Authors: Deborah Feldman
I wanted to accomplish something on this trip, something along the lines of closure. If I could piece together the journey my grandmother had taken before she landed in the lap of the Satmar Hasids, somehow I could put into context my own journey out and back into the larger world she had once inhabited. In a sense, I would be able to clarify my own displacement only in the context of hers. If I came home empty-handed, I worried, I’d never achieve context for my own life. We are, sometimes, simply reduced to where we come from—if not in the most immediate sense, then in an ancestral one. I was convinced that the angst that flowed in my veins was a result of more than just my childhood, that it was part of a greater composite inheritance that I was only a fragmentary part of.
Kántorjánosi had one main street, which split into two smaller streets after the town square, and a few dead-end roads. We drove through it so quickly, thinking it was bigger, that we had to turn around and go back once we realized there were no more houses. I scanned every house, looking in particular for the unique ironwork in the gate in my photograph, but all the houses looked similar, with stucco sides painted various shades of beige and sloping clay-pot roofs. They were all gated and had their own gardens.
“I don’t see it! Do you see it?” I showed them the photograph. I
had a panicky feeling that I had come all this way for nothing, that we would never be able to identify the exact house, that it was probably long gone by now.
“Is it that one?” Angelika asked, pointing as we coasted by a decrepit house, its gate rusted and warped. I turned back to look, trying to compare it with the one in the photo.
“They all look the same!” I said. “How can I be sure?”
“Never mind,” Zoltán said. “Let’s go talk to the mayor and see what he was able to find out.”
The mayor’s office was in a modest but new building that flanked the town square. Inside, some people were lined up in the hallway. They had dark skin and were missing teeth. “Gypsies,” Angelika said. They seemed to be waiting for some form of assistance or welfare.
The mayor’s secretary seemed unnerved by our presence. I could imagine how she might be put off by the idea that I was some big-shot American expecting them to drop everything and help me. She instructed us to enter the mayor’s office and wait there for his arrival.
Inside we sat at a small table that was covered in a crocheted tablecloth like the ones my grandmother had used for her dining room table. She had told me stories of women who started preparing their own trousseaus from a young age, knitting and sewing their own linens. I wondered who had crocheted this tablecloth.
The mayor was a soft-spoken man who seemed a bit taken aback by all the fuss. I could tell that this town didn’t get many visitors. He had found my grandmother’s house, he told us—there was an old woman living there now who, he said, was quite popular in the town. She sat on a bench outside her house every day and
talked to everyone who passed by. She claimed to remember some things about my family, even though she was in her nineties.
“Does she remember my grandmother?” I asked Angelika to ask the mayor.
“Perhaps,” the mayor answered. “She’s a bit fuzzy, but she says she remembers some things. Shall we go to her?”
We walked a little ways down the main street, named after the Hungarian poet Arany János, all of us in a group, and neighbors watched from behind their gates, openmouthed at the sight. The mayor talked to Zoltán about his plans for the city, and Angelika whispered the translations to me as we followed. The economy here was farm-based, he said, but somehow the Gypsy population accumulated enough money to furnish their homes quite lavishly. The mayor estimated that the region was now at least 50 percent Gypsy.
A woman with flared nostrils and hair dyed orange crossed the street in front of us, pushing a stroller loaded with black plastic bags. She paused on the other side of the road and gave us a blank stare as we passed.
Soon we came to a stop in front of the decrepit house that Angelika had pointed to earlier. Now I looked at the photograph in my hand again and saw that it was indeed the right house, but very neglected. The house was actually two buildings: a living area in the front and a separate kitchen in the back. The front building had a badly rusted tin roof, and lichens had coated the terra-cotta roof behind it. Both roofs seemed as if they might slide off on either side at any moment.
Outside the gate, an ancient-looking woman with only one tooth sat on a bench, her arm resting on a cane. She was wearing
a loose flowery dress that buttoned down the front, and although her exposed skin was leathery and dark from the sun, the bits that showed through the gaps between the buttons were stark white. She grinned at us as we approached.
I’m not the first one to come visit her, she told Angelika as soon as we were within earshot. She remembered a tall young man many years ago who had asked her some questions.
“That was my uncle,” I said. “He took this picture.”
I showed her the photograph, and she apologized for the condition of the house, explaining that she had not been able to do any necessary repairs. Yet the garden behind her was bursting with color, and I remarked on it. There were numerous carefully pruned rosebushes and lilacs poking through the rusted curlicues in the gate. In particular, a bench lined with potted geraniums caught my eye.
“Tell her my grandmother used to do that,” I said to Angelika. “She used to replant the cuttings. She would have been really happy to see this garden.”
Angelika related the information, and the old woman smiled and responded eagerly.
“She used to have more things growing,” Angelika said. “But now she is too old.”
“Can you ask her what those enormous white, bell-shaped flowers are called, the ones growing by the door?”
“She doesn’t know. She grows them to keep the flies away. Let me ask her what she knows about your family.”
Angelika leaned in and started a conversation in Hungarian. I looked past them at the house. I couldn’t believe this was where my grandmother spent her childhood, in this tiny little village.
The fashionable, cosmopolitan woman I knew couldn’t possibly have come from such a far-flung, barren smattering of dwellings.
“So, she remembers an older woman who lived here,” Angelika said, interrupting my reverie, “who was a midwife. She had five children, and one of the daughters was named Laura.”
“That’s my great-grandmother Leah,” I said. “Does she remember her daughter Irenka?”
Angelika asked her and then told me, “She’s not sure.”
“Does she remember that they used to pump seltzer from the ground and sell it?”
“Yes. She said they had a little general store in the front room of the house.”
“I remember my grandmother telling me that.”
Angelika turned to listen to something the old woman was saying.
“Also, she says she bought the house after the war from a man named Schwartz.”
“That would be Laura’s father,” I said, “but that’s impossible. He didn’t survive the war. No one in my grandmother’s family did.”
I motioned to Angelika not to translate that. I felt strangely sorry for the old woman, knowing that she had found it necessary to invent a story like that, to justify her life spent in this home.
“She wants to know if you would like to go inside and see it. She hasn’t changed anything since she bought it, she says.”
“She won’t mind?” I asked, incredulous.
“Not at all. Go ahead.”
I made my way gingerly down the path to the side door of the main building. Once inside, however, I immediately regretted my decision. The house was extremely dirty and reeked of human
waste. I couldn’t imagine my scrupulously tidy grandmother in a house like that. I emerged a moment later, trying to cling to some of the nicer details. There was one large room in the front and one in the back. The ceilings were high and beamed; old, cumbersome chandeliers dangled from between the shallow rafters, dusty crystals catching the faint rays of sunlight that weakly illuminated the darkened interior. I imagine they all slept there, in one bedroom, the parents and their ten children. No wonder my grandmother had been sent to live in Nyíregyháza as an adolescent. There had been no room for her.
That was why she wasn’t gassed, my grandmother had once told me. Because she had been deported separately from her family and hadn’t been holding a younger sibling when she faced Dr. Mengele at selection. Anyone holding a child was automatically gassed. Her whole family had been murdered on the same day. She was the only one who made it past selection and was deemed qualified for labor. But she had never told me anything else, except that she had been liberated from Bergen-Belsen. The time in between her arrival at Auschwitz and her liberation from Bergen-Belsen was a question mark in my mind. How would I ever delve into the secret of her courage and endurance if I didn’t know what sustained her through that blank period?
The mayor asked if I wanted to meet the Jewish family that lived in town. I said I was game. We crossed the square to a house of similar stature. The mayor told the Gypsy woman working in the yard that we were looking for Orsi Neni. Zoltán told me that the mayor and Orsi were quite close and had an excellent relationship. He seemed to be trying to say that race wasn’t an issue here, especially not now. “She is one of the most beloved people in town,” the mayor said.
Orsi Neni emerged from her home, a tiny old woman with very round eyes set in a deeply wrinkled face. Her voice was a crackly whisper. I asked her if she spoke any Yiddish. She shook her head no, explaining that her father had spoken it but she had never learned it. She didn’t remember my grandmother, she said, but probably because she had been very young during the war.
“How is it that you were able to come back?” I asked.
“They hid in Levelek,” Zoltán told me, referring to a larger town about fifteen minutes north. “The whole town helped, and they refused to give them to the Nazis.”
“My grandmother said she was born in Levelek. Is there a hospital there or something?”
Angelika translated for the mayor, but he shook his head. “There’s no hospital there that I know of.” He couldn’t say for sure why she would have been born there instead of in Kántorjánosi, where she grew up.
“Levelek is our next stop,” Zoltán said. “I know the registrar there.”
Before we left, I asked whether Orsi Neni still lit candles on Friday night and baked challah.
“Of course!” was her answer.
“Do her children do so as well?” I asked.
“No, just her,” Angelika said.
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. Orsi Neni still baked the challah and lit the candles, but she was the last Jew in the town, and her children had become completely submerged in secular Hungarian life. I recalled my thoughts from earlier that morning—how easily this could have been me: uneducated,
missing teeth, never seeing the world! Would my grandmother have been just like this woman?
As we left, the Gypsy 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 Gypsy dropped my hand suddenly, as if it had grown hot.
“She says she doesn’t do that stuff anymore,” Angelika said.
The mayor was talking to Zoltán about the town. “There is no anti-Semitism here,” he said. “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 drove 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. His secretary, who doubled as the registrar, was a sweet and smiling middle-aged woman with ash-blond hair. She embraced Zoltán when we arrived.
The secretary apologized for not having any bottled water to serve us. “The stores are all sold out because of this heat wave,” she said.
“Oh, so you mean it’s not always this hot?” I asked.
“Would you care for raspberry soda instead?” Zoltán and Angelika both nodded their heads. The soda tasted like seltzer mixed with sugary syrup. It was served on a silver tray with crystal goblets. As if we were visiting royalty.
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 twenty-something 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 to the cemetery. The sweat glinted like dewdrops on his hairless chest. Angelika translated for me, explaining that the man and his wife had decided to 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.