George Konrad: A Guest in my Own Country

For the Passover Seder dinner he would come to Berettyóújfalu from Nagyvárad. He was the one who read the answers to the Haggadah questions that I, as the youngest present, asked. Our Haggadah — the book containing the readings for the holiday, the memorial of exile — was bound in cedar and ornamented with mosaics. It had drawings as well, four in particular: the wise son, the wicked son, the merchant son, and the son so simple he does not know how to ask. I was particularly delighted by the one who does not know how to ask, but my grandfather said the role did not suit me as I was constantly pestering him with questions.

During the evening ceremony a glass of wine was set out between the two windows for the prophet Elijah. By morning it was gone. I was intrigued by the prospect of the prophet Elijah’s visit. Once, in the nursery, I heard rustlings from the adjoining dining room. I darted from my bed and peeped out through the door. I saw my grandfather in a full-length white nightshirt take the glass and drink it. He remarried ten years after my grandmother’s death. He was eighty.

We also had a Christmas tree with gifts beneath it, and my sister would play “Silent Night,” which we knew as “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,” on the piano. My parents did not mention Jesus, but my nanny said he came bringing gifts and even decorating the tree. I pictured him as a flying, birdlike creature in contrast to Elijah, who thundered across the sky in a chariot of fire. But in the end I suspected that neither came at all.

My great-grandfather Salamon Gottfried was the first Jew to settle in Berettyóújfalu. He arrived at the end of the eighteenth century and opened a pub, which he left to his son Sámuel. Sámuel, who eventually held seventy acres, was a strong man who commanded respect and kept order, brooking neither crude speech nor boisterousness in an establishment whose clientele included the local toughs. His photograph shows a man with focused and probably blue eyes wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and a white shirt buttoned to the neck — a determined, strong-boned man, browned by the sun, full of endurance, and sporting a bifurcated beard. He too remarried as a widower, at seventy-seven. The only letters on their waist-high marble tombstones in the Jewish cemetery at Berettyóújfalu are Hebrew.

My paternal grandmother Karolina Gottfried was by all reports a kindly, good-humored, plump old woman. She had three girls, then a boy, my father József. She spoiled her only son, and when she looked in on her father in the pub at Szentmárton across the river, she would dress little Józsi up in a sailor suit and patent leather shoes and take him in a fiacre, which inspired sarcastic remarks. It was the same when Karolina took Józsi in a hired carriage to his grandfather. She wore the trousers in that house, at least at table, where the helpers and servants ate together with the master.

The master, my grandfather Ignác Kohn, was a tinsmith, and he and his men produced the buckets, cans, tubs, and other goods of galvanized sheet-iron for the local artisans. He was not happy when factory-produced goods swamped the market, and had no choice but to switch to retailing. By the turn of the century his hardware business, established in 1878, was the largest in the region.

My grandmother was somewhat embarrassed to find herself pregnant again at the age of forty-three. (Apparently in those days it would have been fitting to conceal the fact that Karolina and Ignác were still making love at such an advanced age.) The outcome was my father’s youngest and favorite sister, the pretty Mariska, the most spoiled of all the siblings.

Both of their black-granite, life-size gravestones are still standing in the abandoned, weed-infested Jewish cemetery at Berettyóújfalu, where no one has been interred for decades, that is, since the entire Jewish community, some one thousand people, disappeared from the village, which has since become a small city. Ignác, who outlived his wife Karolina, had the following carved on her gravestone: “You were my happiness, my pride.” Despite heavy battles in the cemetery at the end of the Second World War their granite pillars were not so much as scratched by the bullets, and they will long continue to stand — if no one sees fit to knock them down, that is.

When I read out my father’s particulars to the officials in charge of granting gravesites at the Síp Street congregation in Budapest, the old gentleman who kept the enormous register slapped his forehead and said, “I remember him. Fine reputation. Solid, solvent.” Apparently he had once visited us as a traveling salesman. My father tended to buy from factories and had reservations about these wanderers with samples in their bags, but he also had a feeling for people and a sense of humor that made his company quite pleasant. He was a guileless man who never thought his debtors might run off on him, as they generally did not. To his poorer customers he granted credit if they could not pay, certain as he was that sooner or later they would come up with what they owed him. He never bought or sold wares that were less than reliable. Everything associated with him was thoroughly sturdy, be it a kettle, a bicycle, or his word.

My father read several newspapers and started listening to the BBC’s Hungarian-language broadcasts at the beginning of the war. I was intimately familiar with the BBC’s four knocks, since I would crouch behind my father as he tried to hear the news amidst all the jamming. From the middle of the war he listened to Moscow as well. We had to close the doors and windows: by turning the knob this way and that with great concentration over the forty-nine, forty-one, thirty-one, and twenty-five meter bands of the shortwave we were committing a subversive act.

An old photo from the family album (lost at the end of the war) comes to mind: my grandfather, my aunts, and my father are leaning over a white-enameled basin, their heads cocked to one side, which would be rather odd were it not for the wire hanging out of the basin: it signaled they were gathered around a single headphone to hear the first radio broadcast in the twenties. An uncomfortable setup, yet worth the trouble.

I was not yet in a position to take part in the scene, but by the time of the war I would perch behind my father on the couch every day at a quarter to two listening to the news, the real news, amidst the static. The sound would come and go; you really had to keep your ears pricked. My nine-year-old ears filled the intermittent gaps in my father’s hearing. I became so attached to “This Is London” that when the Gestapo arrested my father in May 1944 on the charge of sending news to the BBC from his secret radio transmitter in the attic I was proud he was the object of such a noble accusation. Not a word of it was true.

My Bavarian nanny, the beautiful blonde Hilda, left us for Hitler: her father forbade her to work for Jews no matter how comfortable she felt with us. Then came the warm-hearted Hungarian Lívia, who not only spoke German and French well but played the piano. She wore her waist-length blonde hair braided; I never tired of watching her comb it. The Catholic Lívia fell in love with my father’s accountant, Ern? Vashegyi, a quiet, lanky, well-read man, and center on the local soccer team. Ern? Vashegyi was handsome, but a Jew, which gave Lívia some pause. We often went to the soccer field with our nanny and sat in the small, wooden riser; everyone else either stood on the hill or perched on the fence. Whenever Ern? Vashegyi kicked a goal, Lívia and I would squeeze hands. Once in a while the earnest fellow would join us at the family table for lunch, but before long he was called up for forced labor and never returned.

Every Monday the local tradesmen would gather in my father’s store to evaluate the previous day’s performance of our team, the county champions. Other topics of long conversations included rain (precious), drought (worrisome), the price of wheat, and what that lunatic was after anyway. Politics was a theme to be discussed mainly with other Jews; otherwise it was prudent to hold one’s tongue: fascism had crept into the heads of some intelligent people, for whom regaining the Hungarian-speaking territories lost after World War I at the Trianon Conference was conceivable only with Hitler’s support.