Steven TOTOSY de ZEPETNEK
An Application of the Systemic and Empirical Framework
in Diaspora and Ethnic Studies
Abschnitt 3

The importance and impact of Jewish culture in its varied forms on and in Central Europe is well known (see, for example, Johnston). However, while I understand the cultural importance of Central European Jewry tragic as Willet suggests and as seen and understood because of the Second World War and the Holocaust, I do not find it "barred" and "buried." First, I understand Central European Jewishness as of a quintessential synthesis and expression of the said Central European culture. Second, memoirs represent a genre that connects the past and the present and thus it is an advantageous cultural and literary genre to gauge and to understand the problematic at hand, namely Central Europeanness, and third, as it happens, diasporic Jewish-Hungarian women's memoir writing has produced some of the most interesting and exciting texts for the said problematic of Central European culture. And the genre of Jewish-Hungarian memoir writing is of relevance for my discussion for another reason. It is curious that much memoir writing of minority groups, for instance, that of Hungarian Germans reflecting on post-War expulsion often concentrates on "good" memories (see, for example, Murk). It is, then, even more curious that Jewish-Hungarian memoirs contain so much positive about life in Hungary before the Holocaust, when, in truth anti-Semitism has been increasing gradually and in intensity in Hungary since before the First World War! Here, I would also like to mention, with specific relevance to the designation of diaspora what Ella Shohat so convincingly argues for, namely that the homogenizing parameters of Israel and the erasure of Arab-Jewish identity in consequence is lamentable (see Shohat). In other words, there is such a thing as appropriation and, consequently, diasporic Jewish-Hungarian women's memoir writing connects several factors of the proposed notion of Central European culture.

In North America, memoir writing is today one of the most prevalent genres and this can be gauged also with regard to Jewish-Hungarian women's memoirs. There are, in particular in American and Canadian English-language writing many examples of such memoir texts. (I should add that the designation "Jewish-Hungarian" is of course in itself problematic: I am certain that most first-generation Jews now living in North America would not readily accept the designation up front, let alone the second-generation. I am using the designation to indicate the cultural and personal background of the writers I am discussing here as per reflection on their own memoir writing.) For the present study, I selected Julie Salamon's The Net of Dreams: A Family's Search for a Rightful Place (1996), Elaine Kalman Naves's Journey to Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family (1996), Susan Rubin Suleiman's Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (1996), Magda Denes's Castles Burning: A Child's Life in War (1997), and Judith Kalman's The County of Birches (1998).

In a geographical context, Salamon's The Net of Dreams is perhaps the most "Central European." Her idea and research of the book began by the impetus of reading, in 1993, about Steven Spielberg's plans to film his Schindler's List (Salamon 6) after which she travelled to Poland and other areas of East Central Europe such as Huszt, now in the Ukraine, and formerly a Hungarian town. Salamon's description leading into the history of the mixture of nations is intriguing itself: "This was the land of the shtetl -- and of Gypsies [Roma in today's terminology], Slovaks, Hungarians, and Ukrainians -- an ignorant backwater that had been annexed by the USSR after World War II. Now Communism was finished and the place where my parents were from had been reshuffled again. Their birthplace had lost the status of affiliation with Czechoslovakia or the former Austro-Hungarian Empire" (13). What is significant in this brief excerpt is the reference to Czechoslovakia (the interwar period) and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (the period prior to the 1919) and thus the setting of the notion of Central Europe, geographically and culturally. The family history of Julie Salamon stretches across Central and East Central Europe in time, in space, and in cultural parameters. It includes the particularities of their education (Gymnasium) and university, their knowledge of languages, and the necessities of manoeuvring from one cultural context to another but altogether being in a Central European space. Salamon's interpretations and explanations of matters and things Central European -- be those Slovak, Hungarian, Ruthenian, Jewish, or Czech -- extend over much detail. For instance, at one point she explains a specific instance of the usage in Hungarian of the familiar (te) and polite (maga) forms of address and other forms of address they used such as the Ukrainian-Czech mixture of zolotik ("little golden one") in their social and individual contexts (205). Salamon's narrative of memory is concentrated on family and family history and the memory of the horror of the Holocaust runs through it. Yet, the Central European cultural space as well as spaces the family's history and the histories of individual members occupy in the book's narrative involve us as readers not only as historical evidence but also as evidence for a literature of the region.

Elaine Kalman Naves's Journey to Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family is the most historical text among the text I am dealing with here. It also has the least mistakes with Hungarian diacritics and the translation of phrases and terms. The Jewish-Hungarian families whose history is told in the book, the Schwarz-Székács, the Weinbergers, the Rochlitz, etc., belonged to that stratum of Jews in Hungary who assimilated and became members of the educated upper-bourgeoisie of the country. In this case, they produced members who were members of the Austro-Hungarian officer corps and upper-government officialdom, landowners, industrialists. One member of the family (Aggie Békés) is also of interest because she earned a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Debrecen in the 1930s (section of photographs, n.p.). It is well known that Jews in Hungary underwent perhaps the most wide-spread and deepest process of assimilation, for the reason that Kalman Naves describes as "During the forging of Magyar nationalism, they cast their lot wholeheartedly with that of the emerging Magyar nation -- only one of the many ethnic groups in the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire which included Slovaks, Ukrainians, Slovenes, and many other nationalities. Even the orthodox among Hungarian Jews described themselves with self-conscious pride as Magyars of the Israelite faith" (15) and the access of numerous Jewish-Hungarian families to both non-titled nobility and the ranks of the aristocracy is a particular characteristic of Hungarian history which, again, explains much of the said Central European culture and its Jewish aspects (for the Jewish nobility of Hungary, see McCagg; Lukacs 91-93; see also Molnár and Reszler).

Magda Denes's Castles Burning: A Child's Life in War is a doubly sad book in view of its author's recent death in 1996 -- all other authors of the memoirs under discussion here are alive today. The story of Denes's family is particularly poignant because of her father's act of abandoning his wife and daughter in 1939. The story of this Jewish-Hungarian family, again in the context of its position as educated upper-bourgeoisie, is of particular interest for my argument of Central Europeanness because the story unfolds in "travel." What I mean is the telling of the tale when Magda Denes -- after surviving the Holocaust in hiding -- flees Hungary in 1946 with her mother and grandmother and how she perceives and experiences life as a refugee with and among all the other nationalities in the refugee camps. The narrative contains much of the self-confidence of the Central European educated. Here is an excerpt: "I always suspected Ervin of having a bit of the prole [proletarian] in him. Anyway, now he wants to emigrate to Palestine with her, and he wants to fight for a Jewish state. I don't even know what that means. Jews are intellectuals, not farmers or soldiers" (147). Magda eventually ends up in New York where she becomes professor of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy at Adelphi University.

Susan Rubin Suleiman's Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook is similarly bitter-sweet in many instances of her narrative of recollection of Budapest life and death during the war and the Holocaust. The book's title itself is intriguing: Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook and it is similar to Tibor Fischer's (another second-generation Hungarian) Under the Frog (1992, Betty Trask Award of 1992 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993), in that it contains a translation from the Hungarian. Fischer's un-English Under the Frog is a translation of the Hungarian phrase describing when one is in bad circumstances (as in quality of life): a béka segge alatt ("under the arse of a frog"). Suleiman's Motherbook is a translation of anyakönyv, the official name of one's birth certificate in Hungary and a term laden with references of nostalgia and patriotism in Hungarian literature and even in general discourse. Thus, the title of the book sets the scene, the author's search and re-discovery of her Hungarian background and history. In the first chapter, "Prologue: Forgetting Budapest," Suleiman describes her escape from Hungary as a ten year old, in the last months when the border was still open to Czechoslovakia. After stops in Košice and Bratislava -- Kassa and Pozsony (the Hungarian names of the cities), and Pressburg (the German name of the city), respectively; -- the Rubin family of three arrived in Vienna, free. The author then earned a profession and her life with clear distance to her ethnic background in the American melting pot. Although with a brief interest in Hungary during the 1956 Revolution and its aftermath of Hungarian refugees in the United States, it is only in the early 1980s -- upon the illness of her mother, her own divorce, and the stress of raising two sons as a single mother -- that Zsuzsa (the Hungarian version of her name) again takes to Hungary and her unresolved past. After the 1989 Changes, she is invited to Budapest as a guest professor and she spends an extended period in Hungary. In Budapest -- and it is in these chapters where the cultural reading I am interested in is written -- Suleiman immerses herself in the intellectual life of scholars, writers, and artists and makes many interesting observations. Her descriptions of life and letters in Budapest is valuable for the North American reader because it is the description of something that does not exist in North America and even in Western European cities it is at best only somewhat similar: it is specifically a Central European situation. Thus, among the many interesting aspects of Central European and, within that, specifically Hungarian scenes, situations, and cultural specifics, some may be of particular interest to the English-speaking and North American reader. For example, descriptions and references to the situation of feminism and women runs throughout the book and it reminds me of a situation I was in when giving a paper using feminist criticism at a Hungarian Studies conference in 1991 and where both men and women in the audience attacked my paper saying that feminism is nonsense and inappropriate for the situation in Hungary. Evidently, not much changed in the few years since: Hungary is and remains a profoundly patriarchal society. Another theme in the book is the situation of Jews in Hungary. Suleiman describes the situation with some accuracy and when I was a guest professor in Hungary in 1995 I too found that in Hungary one is either a "Jew-friend" or one is an anti-Semite, there is no in-between. Interestingly, there is one instance where Suleiman falls prey to that most Hungarian feature, cultural nationalism. In Suleiman's case this could perhaps be better described in terms of enthusiasm and over-valuation of things Hungarian: "I felt elated by the beauty of the city. `It really is a great capital; it really can be compared to Paris.' I told myself as the cable car rose above the river." Well, yes, Budapest is a beautiful city, indeed, but in my opinion and despite the often repeated comparison to Paris it was never like Paris or Vienna and it is not comparable to them today either.

It is the cumulative effect of these books and of several others published in recent years that prove relevant for the argument of the existence of a Central European culture. It is also worthy of attention that many of these narratives are written by women. In sum, these memoirs suggest evidence for the notion that the Central European character exists indeed -- at least in the imagination and cultural construct of these authors including their families. What is even more remarkable is that the said Central European cultural space and construct apparently survives at times into second-generation families now living in North America. In my opinion, despite the historical break and horrific separation created by the Holocaust, Central European culture includes the Jewish factor, most importantly by its own expression and relevance and as demonstrated by the women's memoir writing at hand.