What happened to the Jews?

I have already started to write about this before, but I have a growing occupation with what has happened to the Jews.

I knew from the beginning that I would be coming to Eastern Europe, where my own ancestry can be traced in jagged lines, and I knew I would be approaching borders of an historic ethnic cleansing my father had been warning me about since I was a little boy; but my sensitivity towards such things was so low. I was amused when Wendy sent me articles about the rise of anti-Semitism in parts of Hungary by way of the Jobbik party. When it's not funny, hyperawareness among the Jews has always been embarrassing to me.

What's more, too much of what's pronouncing itself Jewish these days is hateful, from Israel's vile loyalty oath to the more banal fears and hatreds and fatly entitled victimhoods.

My own relationship feels simple to me. I have pride in our intellectual tradition and a sort of distant respect for a ritualized, spiritual focus. I have a yearning for the melodic minor key chants I learned in those impactful years before high school, as well as a perverse sense of propriety about how a Jew should worship, ingrained in those same years -- no organs, no English, no bare heads -- a feeling contradicted by almost all of my brain. I don't believe in God, but even this belief is slack and apathetic. Despite these dull leanings, even the word, "identify," as in, do you identify yourself as a Jew, is too weak: Do I identify as Jewish? How could I not when my father was born to parents running for their cheap, Jewish lives? There's no ignoring the roots of a family tree clipped brutally bare to the trunk.

Even so, even with a father born into and during the Holocaust to parents haunted for the rest of their lives, Jewishness has played little part in my functional thoughts. I was unconflicted marrying Stephanie, and unconflicted again with children who don't know a Jewish God.

Coming to a country once allied with Nazi Germany only gave me a kitschy merriment, like Kent in his determination to be in Transylvania on the night of Halloween. 

My relationship to history, in short, was the typical ironic stance most Americans my age bear.

The first synogogue I saw in Hungary, in Pécs, was bigger and grander than anything I'd ever seen in America -- despite the fact that the United States has the biggest Jewish population in the world.

The second synagogue I saw, if only from the outside, was bigger and grander than the first. This one is in Budapest.

By the time I saw the third synagogue, and it was incredibly big and grand (in Szeged this time), I had already seen pictures of the former synagogue in our tiny little town of Barcs.

Then we went to Serbia and visited a random town, and it too had a monstrously big and grand cathedral of a synagogue, falling to ruin.

It made me start to think: What happened to all the Jews?

Back in Barcs, I started thinking more about this question. But thinking is the wrong word: I started feeling more about this question. 

What happened to all the Jews?

I knew about a synagogue in our town; I knew our school's forestry dorms were located in a villa that once belonged to a Jew. I knew that somewhere there was a Jewish cemetery too, and I was curious to see it. There were Jews in Barcs!

The cemetery, only one street over from my own, is walled and locked, and I'd seen it on a previous run; but I wasn't sure this was it until I peered over the locked gate and saw Hebrew engraved on every stone.

The graveyard was long and full, and the gravestones, many of them, didn't look that old; but the most recent among them dated to the 1930's, like Adolf Stern below, and the markers went back at least 100 years.

The stones were crowded, proud, demonstrative of a real and thriving community; the grass looked as though it had been tended to, and the markers were preserved as well as in any cemetery; and just on the other side of the wall lay the rest of the town dead. 


There really was a Jewish community in Barcs, a good one, one that in some sense is still side by side with the rest of Barcs. Where did the Jews go?


I know what happened in 1944. It's the same thing that happened all over Europe, and the same thing that happened in my grandparents' homes and villages, the same thing that's been happening since my father started showing me pictures as a boy, the same thing I've been reading about in books, seeing in movies, hearing in stories: It's the thing that happened far away. To someone else.


But now I am seeing these graves and there are no Jews anywhere I've met, and it starts to seem like a town mystery, a great village secret: What happened to the Jews?


I told Tibor about this, and about how when I made a joke about doing a Nazi tour visiting palatial offices and death camps, how Sophie was totally ready to do it, and Tibor asked me if I had visited the Barcs castle yet, and then he told me about the Kremsier-kastély. It was owned by a very successful Jewish family, though one could see only its ruins today. Tibor told me if I travelled down a particular street, I would see the spirits factory as well as the mansion. Kremsier was the richest man in Barcs, owning the biggest mill in the country.


I had seen an image of impressive ruins on Wikipedia when I first heard about going to Barcs, but once here I'd never found them. In any event, there was no way this could be the same place, because the picture I had seen looked like a castle in ruins for centuries; but the place Tibor described was in its glory only half a century ago, until the the Kremsiers fled and left old man Kremsier to kill himself when the Germans occupied Barcs in 1944.


Here is what is left. The day I visited was Wuthering Heights. See the contrast in pictures a week later when I returned with Stephanie. You will also see in pictures the beauty and dream-like quality to a house taken over by the earth, and also signs of history, including floor tiles verifying the building's youth, and graffiti giving dark overtones to vandals. Go through the pictures, which I provide here without further comment.

There is nothing ironic or kitschy about history, when it looms empty and harrowing and broken, and its traces are everywhere about you. We are in Europe now, and the past is never so past.


Last Monday I went to find the Barcs synagogue. I heard it was a furniture store for a while, but now it too lies empty.


It turns out I'd seen this place nearly every day--half a block from my turn to the school, right there at my turn to the pool. It would be a little hard to identify were it not for the distinctive tiling of the house at its right.

Subotica, Serbia

Remember these names?

• Slobodan Milosevic. Butcher of the Balkans kicked out ten years ago today.
• Radovan Karadžić. Very bad psychiatrist.
• Ratko Mladic. Bosnian Serb nationalist killer General hero.

One is dead, one shaved off a beard to stand trial at the Hague, and one remains on Interpol's most wanted list.

It was hard not to think of headlines and books we read less than a dozen years ago about Serbia, about a politics and systematic brutality I never thought I'd see in my own lifetime but we saw twice in the same decade, in former-Yugoslavia, in Africa, and then more recently in Africa again. 

I certainly never thought I'd be a tourist la la la-ing into the Balkans. But a big, beautiful town in Serbia is only an hour from Szeged, and our friends from Pécs were going to head south on their way back, and we were happy to join them.

Pat O'Connor and Margaret McMullan are a lively, vibrant couple, and both are writers (Margaret's books are linked here). They are so easy to be with and talk to, and Margaret laughs so fully and so often, that we feel we too are good and welcome company. Their son is an old soul at his ease with adults, and admirable not just as a young teenager, but as a human being. 

They are in Pécs on Margaret's Fulbright scholarship, as she spends the Fall semester researching and writing about a Jewish grandfather and some of what happened to Jews in Pécs during the Second World War.

I've started thinking more about Jews in Hungary, in part because of the first conversation I had with Margaret during the Budapest meeting. But I've also been thinking about them because of a Jewish cemetery here in Barcs, though I haven't been past the locked gate yet, and a picture of a beautiful old synagogue (below, left) that now is half as high and twice dilapidated, most recently as a decommissioned furniture store. Furthermore, student dorms for Forestry students at my high school is the former hunting lodge, or castle, of Széchényi Ferenc, the grandson of a great Count, and this was said to be owned by prominent Jews of Barcs. But after World War II, not a one Jew is left. I find myself very alert to the question mark that remains.

I am very close to history here. But this was not the only reason I was thrumming with thoughts of travel to Serbia. As Pat and Margaret talking about going to Subotica, Stephanie somehow pulled out the fact that this town is where the novel, Skylark, is based.

Skylark, by Dezso Kosztolányi, is the first Hungarian book I enjoyed, as you might see in one of my earliest posts. This is the book where an older man and woman rediscover a joyous life when their ugly but devoted daughter leaves their home to visit cousins for a week. Margaret, Stephanie, and I had this book in common, and the joy and light humor affected us each: we loved the idea of walking the streets Skylark's father drunkenly, delightedly walked. We accepted the trip as a mission we wouldn't turn down.

We interacted very little with people and spent hardly any time there, so have only the barest of observations: that buildings were marvelous and in surprising disrepair, that Hungarian was still spoken by many like a bum by the bank, that open air vendors hawk books and not watches, that the world is unendingly wondrous once more.

Below is the Great Church, 230 years old and prominently cracked.

Nearby is an empty synagogue, just over 100 years old and topped by what looks like a Zsolnay porcelain roof. It is a broken old dog.

The Town Hall was so big! And it was lovely, too. Inside was one of the prettiest McDonald's I had ever seen (and thank you, McDonald's, for having the most accessible bathrooms in the world).

Finally, Yugos, and a tented market.

War crimes might have fallen out of our minds through the course of the visit. But then we spent an hour and a half at the border crossing.

Ópusztaszer

If you wanted to have a picnic in the place where, in 895 A.D., the great Árpád finally settled (or retreated, according to current historiography -- "settled" in the other sense of the word), you couldn't do much better than the National Historical Memorial Park of Ópusztaszer. Fulbright brought us by coach one hour out of Szeged where we were free to roam amongt the sheep and statues, the wide open spaces and the space-age domes that cut the sky. Pack your own lunch, though, because the one snack bar open at the park heightened aggression among the guests, and most of us by then were ready for an old-style Hungarian raid to make do.

One of the big draws of the park is an enormous panorama painting created over two years at the tail end of the 19th century. Housed in the most dominant building for miles around, the painting tells the story of how Árpád came to the Carpathian basin, raided the land, enslaved the women, killed the men and boys, and enacted pagan rites through the slaughter of beautiful white mares. Follow the hyperlinks in this sentence to see images of Árpád, the reluctant sacrificial mare, and the Shaman who foretells their future through the death of the white beauty. I was thinking about this future: When Árpád and the others discovered that their destiny was a millenia of despair, defeat and failed revolutions, maybe they regretted losing the horse.

Surrounding the central Árpád memorial were the most interesting bronze busts of monarchs I'd ever seen. They weren't flattering, at least as far as I could tell. Kings of course were victims of long past fashions, with geometric beards and wire hanger moustaches; but the statues also captured this strange evolution of pride through the generations of kings. While I don't have most of the pictures here, please take my word for the fact that a series of Hungarian leaders start with their chins almost level and quickly lift to 45 degrees of aching-neck hautiness.

  

Please observe this king. While his chin is at rest in quite a normal position, his very skin seems to fold in on itself with contempt.



Then you have characters like this guy at right, about whom I need say very little.

We all noticed that the greatest of all Hungarian kings, István the First, looked positively exhausted with worry, though he was the only bust to have a gold crown and robe -- as the only king to be sainted, perhaps. He carries the burden of all Hungary in his worn face, but in the end succeeded in uniting the warring tribes and allying himself with both Pope and Emperor, and he was sainted in 1083.


Another piece of the history park was a rural village set in that last 200 years. When people heard about the school house and how it housed many grades in one room, and that there still exists one school house with only four children in it, several people asked us about the Szulok school my children attend: 23 kids, two multi-grade rooms. I don't find this archaic at all, even before arriving here. Stephanie reported that the girls attend a Montessori program in a public elementary school in Seattle where several grades are purposefully combined in a single classroom, where maturity, leadership and knowledge grow together.


I was more interested in some of the old posters they had around, like one about the danger of flies, portraying flies in food, flies around animal corpses, and flies attacking a baby. Below on the right is a detail from a poster warning of the dangers of drunkenness.

One of the funny things to me about this hundred year old museum village was the space-age dome that rises up in the background like cheap science fiction. The two pictures below capture the same image, but the one on the right zooms closer to the tented future at the center.

From there, Stephanie, Sophie, Amelia, Maisie and I climbed and studied an immaculate windmill and then looked for food.

After a harrowing experience at the snack bar, the kids went with Stephanie to work with felt, and I went on a walk with Kent and Emily.

The walk through the woods was beautiful, and we saw an enormous jackrabbit and what felt to be an even bigger wolf spider, who shocked us when it shrank in size and lightened in color, as all its black babies fled from its body in a fright. We also saw Oxen. Judge for yourself why I pair the two photos below.

Towards the end of our visit, we sat on log benches at the Park of the Nomads, where men and young women with arrows and spears and horses demonstrated the best tribe raiding skills I've ever seen, with mounted shooting, roping, and yelling techniques probably unfamiliar to the modern Hungarian.

The four second video below captures a young kid practicing before the exhibition. The poor resolution makes this video just about meaningless. Imagine an arrow getting lofted in full stride and smacking straight into its target.

After the museum staff demonstrated their remarkable prowess with spears, and also a game where they played keep-away with a bundle of skin surely meant to represent a baby, they then invited volunteers to join them for such games as mounted tug of war, and shoot the enemy in the head, which Amelia came close to doing.

We also had to contend with this renegade pony, who was ready to eat anything handy, like Andrea's purse, Emily's umbrella, or whatever is at the bottom of this garbage can. I won't say whether Emily, in the picture at right, is admonishing the pony or assisting it, but perhaps she is to be commended either way.

Szeged

Fulbright came through with another epic visit, finally matching us with a good fish soup I've been hearing so much about, the well-known university formerly attended by several people we know, and with Szeged's renowned paprika and szalami. Szeged.


The visit began with a visit to the bilingual high school, Deák Ferenc, where students seem so well acculturated to foreigners and the dream of travel, that we were of little interest. By way of contrast, I also discovered that the welcome and courtesy I receive every day from students at my own high school in Barcs is special. Students at DVK greet me in Hungarian and increasingly in English, with shy smiles and nods and attentive expression, and this is due me not simply because I am an adult in the hallways, as I realized in my invisible soujourn through the Szeged school, but because whether I know them or not, students in Barcs know me, tanár úr amerikai. I felt very appreciative of this in the hallways, where I expected to engage any teenager I met.


The school was impressive, though. Because it's a bilingual school and by law bilingual schools require native speakers, there is a revolving door of Fulbright teachers, and when that doesn't work, one of the Hungarians finds a Canadian to marry, or a Brit, rope him back. Students, meanwhile, have a relationship with a private boarding school in Massachussetts, where Hungarian students receive the American elite experience for three months at absolutely no expense to themselves in exchange for a few week home stay by American students that then come abroad. Students were knowledgeable and adult; and those Fulbright grantees unfamiliar with Hungarian students or the class pictures on school walls were shocked by how mature were the faces in the portraits (I think Americans go for cute faster than for elegant, and it translates visibly).


We next toured Szeged University's library. Its spacious atrium once housed a line of beautiful faux ecalyptus trees, we were told, but they collected dust and so sadly had to be discarded; while our tour of the library was thorough and proud, I never could shake the perverse response to the ecalyptus trees, embraced for their realism and condemned for their dust. Still, we saw some incredible old books -- and we not only saw them, we handled them freely, books over three hundred years old whose pages were soft as dandelion seeds and whose bindings and folds were various and loose.

The old books were terrific to see, but the walking tour of the city was a welcome relief after spending the morning behind the closed doors of the Academy. Our hotel was right on Széchenyi Square. Cross it and you run right into Town Hall, and its marvelous Zsolnay porcelain roof.

This weekend you'd also run straight into the silent protest of streetworkers demanding to know where all the capital expenses went.

Any direction brought us to another marvelous building. Below are pictures of the Reök Palace, a building that captures early and aggressive Art Deco aesthetic  through its curved lines, pastels, and flowers. It's pretty, and pretty strange, and better than Miami Beach, and easy to capture on film, so here it is.

One thing that surprised us on our walks was how empty the streets seemed to be. Perhaps all the students were in class, housed together in a crush in some other neighborhood entirely; but I was very aware of an emptiness when we arrived at perhaps the most historical of sites, the Dom Tér, or Cathedral Square. We were alone with maybe forty or fifty others in a desert of a plaza beneath a 12th century tower and an absolutely dominant Votive Church (which apparently includes an organ with 11,000 pipes).

We crept into the Church where a mass was in session and slid into doorways and onto pews and behind columns. I'm sure many of us were alert to the reactions of those seated, because we knew we had cameras around our necks and we felt very American in there, but we were hungry nevertheless. This was the first Cathedral our girls had seen or remembered, and we weren't going to miss the chance for something as fleeting as courtesy when mob rule said we could clambor in.

Later, Sophie and I had a talk about architecture and religion, and how the grand cathedrals and basilicas were intended to evoke the majesty of God and inspire humility and awe of the universe, and how some buildings took several generations to build. Sophie said it didn't really make her feel God, but it was definitely big in there, and beautiful.


When we left the building, it was hard not to notice all the strange, satanic images on the main threshold of the cathedral, intended, I suppose, to scare off sinners or sin. Here are just a couple.

We also saw a gorgeous synagogue now one of half a dozen I've seen from the outside in Hungary. And like most of the others, this one is used by almost no one. I was told there were perhaps 40 Jews in Szeged, and they don't practice in this cavernous building, which may well be falling into the interior disrepair met by most; and whereas a religious group in another country might take over the grand palaces of the defeated, perhaps communist rule thinned out religion so much that even the gorgeous temples of old can lie fallow. On the other hand, a website where I can see the interior for the first time suggests that someone is providing upkeep.

The fish soup in the evening was terrific. I will say this. If someone tells you to be careful because the peppers are spicy, you can still go ahead and put them on your bread or in your soup or pop them plain into your mouth as I had done; but do remember what is there on your fingers before you go scratching your eyes or poking your eye ducts. After just such an experience, I am fortunate in two ways: One, the fire burned out. Two, in the bathroom where I fled to hose down hands and face, I remembered to wash before I did anything else there.


On the way back to the hotel, Emily insisted on jumping poses. The residual pepper in me came in handy, as did Franky's camera.

Late that night, Kent and Franky returned to their room next door and failed to get their key to work. When the night manager and several others had the same response, they called the owner of the hotel, and soon, in the middle of the night, workmen came with their drills and machines and bit that door open.

At right, Amelia demonstrates that the key lock is gone, and Franky and Kent's room is open to the world.


We were still staying in a hotel where Bartók Béla once played. See the ballroom below and it gets easier to imagine.

Before we left, we bought paprika and more kürtőskalács, heard a Hungarian folk pop band, and had a terrific dinner with Margaret, Pat and their son James, about whom more will be said when I describe the trip the eight of us took to Serbia the next day.

In the meantime, here we are on the Tisza river, wishing you a jó reggelt, jó napot, jó estét or jó éjszakát!