ran for a brief time. At any rate, Anna met him there when she was twenty, and they married in 1892.

I do know that my father thought Granny was too full of quiet resignation, too passive. He talked about that passivity often, saying he couldn’t stand such “martyrdom.” But he never told me what she was a martyr about. Was it Samuel’s tantrums? Samuel’s drinking? He didn’t say.

But my grandfather did stand by her financially, even when times were tough for him.

By 1902, Samuel had moved with Granny to Jersey City, where my father was born, followed in four years by Aunt Judy. Samuel practiced the craft of watch repair (learned in his adolescence in Nagyvarad) but couldn’t abide New Jersey.

Over the next fifteen years, the family moved many times: from New Jersey to Philadelphia; from Philly back to New York; then to Pittsburgh. Samuel’s profession changed just as often. He gave up watchmaking for a hardware store, then traded that in to sell early models of the phonograph to the miners in the hills above the Allegheny River. My aunt remembers him striding around his study in Pittsburgh, comparing recordings of various arias—Caruso versus “unknown” tenors like Lazaro—and asking everyone in the family whom they preferred, so he could let the phonograph company know what it should support. Samuel thought Caruso was not the best; he didn’t last long at that job, either.

“Every day started with excitement,” wrote Aunt Judy. “He was an early riser. I heard him sing and whistle in the bathroom. I loved that. Then I had to be prepared for what would follow. My door would open and there would be some surprise. A funny face, a hand making signals, the growl of a monster. Before the day was over I would witness an endless variety of moods and antics. When he pounded the table at dinner, I didn’t always know whether he was angry or having fun.”

Some of this behavior can undoubtedly be chalked up to the “Magyar personality,” the explosive temperament coming out of the tempestuous battles for survival in the old empire. But much was probably due to a particular set of character traits that I could sometimes find in my own father. He, too, whistled pretty tunes. He, too, broke into fiery anger at strange times. He, too, could be sarcastic—making jokes that were, or were not, funny.

My grandfather seemed totally unaware of the effects his erratic behavior had on Granny—or anyone else, for that matter. He was one of those theatrical human beings who was a whole world unto himself.

In Pittsburgh, Samuel continued to make enough money to support the family with basics. Anna gave them luxuries with her sewing, including a piano for Aunt Judy, who couldn’t play then and never did learn. Aunt Judy’s first marriage, at nineteen, the one that took her away from the lovelorn column, was a disaster. “I married a Hungarian firecracker” is the way she put it. “And that’s all I’m going to say about
that
!” I later found out he was twenty years her elder, an abusive man. When she married again in the 1970s, Dad helped get her divorce papers from Mexico.

Aunt Judy told me that Dad was popular with both girls and boys, who loved the way he had taught himself to play the mandolin and the accordion. Dad never mentioned his popularity. He spoke of the ugly, belching steel mills, and made it sound as if his family were poor. Aunt Judy swears they were not. Perhaps what colors how he remembered it were the vivid arguments he had with his father, especially about the outbreak of hostilities during World War I. Samuel believed the family should support the Hungarians, who were, of course, on the side of the Austrians, and therefore foes of the Americans. Dad was furious about this and argued in America’s defense. When the “wrong side” won, Samuel pretended he’d been America’s supporter all along. But they both shared dismay that the Allies had taken Nagyvarad from Hungary and given it to Romania. In some ways, it took the steam out of Samuel for the rest of his life.

Dad was also disappointed that his father wanted him to study dentistry (“to support the family”), a notion that Dad detested. He had his heart set on law and politics. However, to please—or at least pacify—his father, Dad entered the medical school of the University of Pittsburgh.

Dental studies were not as long or as arduous as those required for physicians, but the first semester was the same for both, mainly involving dissection. Dad told two stories about his dental school attendance, both of them quite amusing. Unfortunately, he told the same two stories over and over, until Tony and I knew them by heart, by which time they ceased to be interesting. One sticks most in my mind. It shows something about ingenuity, life in the 1920s in Pittsburgh, and my father’s mind-set.

Dissection of the human body was done by teams of three students. My father picked two young men to do the work with him. Unfortunately, none of the three had the few bucks it took to purchase a dead body from the university, so Dad and his cohorts decided they could do what the dental school did: go to the coroner’s office and get a body that was going to be buried in potter’s field—the burying place for unclaimed bodies—and transport it to the lab themselves.

They looked in the paper and found the ideal body: a woman who had been dead only a few days and who, according to the paper, would be interred in a simple grave within twenty-four hours if no one claimed her. The three stooges approached the morgue and “claimed” Ella Morgan (the name found on the woman’s identification, according to the paper). “A cousin,” my father said. The official at the morgue laughed long and hard. “You’re med students, huh?”

“How did you know?” they asked, chagrined.

“Come on, fellas, I’ll show you.”

Ella Morgan was black. None of the three applicants was. While Dad and his friends felt foolish, the pudgy official was delighted to have Ms. Morgan taken off his hands. He gave her to the students.

Ella weighed 250 pounds, which caused a number of problems. Outside waited the Model A Ford they had borrowed for the job. Piling Ella into the rumble seat was not easy, but they managed it. All three of them crowded into the front seat; no one wanted to sit with Ella. It began to snow, and the slippery, steep road up the hill to the university was too much for the Model A—especially with a dead body in the backseat. The vaunted ability of Mr. Ford’s automobile to go up hills better in reverse didn’t pay off, and the car skidded to the side of the road.