Untold Tales of Love and Shame

By Marianna D. Birnbaum

“Four o’clock is approaching; my daughter is becoming restless, prancing like a colt, ready to bolt out of here. The program is over: The news she will watch at home. But she gives it another try: she fishes out a large sheet of paper from her handbag –she goes around with gigantic handbags- that carries a text in huge capital letters: I LOVE YOU, SQUEEZE MY HAND IF YOU UNDERSTAND. She grabs my left hand; I let her, but do not react. Of course, I could squeeze it – my left hand works fine, but I remain motionless. She sighs, returns the sheet into her handbag and rises, ready to leave.”

“…Somewhere I read about a father saying that his child’s heart is a second heart that beats in his chest, right next to his own. I always felt like this about you but I was never able to express is. At most, I could say: “I only have one daughter.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664129405

Marianna D. Birnbaum

Marianna D. Birnbaum, is Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her area of research focuses on the cultural history of Central Europe. Her scholarly work has been translated into French, German, Portuguese, Turkish and Hungarian. Having also turned to fiction, she has published her stories and novels in Hungarian and in English. Her autobiography, 1944 A Year Without Goodbyes is also available in English.

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Copyright © 2020 by Marianna D. Birnbaum.

Cover image taken by Sarolta Hüttl.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 09/18/2020

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CONTENTS

I. APU

2. MICI’S PLAYBOOK

Explanation of names, words and phrases marked by * in the body of the text.

Originally published in Hungarian in two volumes:

Láthatatlan történetek (Budapest: Magvető, 2018)

and Apu (Budapest: Magvető, 2020)

I. APU

(Oh, My Papa)

To my friends Ági, Éva, Gabi, Irena, Jutka,

Marika, and Vera, who grew up without their fathers.

A FTER THE DEATH of my mother, I closed down my parents’ home in Hollywood. I had to go through each item because my mother never threw out anything. Utility bills from ten years ago, mixed with greeting cards she had received for various New Years, were waiting for me in the overstuffed drawers and in boxes filling the closets. She survived my father by sixteen years, but as I was emptying the closets, I held both their lives in my hands. My father’s suits, shirts, and neckties were still organized; he could have picked and worn them right away. In the bottom of the cupboard, his shoes were standing on shoe trees in a straight row, even if a touch dusty.

On one of the shelves, I found a box; it held the tape recorder I bought for my father after he became totally blind so that he could listen to music. I also wanted to talk him into recording his life story because I wanted to hear it, and I believed it would have helped him too. This suggestion he refused right away. But he liked the machine and even took it along his final trip to the hospital.

I gave away almost everything from their home to a variety of welfare organizations, but I brought home my father’s winged armchair and the tape recorder. The tape recorder was a clumsy large piece. The majority of them were made like that during the seventies, and it had to be large because my father needed to find the buttons without seeing them. I knew that I would never use that monster, but I was unable to part with it. In our home too, it was placed on one of the shelves of the walk-in guest closet, out of sight. I totally forgot about it until, two weeks ago, one of the boilers began leaking, and the water also covered the floor of the back closet ankle deep.

During the drying and cleaning work, I realized that I have no need for 90 percent of the stuff housed on those shelves, that is, I began to frightfully resemble my mother. The old coats, shawls, and gloves could go to the blind, to whom I have been donating used clothes two or three times a year. That was how, while collecting the items to get rid of, I rediscovered the tape recorder. It had remained dry since it sat on the third shelf. Clearly, the time had come to give that up as well.

But before I placed everything into an ancient suitcase without wheels, I checked the pockets of the old coats. Also, I took out the tape recorder from its box and plugged it in to see whether it was in working condition. To my greatest shock, the machine began to talk. It spoke to me in my father’s voice:

It is Monday, almost midnight. Poor Mom is long asleep in the bedroom. She gets terribly tired by the evening because of me. I cannot sleep. The clock is ticking in my head. I feel each moment separately, and at times, I think that I cannot go on like this.

You kept nudging me to tell you my life story, later that I should record it, but I always resisted because I doubted that I could organize my thoughts or that whatever I could say would be of any interest. The life of a Hungarian Jew from the middle class who lived during the twentieth century—how many thousands of the same stories? But now I begin to believe that talking about myself might help me; it could perhaps make me feel better.

I don’t know the reason for this permanent nervous stress. I am not scared of death but of life, spending it blind. It will be good to talk to you about this, but I cannot. Even if you sit opposite me, I could not speak about this, even if I could see your face while I am talking. Perhaps it will be easier alone with the tape recorder. I thought I’ll give it a try. I can always stop it if it does not work. Unfortunately, I have time to spare.

Now I should begin with my birth and my childhood. The hardest is to begin, but even more so, it will be very difficult to talk about my childhood because it was the unhappiest period of my life.

I read it in one of the papers; I believe it was the Los Angeles Times, where young would-be writers were advised to write a letter to someone because everybody can write a letter. When they finished, they should take off the name of the addressee and leave the rest. I remember laughing about this witty idea. At that time, there were no tape recorders, but now I am going to do the same because, in any case, I am telling my life story to you—if it works. Therefore:

My darling,

I was born on July 15, 1903, in Dunaszerdahely. That time, it still belonged to the monarchy; and in Szerdahely (we mostly used the short form), everybody spoke Hungarian, even the majority of the Jews, namely, those who were already born there.

As you know, I don’t speak Yiddish; I merely understand what I can figure out from German. It has been said that most Hungarian Jews learned Yiddish from the Polish Jews in the concentration camps. Not by accident did Herzl claim that the Hungarian Jews were a dried branch on the tree of Judaism.

My father’s name was Henrik Lőwinger, but in some documents, he appears as Heinrich. My mother was Rozália Grűnhut, but in her birth certificate, she is called just Száli. My father was born in Vizkelet, my mother in O-Lehota. Both were native speakers of Hungarian. I am speaking as if I am interrogated by the police. I have a few pleasant memories of that too, but let’s proceed.

There were six of us siblings. I was the youngest, born in 1903. Allegedly, after me, my mother had a stillborn child, but I don’t remember that. I heard about it later, much later. My eldest brother was Dezső. Then came Bálint and Samu in between my sister Hermina; she was born in 1899. You knew them all. I had another sister, Karolina; but later, we rarely saw her, and she died young. You might not remember her.

My father owned a pub. We also had a small general store in front of our house. On one document, he appears as a merchant, like the merchant of Venice.* But that had been translated from the Slovak. He was a large man, loud like innkeepers usually are, a bully who was always right. He pushed around everybody; he screamed at us and beat us when he got real mad, even with his razor strop. As a little boy, I was very scared of him.

I was never scared of my mother. She was an angel. She was good to everyone, always covered for us; and whenever our father was furious with us, we hid—as is said—behind her breite Schürze.* She worked very hard. In my mind’s eye, I always see an old woman, although I heard that as a young girl she was as beautiful as Hermina.

Now I can tell you the truth. When a few years ago we visited Dunaszerdahely with Mom, the guy in the cemetery said that he could only find the grave of my father. I know it was foolish of me, but I refused to accept it because I was looking only for my mother’s grave. I insisted that the grave he was pointing at was my mother’s, although even with my poor knowledge of Hebrew I could read my father’s name on the stone.

My father was always furious and unpredictable, like men who drink, although Jews rarely drank, perhaps a little brandy on Friday evenings in their homes. My father never drank in his own pub. Once, the awed public notary said to him, You Jews, your greatest fault is that you don’t want to assimilate to the others.

My father looked around and, pointing at the loud, drunken men in the pub, asked, To whom should we assimilate? To them? The notary turned around and left, slamming the door behind himself. A few weeks later, unknown men beat up my father as he was locking up at night. He did not report it to the police; that bold he was not, only with us.

I don’t have the faintest idea whether he was stupid or smart. We never knew what he was thinking—only when he began to yell. He never talked to us. He never asked a question from us. He gave orders all the time. We didn’t know whether he ever attended school or whether he was even literate. I did not see him write, only count or sign off on a delivery.

There was never a real family dinner in our house or any family meal for that matter, not even on Friday nights, when the others were spending time together. I don’t think my father was religious. We honored the holidays for show because people would have gossiped. We kept a kosher house, of course. Those were different times. My mother baked a challah for the Sabbath and lit candles, but there was nothing like the festive atmosphere about which I have heard from others. There was no conversation at the table. We mumbled some prayers and ate, and afterward, we all went to bed while my father returned to the pub.

We lived in our own house not far from the pub, and as I said before, the shop operated in the front section of the house. It was a pitifully shabby little place. Don’t you remember, for a while, Samu and his family lived there? You would not live in it for a minute. It had two rooms and a real hole in the wall in which the girls slept. There was a kitchen, an outhouse surrounded by a tiny yard, with ducks and chicken running around. Szerdahely was yet to become a town; it was just an ugly large village. We boys slept two to a bed because there was no room for more.

When I was small, I had to sleep with Samu because, even then, Samu was very fat, and no one wanted to sleep with him. I was the youngest. My brothers forced me to do everything that disgusted them; at the age of four, I had to carry the stinking night pots to the outhouse. I barely reached the hole on the wooden bench to empty them.

I always looked at the newspapers that people left in the pub, and I very much wanted to be able to read them. I believe I learned how to read Hungarian on my own because, at first, I did not attend a regular Hungarian elementary school; I was sent to a heder.* I don’t remember much from that time either, with the exception that we had to get up very early and take wood or coal along with us; everybody brought something, and that was how the heder was heated. I am sure it is my own fault that I can recall so little, but I do remember that we were beaten there too, mostly on the knuckles with a ruler, although at times we had to bend and touch our ankles with our hands, and the cantor kept beating our behinds with a cane until we cried out. I never wanted to cry, but in the end, I was howling because of the sharp pain. I know that my brothers studied there as well. The girls too went somewhere to school, but I don’t remember where. At our place, only a cantor supervised or taught us, but we have not learned a lot; at least I haven’t.

After six years of elementary school, I got away because I was sent to Budapest to a cousin of my father, Tiny Granny. Remember, that’s how you called her because, on my side, you had no grandparents, and she was very small and thin. Her husband died, her son was drafted, there was plenty of room for me, and she was pleased not to be alone in her apartment. The rest of the boys in the family did not return to school after the sixth grade. The girls, I believe, only had four years of elementary school. I was the only one to continue.

Now I should talk about the members of my family, beginning with more details about my father, but I have not the slightest intention to talk about him. I hated him because I witnessed how he treated my mother. They fought a lot, and even when he was right, I always sided with my mother in my heart because I knew that he did not truly love her, he was cruel to her and exploited her, and she was always overworked. She had to take care of all of us, but in addition, she often had to be in the shop in the mornings because, after a long night in the pub, my father would sleep until noon.

My mother did not have a decent dress to wear except for the one that she put on during the High Holidays for the synagogue. She kept mending our stuff as well. She wore a wig, like all women in Dunaszerdahely. Hers was a brown one, cheap stuff, forever shedding. She removed it for the night and placed it on a head-shaped wooden base, something like a large darning mushroom; but probably, you would not have seen those either. She combed her wig fixed on that base, and her comb was always full of hair. My mother had beautiful red hair; Hermina had inherited that from her, but we only saw the bristles because, as her hair grew, she kept cutting it with scissors and covered her head right away. She wore a kerchief, but unlike the peasant women, she tied it on the back of her neck, not as they did under the chin.

I never saw her praying, except in the synagogue and on Friday evenings over the candles. I have no idea whether she believed in God or was just worried that people would speak ill of her behind her back. People gossiped about us plenty because we did not have enough money, or my father was too cheap to send the Friday cholent* to the baker and retrieve it warm on Saturday. My mother had our nasty neighbors ask where she warmed our food on the shabes.* I don’t know how the poor thing responded. Come to think of it, I never saw my mother laugh or hear her sing. At times, when I snuggled up to her, she smiled and kissed the top of my head.

I think I was my mother’s favorite not because I was the youngest but because I loved her so much that I always tried to be near her. Until I entered school, I remember the Friday mornings, me sitting next to her on a small footrest, waiting for her to braid the challah.* When she was done, I was allowed to lick the dish from which she had worked. I did not know then that I too would become a diabetic.

I also remember when she bought me shoes at the Szerdahely fair. Those were the first pair of new shoes I owned. I never got new clothes. I wore my brothers’ hand-me-downs. But I could not wear their shoes and not because, even as a child, I had large feet. By the time my brothers were through with them, their shoes were in shreds and barely had soles. My poor, sweet mother! How dearly she had to pay for those new shoes!