Homage to the Eighth District: Tales from Budapest

By Giorgio Pressburger, Nicola Pressburger and Gerald Moore

The vibrant Jewish quarter of Budapest provides the setting for these stories by Hungarian twins Giorgio and Nicola Pressburger. Holocaust survivors and refugees from Communism, the brothers settled in Italy after 1956; and both pursued successful careers in journalism. Nicola died in 1985 and Giorgio died in 2017, now recognised as a major mode

• Language: English
• Publisher: Readers International
• Release date: Sep 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781887378208

Book preview

Homage to the Eighth District

Acclaim for Homage to the Eighth District

Bare narrative and bitter irony, but not without humour…Faced as we are with so much over-writing it is sobering to reflect on the Pressburgers’ brevity, and to realize that humanity and the agony of oppression can be encompassed in a few well written pages.  — Times Literary Supplement

History can be told in many ways, but the most memorable accounts often employ the techniques of fiction to tell the truth… A beautiful collection of tales. Where others are angry, the Pressburgers are wise.  — The Village Voice

A clarity, tact and affection utterly devoid of nostalgic distortion.  — Independent on Sunday

Opens a new and fascinating page in the grand passion of European Jewry…  — Books of the Month

"In Homage to the Eighth District – published in Italy only after rejection by several publishers – there are beautiful and harrowing stories of memorable characters like Ilona Weiss with her seven lovers or the disturbed Leuchtner, among the filthy market stalls and mysteries of the Temple, peeling hovels with inhabitants ‘bearing in their eyes strange flashes of anxiety’, all poised on the threshold of the huge historical tragedy of the Holocaust."  — Corriere della Sera

History, but full of the feeling of fable.  — El País

A Hungarian rhapsody.  — Panorama

A vibrant portrait of a people who retained their courage and individuality under German and communist siege. Written in exile, the book is humourous and sad, nostalgic and proud, revealing a Hungary hitherto unknown.  — Cardiff Western Mail

"The Eighth District of Budapest became a new kind of ghetto where the old prejudices combined with the new ones to keep the Jews apart from the rest of society; an island where one of the heroes of Homage to the Eighth District could justifiably observe about the main thoroughfare: ‘Life is like Rákóczy Avenue: to begin with it’s all theatre, in the middle it’s a hospital, and at the end a cemetery’. The co-authors of these stories have brought those tensions to life with immediacy as well as depth."  — Review by Karel Kyncl in The Independent

"The ghetto teams with goose-sellers and gamblers, money-lenders, rabbis, jewellers, printers, porters, tailors and tavern-keepers. As a fictionalised reconstruction of a scarcely-known community, Homage to the Eighth District pulses with life."  — The European

Homage to the Eighth District

Homage to the Eighth District

Tales from Budapest

Giorgio and Nicola Pressburger

readers international

This book was first published in Italy in 1986 under the title Storie dell’Ottavo Distretto by Casa Editrice Marietti, Genoa.

© Casa Editrice Marietti S.p.A. 1986 on behalf of the authors

First published In English by Readers International Inc, Columbia, LA USA and Readers International, London UK. Editorial Inquiries to the London office at 8 Strathray Gardens, London NW3 4NY England.

US/Canadian Inquiries to the N. America Book Service Dept, P.O.Box 909, Columbia LA 71418 USA.

English translation © Readers International Inc 1990, 2017      

All rights reserved

Cover illustration: Father and Uncle Piacsek Drinking Red Wine, 1907, by the Hungarian artist József Rippl-Rónai. Courtesy of the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest.

Readers International acknowledges with thanks the co-operation of the Google Book Project in the production of this digital edition.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-64269

A catalogue record for this book is also available at the British Library.

ISBN 9780930523763    

EBOOK ISBN 9781887378208

Contents

Preface

THE SHADOW

THE TEMPLE

THE SEVEN LOVERS

FRANJA THE FOX

THE TABLES OF THE LAW OF SELMA GRÜN

IN HIS OWN IMAGE AND LIKENESS

RACHEL’S MEMORY

SCIOLET

THE CHRISTIANS

NATHAN

About the Authors

About the Translator

About Readers International

Preface

The tourist who sets out to visit Budapest, a principal city of an empire non-existent for over half a century, but still remembered for the gaiety of its leading citizens and the multiplicity of its peoples, could stumble upon the Eighth District only by mistake.

Getting down at the East Station, he would have to meander along one of the narrowest and darkest ways, all cobbled with granite, which open off Rákóczy Avenue, to the left of those leading towards the city centre.

There he will find no monuments, no well-known sites or vivacious quartiers. Peeling facades, still bearing traces of their original decor, but untouched for almost a century, will greet him with indifference; and the people coming and going through the entrances or along the street will appear no less indifferent, even though bearing in their eyes strange flashes of anxiety. This is no place to visit with a light heart, but with one full of suffering, of sadness, even of abjection. After following several streets, however, the visitor might come across large squares filled with trees: for the Eighth District was created, towards the end of the last century, as a clean and spacious quarter, ready to offer dignified comfort to its bourgeois inhabitants. The urban planners of the time had conceived of it almost as an ideal city, tracing out its generous limits with certain destinations well defined. On one side of the district was chosen the site for a big cemetery, which was soon crammed with thousands upon thousands of tombs, some of monumental proportions, and with pompous mausolea for the Fathers of the Nation. Two other sides were to be flanked by important thoroughfares, fundamental to the layout of Budapest itself: Rákóczy Avenue for one; and the other, one of the ring roads that start at the Danube and finally return to it. The fourth side was left open to offer room for the later development of factories, shops and other commerce.

In the middle of the District, the spacious Colomanno Tisza Square, with its green lawns and plentiful stone benches, should have become a spiritual centre, so to speak, thanks to the proximity of the City Theatre. But this theatre was to arise only several decades later, becoming one of the principal houses of the city, able to hold more than two thousand spectators. Not far from this square lay the hospital complex, consisting of one red brick edifice and another constructed later, with a more modern finish in green tiles. The presence of good health facilities was thus ensured. The brick building, boasting an impressive tower and a rotating elevator of separate cubicles, nicknamed Pater Noster for its resemblance to a gigantic rosary, was the seat of the National Social Security offices.

Not far from Colomanno Tisza Square, the architects had designed another open space, named Teleky Square, destined to be a market because of its excellent location, near to the supply routes for provisions from outside the city and to the traders coming from the centre. And it was this very square which was destined to infect, over the coming years, all the rest of the new district and to give it an aspect little dreamed of by any of the illustrious planners of the future Budapest. The market, in fact, immediately drew in a large number of Jewish traders: junk dealers, grocers, moneylenders, and the inevitable taverners, always ready to ply with drink the peasants come to town to sell their wares.All this mob gradually penetrated the fabric of the houses, occupying the basements and the darkest rooms of the ground floors. The inhabitants of the upper floors (petit bourgeois, decadent nobles, conformists, patriots, landlords) soon took flight; and the big houses built pretentiously with vast rooms, floral decorations, stucco mouldings, ornamental facades — were soon adapted to their new population. The buildings were divided up to form little hives of one-room apartments, with no conveniences or any of those hygienic services that urban life nowadays provides for all those having a little dignity. The Jewish traders from the basement thus climbed at last to the very highest floors.

By the beginning of the twentieth century of the Christian era, the Eighth District of Budapest was already occupied by tens of thousands of Jews and Gypsies, those two rejected minorities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whilst Teleky Square, with kiosks and stalls jammed into every inch, had become a by no means insignificant centre of business, as well as a crucible of poverty and human suffering — that poverty and that suffering which spring up soon enough and of which no one can see the end.

THE SHADOW

Sundays were dedicated to family visits. In the mornings my brothers and I got moving about ten o’clock to go and greet our grandmother, our uncles and aunts, who all lived more or less within the Eighth District, a few blocks distant from one another and from us. Our family was the most numerous, and we children acted as messengers for the grown-ups. Wherever we arrived, we were first of all asked news of our parents and of anything that had befallen our household during the week. Then followed questions about all the other households, all the uncles and aunts whom we had already visited. At the end, together with a little loose change, we would be charged with a message for some relative still to be visited. These were poor houses of humble folk, who were content to scoop themselves a little hole in the body of the city, an apartment consisting of scarcely one room, with a kitchen. This could suffice for some of them, like Aunt Leila, who had no children. But sometimes several generations lived together in the same room. My great-grandfather, for instance, lived with his daughter and her husband and child. All lived around the great centre of business, the market, where stalls selling every type of goods, from foodstuffs to clothing, from tools to old shoes, filled a square mile of land, all dust in the summer and all mud in the winter. The houses to be visited lay within a few dozen yards of this arena. I still remember the string of kitchens and living rooms, each with its own odour, and the emergence of uncles or aunts from the shadows, always with a welcoming smile in response to our greetings. Every house also had its own character, calm, joyful or irritable, according to the character of its occupants.

After the war the scene had changed. My relatives still lived near the great market, but they were in better apartments, of two or three rooms, and lying more distant from one another. The population of the quarter was frighteningly reduced by the Holocaust of the Jews, and there was much more space for the survivors. My own family had advanced a step up the scale of human and social dignity. But we boys, now about ten years old, still preserved our role as messengers. Every Sunday morning we left our house, also larger and lighter than our previous abode, to make our round of visits, rather longer now that our relatives were more dispersed around the quarter. This fell strictly on Sunday mornings. Not on Saturday, the proper Sabbath of the Jews, because the humble traders of my city had long since had to adopt the Christian calendar.

On Sunday afternoons the roles were reversed. Our family was the one to receive visits. I don’t know if this was also part of the unwritten order of things, but whereas in the morning we maintained contact with my mother’s relatives, in the afternoon it was those of my father who