Budapest and the Bronx: Portrait of an Intermarriage

By Stephen Miller

Budapest and the Bronx: Portrait of an Intermarriage is a memoir that begins in wartime Budapest and touches on dark topics–Fascism, Stalinism, antisemitism–but it is mainly about two people from radically different backgrounds who enjoyed each other’s company for almost six decades. Theirs was a marriage of “true minds” because they had so many interests in common, but they did have one serious disagreement. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Feb 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9781977272669

Stephen Miller

Stephen Miller is a creator and entrepreneur who has grown his platform to nearly one million followers in just two years through his show The Miller Fam, a channel that displays the beauty of diversity and adoption featuring his large, diverse, adoptive family of nine. No clickbait. No fake drama. Just a story that says, “Where grace guides, we'll go.” With over fifteen years of ministry in some of the nation's largest churches, Stephen has recorded six studio albums and is the author of Liberating King and Worship Leaders, We Are Not Rock Stars.

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Budapest and the Bronx: Portrait of an Intermarriage

All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2024 Stephen Miller

v3.0

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Table of Contents

Preface

1. Budapest, the Bronx, and New Brunswick NJ

2. Hungarian Themes

3. Minor Risks, Major Rewards

4. Varieties of Religious Experience

5. Rituals: Religious and Secular

6. The Silken Tent

7. Grief, Gratitude, and Folk Dancing

Appendix: Santa and the Magi Brothers

Acknowledgements

For Elizabeth and Katherine

"If you come to a fork in the road, take it."

Yogi Berra

Preface

Marriage is often painted in dark colors. The literary critic Rebecca Mead says marriage is often flawed, and only occasionally satisfactory. In On Marriage Devorah Baum speaks of the widespread presumption of marital misery. This memoir is about a happy marriage.

Is a happy marriage a good subject for a memoir? Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina by saying: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. He implies that happy families are boringly similar but unhappy families are more complicated and therefore more interesting to write about.

Happy families are not all alike. Happily married couples have their distinctive way of talking to each other and their distinctive family rituals. Moreover, happy families are rarely uniformly happy. Two quarrels clouded my marriage to Eva Barczay, which lasted for fifty-five years, but I never thought of divorcing her, and I doubt that she ever thought of divorcing me.

Our marriage ended in February 2023, when Eva died of brain cancer at the age of 82.

It is not easy to write about a happy marriage. Ann Patchett wrote an essay entitled This Is The Story of a Happy Marriage, but roughly half the essay is about her unhappy first marriage as well as an unhappy love affair. Her second marriage is the great joy and astonishment of my life, but she finds it difficult to write about. I’m trying, she says to a friend.

I’m trying, I often said to myself while writing this memoir. I was trying to avoid sounding smug or saccharine. I also wanted to avoid sounding like a how-to writer. Does this memoir offer suggestions for how to have a happy marriage? Maybe. Patchett rightly says that both the successes and the failures [of marriages] are based on an unfathomable chemistry and history that an outsider has no access to.

In the United States fewer people are getting married. David Brooks notes that in 1980 only 6 percent of 40-year-olds had never been married. As of 2021, 25 percent of 40-year-olds have never been married. Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes: Marriage in the United States is in decline, with the overall marriage rate having fallen drastically over the last half-century, reaching astonishing lows in some states.

A few weeks after I met Eva in the spring of 1965, I knew that I wanted to marry her. I did not worry that marrying someone from a radically different background would be a problem. I thought we would get along fine. My intuition–or whatever you want to call it–was right. In our fifty-five years of marriage I never thought I would be happier married to someone else.

After Eva died I felt somewhat disoriented. Joyce Carol Oates, whose husband died unexpectedly at the age of 77, writes: Losing a spouse of 47 years is like losing a part of yourself, the most valuable part. When Eva died I too felt that I had lost part of myself.

This memoir, however, is not about my life after Eva died; it is mostly about my life with Eva.

A writer in the Times Literary Supplement speaks of the claustrophobic nature of marriage. For me marriage was the opposite of claustrophobic. Marrying Eva opened a door to a wider world. I became less provincial, more cosmopolitan. I came to appreciate things I probably would never have appreciated had I not met Eva.

I read recently that a leading movie star and his wife have decided to get divorced after 27 years of marriage in order to pursue our individual growth. I suppose that marriage could impede one’s individual growth, but my marriage had the opposite effect. Marriage made me a better person–and a better writer. George Eliot said: What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life–to strengthen each other in all labour … to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting.

Marriage is what you can only do if you don’t allow yourself to think too much about it, says Devorah Baum. After Eva died, I began to think about our marriage. Why, I wondered, did I enjoy Eva’s company so much? But I don’t begin this memoir with our marriage; I begin with snapshots of our lives before we met.

CHAPTER One

Budapest, the Bronx,

and New Brunswick NJ

Budapest January 1945

A FOUR-YEAR-OLD GIRL is sitting in the basement of an apartment house in Budapest–playing with other kids or reading a book. She can hear bombs explode but she is not afraid. She enjoys being in the basement with other kids. It’s the older kids who are afraid.

The battle of Budapest took place from December 24, 1944 to February 13,1945. German soldiers and the Arrow Cross (Hungary’s Pro-Nazi Party) were fighting Soviet and Romanian troops. In January 1945 Eva’s mom was eight months pregnant. Eva’s dad was spending many hours in the streets of Budapest, looking for food.

Two years before Eva died she wrote about her wartime experience. During the seven weeks of the siege, as Allied and Axis forces fought over the city, about 38,000 civilians died in the intense bombing and ground fighting. Our family … and others in our apartment building survived in the basement in extremely difficult conditions.

One story that Eva told about the battle of Budapest sticks in my mind. It was about her mother and her aunt. They were eating in a crowded restaurant because there was very little food available in stores. Eva’s aunt was fastidious and the woman sitting across from her had terrible table manners, so Eva’s aunt persuaded Eva’s mother to move to a table at the opposite end of the restaurant. Ten minutes after they moved, they heard a loud explosion. A bomb had hit the area where they were sitting. Most of the people sitting there were killed.

In World War II Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany, but it would be wrong to call its government fascist. Hungary’s fascist party–the Arrow Cross–only held power in the last months of the war. For most of the war Hungary’s leader was Admiral Horthy, who was authoritarian rather than fascist. (More about Hungary’s politics in Chapter Two.)

Eva’s father was anti-fascist. Before the war, he refused to be in a photograph with a relative’s boyfriend who was pro-Nazi. When the war began, Eva’s father was drafted into the army and sent to fight in the Soviet Union. In January 1943 the Hungarian army was badly defeated in the battle of Voronezh. Eva’s father was not wounded but he had to walk back to Hungary in the bitter winter. He almost lost his toes because of frostbite. He avoided being sent back to the front again by having a doctor friend give him injections that caused a high fever.

After the war ended in February 1945, life in Hungary was hard. Food was scarce, and the Soviet occupying troops often behaved brutally, especially when they were drunk. One of Eva’s relatives was run over by a Soviet truck. Another relative who was known for her beauty avoided being raped by lying in bed and looking feverish–her faced covered with snot. When Soviet soldiers entered the room, she coughed violently. They left. Many Soviet soldiers did not know how to use a toilet. Many thought toothpaste was something you spread on bread to eat.

Soviet soldiers were known for putting a gun to someone’s head and saying: Give me all the watches in this building. This happened to a relative of Eva’s. He gave the Soviet soldiers the watches from people living in the building where he lived, but he took the risk of not giving Soviet soldiers his own watch.

Eva’s brother, George, was born two days after the war ended. Eva writes: When the bombing stopped my mother could be taken up to our apartment to give birth. There was little water, no heat, and a big hole had been blasted in the wall, but George was born healthy and vigorous. His diapers were monogrammed linen napkins found in what had been the dining room.

George was more fortunate than most Hungarian babies born at the time, Eva writes, because our father was with us during the siege and was able to go out during lulls in the bombing to scavenge for food in the devastated city, so our mother did not starve and was not alone during George’s birth.

Soon after George’s birth, Eva says, our father set out for our country estate to start the spring planting, which was urgently needed to revive food production. It took him three days to go about 100 miles because the railroad lines were bombed. When he finally arrived, he found that occupying Russian troops had burned all the outer buildings, cut down all the trees, and left nothing in the house but a bathtub and one large painting.

Eva’s mother and her two children followed four weeks later. Eva writes: We were driven by an acquaintance who, unlike everyone else we knew in Budapest, somehow still kept his car. On the way we were stopped by Russian soldiers who confiscated the car but eventually agreed to give us a ride to the city near our house. We sat in the back of a pickup truck. Eva’s mother was terrified but the Soviet soldiers were well-behaved.

Eva’s family spent two years in the countryside. Conditions were gradually improving, but Eva’s father wanted to emigrate because he thought the Soviet-backed Hungarian Communist Party would soon take complete control of the country. Knowing that the communists planned to confiscate most private property and persecute those who did not support them, our father started to maneuver early on to get us passports to leave the country legally. Eva’s father supported the Smallholders Party but he had friends among the Social Democrats, and they still had some political power. These Social Democrats helped him get passports.

Eva was always a big reader. In 1948, when Eva’s family was traveling by train through Switzerland on their way to Paris and eventually to the United States, Eva had