On the day they married, Louis and Tekla first came to a “civil wedding” before a county registrar in the Office of the Registrar of Vital Statistics. It was a Sunday morning, April 25, 1897. This was the first year such a ceremony was required by the state, and the registrar decided to process four couples at once. Louis remembered the occasion as informal and “Very festive,” but to Tekla the drab walls and the registrar’s officious manner were “cold and uninspiring” She even feared throughout the brief bureaucratic ceremony that somehow her name would “be coupled with that of a total stranger in my marriage certificate.” Then, at three that afternoon, the couple handed their marriage certificate to a royal notary, who read a marriage contract that he had drafted using information provided by the two families. For the first time, Louis learned that his wife had “a considerable fortune.” The sum had been deposited in Louis’s account at the Kommerzialbank, the receipt handed to him by the notary.8
Next, Tekla returned home, dressed in a flowing bridal gown, and rode in a carriage with her parents through the bustling city to a synagogue. There Louis Spitz married Tekla Vidor in a Jewish ceremony, arranged by the bride’s father, Dr. Sigmund Vidor, a member of the governing body of the Jews of Budapest. With Louis’s family in mind, the ceremony was performed in German by the German chief rabbi Kaiserling. After the ceremony, the couple took a coach ride through City Park, attended a party given by the bride’s mother at her home, and finally, about midnight, moved into their apartment nearby at 28 (now 50) Bajza Utca, greeted by their new cook and maid.
Louis and Tekla Spitz took no honeymoon because he considered the custom frivolous. Tekla didn’t mind, she later wrote, and found her first months of marriage delightfully “harmonious,” perhaps “because we were not allowed to spend enough time together to turn mushy with sentiment.” Resolutely and with a renewed desire to be “useful,” Tekla focused her nervous energies on home and husband. Early each morning she rose to prepare Louis’s breakfast. All day she puttered around the apartment, sewing and reading. Often she prepared lunch for Louis whenever he worked in the neighborhood. Most evenings she walked arm in arm with him along the Garden District’s tree-lined boulevards. And each evening Tekla visited her parents at their apartment nearby.
All the while, Tekla Spitz was uneasy about her sudden change from “a girl innocent in body and mind” to a married woman. She was “repelled,” in conversations with her married friends, by “frivolous remarks of double or unmistakable meaning”; she “felt that to make a joke of what was private and sacred was a brutish thing.”9
The couple’s first apartment was in a large corner building, an Italian Renaissance-styled stone structure set back from the street by a small lawn. That spring, Louis was able to spend more time there, for he moved his contracting office to a small room in their apartment. This he shared with Tekla’s older brother, Emil Vidor, who was just beginning a career as an architect.
The Garden District in which Louis and Tekla Spitz lived was by the end of the nineteenth century both showy and shabby, an eclectic mixture of new “Villas” built by the upper middle class and older city mansions belonging to Hungary’s ostentatious but often impoverished nobility. The neighborhood was a meeting place for two clearly different cultures: ambitious and successful merchants, many of them Jewish, whose wealth and lives centered on the city; and Magyar aristocrats, who depended on vast country estates for support but whose social and political pretensions also drew them to the bustling capital. The Garden District fostered a symbiotic relationship of another kind: The daughters of wealthy Jewish merchants married the titled sons and grandsons of counts, often at the time when their parents loaned money to the titled families. In turn, the Magyar court bestowed titles (usually Baron) on the more successful merchants, making them members of the Parliament’s House of Lords or including them in the aristocratic civil service. By 1904, Jews owned more than one-third of the country’s arable land.10 Anti-Semitism would arise later, in part as a reaction to the access Jews gained to commerce and society. But for the moment, “assimilation” for Louis and Tekla Spitz was an easy step. Louis belonged to a Masonic lodge in Pest and over time rose to hold several offices. The couple attended evening card parties and dances there, and Louis repaired to the lodge once a week for a stag evening.
Budapest itself was a tense crossroads of monarchy and modernity. Buda and its dramatic hills featured palaces and citadels, a proud outpost for the co-capital (with Vienna) of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Pest, flat and modern with its art nouveau apartment blocks lining broad Parisian-style boulevards, was a cultural and commercial center in its own right. Few other cities could boast a modern subway, the banks and stock exchange were influential throughout Europe, and the artistic and political life flourished in Budapest’s many concert halls and elegant coffeehouses.
In early July 1897, Louis and Tekla Spitz left Budapest for a vacation in Alt-Aussee, a resort in the Austrian Alps, and while there, the couple delighted to discover that Tekla was pregnant. By the fall, Tekla Spitz suffered morning sickness and sometimes became ill after meals. But striving to prepare for her first child, “she bought linen for diapers, things for crocheting, and material for bibs and panties; and she started working on all this indefatigably,” Louis wrote later. He helped “by cutting out patterns from paper and by doing the basting for her to make the hems.” Tekla’s father, an eye specialist, was medical director of Stefánia Children’s Hospital in City Park, and on his way home at noontime he dropped in almost daily to visit his daughter, who regularly brewed for him a cup of strong beef broth.11
By the beginning of February, Tekla’s nausea had stopped, and she was eager for the birth, although she later admitted to knowing little about how a birth might actually occur. Following her mother’s advice and assisted by the midwife who had delivered all the Vidor children, Tekla strained to concentrate on avoiding what was “ugly” about childbirth and focused on “what was beautiful and good.” Once his wife’s labor began, Louis spent an anxious and excited night in an adjacent room, and the next day, February 11, 1898, Tekla was “glowing with happiness” as she proudly presented him with their first son, Leo.12
Giving birth may have been a startling ordeal, but handling infants was nothing new to Tekla, as she had tended her own younger siblings and her sister Margaret’s children. She nursed Leo easily and followed the advice of Dr. Karman, the Dr. Spock of his day, from a book he had presented to her. From the beginning, she had definite ideas about Leo’s upbringing. Tekla would “rebel” against anything she thought was “over-done,” and she abhorred the fuss made by bourgeois families over the firstborn. As parades of relatives called with gifts, she broke tradition, refusing to dress Leo in white clothes or to display him in a new white carriage. Her strong views about rearing children also created early (and lasting) disagreements with Louis: Whereas she was “more decisive” because of her experience handling other babies, he was “the more tender” and approached them “gingerly”; she wanted to “harden” and discipline her children, while he wanted to “pamper” them; she adopted a “puritan” approach to living, with modest and simple dress, while he was more bourgeois, spending money freely on rich foods, fancy outfits, and expensive vacations.13 The city girl was rejecting her family’s luxurious traditions. The country boy was making up for lost time.
That summer, Louis had to travel to Újvidék, in southern Hungary (now Novi Sad in Serbia), where he was working on a new railway line. Louis rented a two-room apartment, hired a nursemaid, and moved Tekla and Leo there along with her youngest sister, Juli. Louis also rented a horse-drawn carriage to drive the few blocks to the large restaurant where they took most of their meals.
The excursion to Újvidék was elegant but short-lived. Juli, who slept in their second room, wanted to retire one night but found the landlord’s daughter asleep in her bed. The girl refused to leave, forcing Juli to sleep on a hard sofa. Louis was outraged, concluding that his Serbian land
lord was behind this contretemps. He swore so obscenely that the landlord lodged a complaint in court. Upset by the whole incident, Tekla left by train for Budapest the next day, taking Leo and Juli with her. For Louis, the Újvidék job ended in September—his first success as a contractor, his first failure as a husband. After this, Louis’s quick temper and stern temperament caused Tekla to become more docile and introspective.
The young family had another unsuccessful summer in 1900, when they moved across the Danube to Szabadsaghegy, one of the many hills in Buda. Seeking a restful retreat for Tekla, who was then pregnant for a second time, Louis rented a small villa just below the upper terminal of a cog railway. But the villa was shady and damp, and Tekla’s right arm soon became swollen and inflamed. After she developed a high fever, Louis returned her to their apartment in Pest and confined her to bed.
To compound their troubles, Leo, who was two and one-half, came down with whooping cough and had to stay with Grandmother Vidor in the elegant and imposing Fonciere Building. The doctor advised that Leo spend several hours a day outdoors, so each morning, Louis picked him up and rode the ferry to the large park on Margaret Island in the middle of the Danube, between Buda and Pest. During their hours together Louis Spitz noticed his son’s unusual “thirst for information,” for Leo questioned not only his father but also his fellow passengers on the boat.
Each day’s outing was a joy, Louis recalled later, but back at the Vidor apartment, Leo “wanted to stay with me in the worst way.” There was no elevator at the Fonciere, and Leo refused to climb the stairs. This conflict ended each day when Leo’s aunt Juli took him in her arms and carried him upstairs—the only way to quiet his screams, which echoed through the marble halls. Concerned over Leo’s selfish behavior, his grandparents tried to teach him to say “please.” Leo refused. “It was beneath my dignity,” he recalled later, and the old couple had many arguments with him over this.14 Leo remained away from home until after the birth of his brother, Bela, on September 6, 1900.
Less than a month after that, on October 4, Louis Spitz changed his surname to Szilard, yielding to growing government pressure for the Magyarization of foreign-sounding names. In Hungarian, Szilard (pronounced ’Sil·;ard) means “solid.” Two of Louis’s brothers changed their names at this time—to Arnold Salgo and Adolf Szego—but the fourth remained Max Spitz.15
Summers were remembered by the Szilards for misfortunes, and in 1901 another mishap occurred. As in the previous two years, the trouble came about despite the most pleasant intentions. The family—Louis and Tekla with three-year-old Leo and nine-month-old Bela—moved by train to Velden, on the west end of the Wörther See, a large lake in Carinthia, near Villach in southern Austria. The Vidors and their daughter Juli came along, as did Louis’s niece, Aranka Spitz. Work prevented Louis from staying at the resort for the whole summer, but as Tekla was then pregnant with her third child, the Vidors remained nearby. They lodged at the Grand Hotel, while the Szilards rented a small house with a lawn and garden. There Leo could play while Bela was watched in his pram by the family nursemaid, Zsuzsa, a peasant woman nicknamed Auntie Susie.
One sunny day, a leather manufacturer’s wife and her two sons— students at Budapest’s Technical University—invited the Szilards for a boat ride to visit a coffeehouse across the lake. Tekla preferred her parents’ company, but Louis fancied the offer and persuaded her to come along. With the two students at the oars and their mother tending the rudder, Tekla and Louis (with Leo on his lap) sat in the middle seats with Aranka. Tekla, who had never learned to swim, was nervous throughout the crossing and sighed with relief when she climbed from the boat at the far shore.
After a pleasant two-hour stay, the party returned to the boat. First Tekla climbed in, cautiously. Then Louis followed, with Leo cradled in his arms. But Aranka leapt in from the dock, tilted and rocked the boat, and spilled Tekla over the gunwales and into deep water. Leo began screaming as his father gripped him with his left hand. With his right hand, Louis grabbed the horsehair bustle at the back of Tekla’s dress and held her above the cold water until the frightened students fetched a rope and hauled her to shore. Wrapped in borrowed blankets, Tekla was carefully set in the boat again, and the party crossed the lake with no further scares. At Velden, the Szilards’ cottage was only fifty yards from the landing, and Tekla was quickly put to bed and warmed with hot bricks wrapped in linen. By the next morning she was cheerful and healthy and never mentioned the accident again. Nor did Leo, although he remained frightened of water for the rest of his life.16
CHAPTER 2
View from the Villa
1901–1912
In the fall of 1901, Tekla Szilard’s older brother, Emil Vidor, received his first commission as an architect—a contract from his parents to design and build an elegant residence. In it the entire family would live: the elder Vidors, their three daughters with their growing families, and Emil. The Vidors encouraged Emil to design the most beautiful house he could, with no regard to the cost, and committed part of Mrs. Vidor’s inheritance to the task. The Vidor Villa, as it came to be known, was intended to display Emil’s talents, with his office on the ground floor so that prospective clients might admire his work. “Give your artistic ambition free rein,” Dr. Vidor instructed his son, and he did.1
There was a growing need for larger quarters, especially after the Szilards’ third child, Rozsi (Rose), was born, on December 15, 1901. Rose’s arrival sharpened the debate that Louis and Tekla had about child rearing. “He was anxious to give them all the comforts and advantages gained by his hard work, and that was his delight,” Tekla wrote years afterward. “Spoiling the children was not my idea of being good to them. I did my best to give them happy experiences of a different nature.” She wanted Leo, Bela, and Rose to be “plain, unassuming people” and to “avoid giving them the feeling that they were special and having them become conceited about their abilities and accomplishments.” The couple’s disputes rarely erupted into angry arguments, but over time battle lines were drawn. Because Louis traveled frequently to construction sites throughout Hungary, he often saw his children only on weekends. Then he lavished sweets and rich foods on them, often during excursions to the city’s many parks. But come Monday, Tekla “took firm hold of the reins” to guide her children’s development throughout the week. In this way, the three Szilard children were alternately spoiled and scolded, swayed by both their father’s bourgeois tastes and their mother’s sterner spirituality.
Their new home was as bourgeois as could be. True, Emil’s Vidor Villa had to serve the practical needs of several families. But it did so exuberantly. Set on a large plot of 600 klafters (about half an acre) along the tree-lined Fasor, Emil’s creation soared five stories in a mock-rustic, art nouveau style. Outside, curved stucco walls were fitted with pointed and rounded stained-glass windows; wooden turrets and porches seemed to pop out at unexpected places, braced by rough-hewn beams and hand-carved tree branches. Inside, the three floors of apartments were linked by an airy, curved stairway that was decorated with an intricate wrought-iron rail. The house was an architect’s fantasy, a child’s delight.
But to Louis Szilard, a practical and very outspoken civil engineer, Emil’s designs raised doubts from the start. When Louis eyed the plans and criticized using wooden beams rather than steel to support a ceiling, Emil took offense and refused to change the design. This “disagreeable discussion,” Louis regretted years later, created “mutual ill feeling” between the two men that “never disappeared entirely.” Even without Louis’s criticisms, Emil’s innovations and constant changes slowed construction. These delays forced the Szilards, who had broken their apartment lease on Bajza Street, to live for three months in borrowed rooms, so Louis was grateful when his family did occupy the villa in December 1902, because in addition to gaining a large apartment, he had a new office for himself near Emil’s. (The villa, at 33 Fasor, now houses the Bela Bartok Collegium of Music, offering spacious quarters for living, pract
ice, and recitals. Emil’s name can still be seen, carved in a ground-floor archway that once led to his office, and Leo Szilard is commemorated on a plaque.)2
For Leo and Bela, the move to the Vidor Villa meant a new world to explore and conquer. From the third-floor bedroom they shared, which overlooked the rear garden, the two boys could wander along back stairs or charge the spiraling front hall. They could hide in the angular attic, romp through the narrow servants’ corridors, or hang from the ornate porches and turrets. Dangers lurked throughout the villa, and Leo, like his father, was quick to find most of them. But he also found delights and surprises in the huge house and a sense of security he would never know again.
When the Vidors’ extended family moved into the new home, Dr. Vidor, Leo’s maternal grandfather, was soon the center of attention. A well-known ophthalmologist of about sixty-five, he resigned his post at the Stefánia Children’s Hospital and donated his large medical library to the Medical Association, which he continued to serve as president. Life for the old man was a succession of delights: In the morning he visited his daughters and played with his grandchildren; in the afternoon he played at the Chess Club, of which he was president. Most evenings, he gathered his daughters, sons-in-law, and older grandchildren in his apartment and told them stories about his life. Leo remembered his grandfather best for the classroom episode in Debrecen, when he scrupulously reported his own truancy. But Dr. Vidor also regaled his grandchildren with tales of Hungary’s 1848 revolt, when as a young man he joined the partisans led by the fiery patriot Louis Kossuth.3
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