In the Darkroom (49 page)

“Let the people in Hungary look at them!” my father burst out. “They turned their back. They said, ‘Waaall, it's none of our business.' They never looked at who was taken. These people were just like them. They spoke the same language. They were your neighbors. They were your friends. And you let them die! These were the ones you allowed to die! Let them look, so they can go home and not sleep in peace.”

She said she'd seen enough.

I followed her up to the lobby and down the ceremonial steps. By the time we reached the street, she was already second-guessing her reaction, retreating from the most heartfelt passion for her people's fate—and her own—that I'd ever heard her express.

“Waaall, there were a few who were righteous,” she said. Christian Hungarians, she meant. “Like the doctor who gave my father his apartment,” the Ráday 9 apartment where Jenő and István hid in the late spring and early summer of '44, while the physician and his family were vacationing at Lake Balaton. “And I could tell it from the other side,” my father continued.

“What other side?”

“The point of view of the people in this country. From their point of view, the Germans did it. And the Jews brought it on themselves. Our family bought real estate in Hamburg when there was the economic crisis, and sold it when it got better, and that's how my father founded his wealth.”

“So what?”

“So, I'm just giving their point of view.”

We walked half a block before she spoke again.

“But to have that exhibit
in the National Museum
! Fantastic. It's very praiseworthy.” After a few more paces, as if in response to another voice in her head, “Waaall, but it's in the cellar.” My father gave a rueful snort. “If they had a visitors' book, I would write in it, ‘Thank you! Thank you for putting the Jews in the cellar!' ”

On the afternoon of September 24, my father and I took the bus into Pest. My father wore a tweed skirt and a dark pullover sweater that covered her arms; I wore a shawl over a long-sleeved dress and black tights. We both had on low pumps. We were on our way to ring in the Jewish New Year of 5775.

It was with an uneasy sense of déjà vu that I stood before the heavy double doors of Ráday 9 with my father and searched the address roster for the right bell to ring. When I hit the buzzer for the synagogue, it rang and rang.

“No one's there,” my father said. “Let's go. I know a place we can get coffee, and their cakes are …” Here we go again, I thought. Another abortive trip to the natal home.

Just then, and as if in replay of our last visit, the door flew open and a resident breezed past. This time my father grabbed the handle. We slipped inside. The creaking and still patched elevator took us up a level. We turned left and followed the balcony that rings the inner courtyard to apartment #2.

“My God,” my father said. She was staring in disbelief at the door. “This is the same apartment.”

“Same as?”

“The doctor's.” It was the apartment where my father and grandfather took cover in the late spring and early summer of 1944.

I heard footsteps and, to my great relief, the door opened. A cheerful and slightly frayed middle-aged woman stood on the other side. Edit Kovács introduced herself—she was the synagogue's shammes, as well as its cook, bookkeeper, librarian, and housekeeper. She apologized; she had been mopping the floor in the back of the apartment and hadn't heard the buzzer.

My father explained, in a rush of Hungarian, that her father used to own this building, that she'd grown up here, that she'd spent two months in hiding during the war in this very apartment. Edit spoke no English, but her moist eyes transcended language. She took my father's arm and drew us inside. My father and I gazed around. Two interior walls had been knocked down to make space for the main sanctuary. A lectern was set up at one end, a painting of the tree of life behind it. A wardrobe doubled as an ark. A cabinet held menorahs and seder plates. The back wall displayed photos of the old Jewish quarter in Budapest, taken by Szim Salom's youth group. At the other end of the apartment, a small room had been set up as a library, devoted to religious books and guides to Jewish sites in Hungary. The passage between the two had been converted to a social hall, with a folding table in the middle, walls adorned with children's drawings. An easel showcased Hebrew letters, drawn in finger paint.

That's what I saw. My father saw something else.

“This was the dining room,” she said, poking her head into the library. “There was a grandfather clock right here. It had to be wound every night.”

In the sanctuary, my father paced up and down the old parquet floor. “This is where I slept,” she said, stopping by a row of folding chairs, “in the middle bedroom.” Whose dividing walls had since been removed.

“How many people come to services?” I asked Edit.

“For the bigger holidays,” she said, my father translating, “it can be forty or fifty. But usually it's no more than twenty-five. Sometimes only ten.”

My father went to inspect the back corner. “This is where the radio was,” she said. “This is where we'd listen to the BBC. With the sound turned down very low.” This is where my father and grandfather heard that the Friedman family of Kassa had been deported.

I asked Edit how she'd come to join Szim Salom.

“I was Jewish but I didn't know it,” she said.

“You weren't raised Jewish?”

“It was the Socialist era,” she said. “Many people were hiding their Jewishness.” She gave a sad smile. Her parents, she recalled, would light candles on Friday and Saturday nights, and have some sort of ceremony to which only their relatives would come. “But they didn't tell me what it was about. I thought it was just a family custom.”

Edit was well into her thirties before she learned the truth. “My mother told me. She just said it, like, ‘Oh, by the way, we're Jews.' ” Edit received the news as revelation. “I always felt there was something different about me, but I didn't know what it was,” she said. “I couldn't adapt to other people. I felt things differently.” She began to read up on Judaism, and a friend directed her to Bálint House, the one Jewish community center in Hungary. More recently, she discovered Szim Salom. It felt comfortable and welcoming, she said, and she liked its politics. From a stack of papers on the folding table, she extracted an English-language statement of Szim Salom's principles. They included: “We welcome everybody, regardless of his/her familiarity with Jewish liturgy and tradition”; “We reject any fundamentalist approach to Jewish tradition”; and “We affirm equal rights for women and men to participate in all aspects of religious life.” I pointed to the last statement and gave her a thumbs-up. She returned my enthusiasm with a big smile.

Szim Salom had been established only two decades ago, the first Jewish Reform community in Hungary. Its organizers had applied for formal recognition from the state, a requirement for public funding. The request was denied. “They told us,” Edit said, “ ‘You can't be recognized because you don't have a cemetery, you don't have a school, you don't have this, you don't have that.' But we didn't have the
money
to make a school and a cemetery. If we got recognition, we could get support. We could buy a place to have a permanent synagogue.” Instead, in the last twenty years, Szim Salom had moved from one apartment and storefront to another, wanderers at the whim of various landlords. Right now, they were renting from a man who owned two flats in Ráday 9. He lived in the other one, next door. How long he'd allow them to stay, no one knew.

“These people are thieves,” my father put in. “They are trafficking in stolen goods.” She switched to Hungarian and talked for a long time. I didn't ask for a translation. I could tell it was my father's diatribe about our family's lost real estate.

Edit listened patiently, nodding every once in a while. When my father paused to take a breath, Edit interjected that her grandmother had owned a store in Buda before World War II. It sold glass and dishware. “They took it away from our family, too,” she said. She led us to the reception area and the folding table where a large leather-bound volume sat. It was their guest book. “Would you sign it?” she asked. My father sat down and deliberated, then wrote for a while in her old-fashioned Hungarian lettering.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I was very surprised,” she translated, “to see that at my father's house, there is now a synagogue. I found it on the Internet. I will keep the connection.
Toda raba
.” She looked up at me. “That means ‘Thank you very much' in Hebrew.” She had signed it, the traditional Hungarian way, last name first: “Faludi Stefánie.”

My father checked her watch. “Oh, it's already five o'clock,” she said. We had to rush. Rosh Hashanah services and dinner to follow were being held across town at a hotel. Szim Salom was expecting a larger-than-usual turnout; the flat at Ráday 9 was too small.

The Hotel Benczúr was a generic modern conference center in the upper-crust embassy district that runs alongside Andrássy út, a few blocks from Heroes' Square. Shadows were lengthening as we came up from the subway's Millennium Underground line. The first thing I saw was the archangel Gabriel, perched on the thirty-six-meter-high pillar of Heroes' Square's Millennial Monument, the Holy Crown of Saint Stephen in one hand, the double-barred apostolic cross in the other. After two blocks we turned off Andrássy and walked the smaller silent streets girded by palatial consulates. Their formidable facades stared down at us from behind iron gates. My father grew nervous, then accusatory. “I thought you said you looked at a map,” she said. “This can't be the right way. There's nothing here. We should go back.”

I said I was sure. “Just two and a half more blocks.”

“I told you, this isn't right. This is not a Jewish area.”

We turned the corner, and I pointed to a string of twinkling lights: the entrance to the Hotel Benczúr. We headed toward the revolving door behind two teenage girls, dark-haired and in formal dress. My father eyed them. “Do they look Jewish?” she murmured to herself.

The services were in the Budapest Room, a conference room off a corridor lined with identical suites. The space was shoebox-shaped, antiseptic, and harshly lit. Two folding tables had been set up on the far end. Metal stacking chairs ran in rows down the middle. The ceremonies had just started. An usher handed us the text for the evening, a sheath of Xeroxed stapled pages. My father grimaced. “This is
not
a prayer book,” she grumbled as we headed down the aisle.

We took seats toward the back. I noted with dismay the many available chairs. I counted about seventy attendees, including several children, two infants, and a dog. The services were informal. Rabbi Katalin Kelemen, a tolerant woman with a sensible bowl haircut and laughing eyes, smiled encouragingly at the speakers, no matter how badly they mauled their Hebrew recitations, and doled out hugs and kisses. Most of the assembled, as was evident even to my untutored ear, were new to Judaism. Like me, they picked their way awkwardly through the Shema and its blessings—the call to learning, the charge to remember the liberation from Egypt, the promise of prosperity. One congregant wasn't having trouble with the words: the one seated next to me.

The cantor rose to sing a haunting melody. The Torah scrolls were taken from the ark and placed on a lectern, and the rabbi invited some young people from the audience to help with the holiday's readings: Isaac's miraculous birth to Sarah, who at the age of ninety had given up hope of bearing a child, and Abraham's near sacrifice of their son, his hand stayed by an intervening angel. “This is a controversial story,” Rabbi Kelemen said, my father whispering a translation in my ear. “We need to not just accept it. It's good to debate.” Then a young woman was called up front to conclude with the evening's haftarah passage: the prayer of the barren Hannah, despondent because she has no children, whose appeal to God was answered on Rosh Hashanah. “And in due time Hannah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Samuel, for she said, ‘I have asked for him from the Lord.' ”

Rosh Hashanah is also known as Ha'rat Olam, the Pregnancy of the World. The Jewish New Year celebrates the birth of the universe, but other births as well. So many of the prayers involve pregnancy, motherhood, a yearning for children—Sarah's, Hannah's, Rachel's. I looked over at my father, who was sitting very still. And thought: What of your mother, Stefi, who grieved the loss of two newborns before she had you, yet left her only child with nannies and nursemaids and went out on the town every night? And what of your father, who left you to fend for yourself on the streets of wartime Budapest? Who didn't come to your bar mitzvah? Who wrote in his will, “To my son, István Faludi, one lira”? And what of your daughter, who didn't have the grandchildren you wished for, and who let you evict her from your life until, by an act of extraordinary reinvention or reassertion, you invited her back in?

I pulled out my notebook to scribble down some thoughts. A hand flew down and pounced on my pen. “Stop writing!” she hissed in my ear. “It's not allowed on Holy Days.” Chagrined, I returned my notebook to my purse. Even in this anything-goes Reform ceremony, I was getting the fundaments wrong.

The rabbi rose to give long-winded remarks. The audience became restive. The children behind us began to whisper and giggle. On the other side of the aisle, the dog let out a loud yap, and everyone laughed. Everyone except my father. “It's not funny,” she said. “This is a serious occasion, and they are mocking it.”

When the Torah was carried down the aisle, my father nudged me to touch my shawl to the scroll's sheathing and kiss it. An elderly man was summoned to the front to blow the shofar. And then the services closed, per tradition, on the mourner's Kaddish.