Exodus: A memoir

by Feldman, Deborah

  “She wants to know if you would like to go inside and see it. She hasn’t changed anything since she bought it, she says.”

  “She won’t mind?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Not at all. Go ahead.”

  I made my way gingerly down the path to the side door of the main building. Once inside, however, I immediately regretted my decision. The house was extremely dirty and reeked of human waste. I couldn’t imagine my scrupulously tidy grandmother in a house like that. I emerged a moment later, trying to cling to some of the nicer details. There was one large room in the front and one in the back. The ceilings were high and beamed; old, cumbersome chandeliers dangled from between the shallow rafters, dusty crystals catching the faint rays of sunlight that weakly illuminated the darkened interior. I imagine they all slept there, in one bedroom, the parents and their ten children. No wonder my grandmother had been sent to live in Nyíregyháza as an adolescent. There had been no room for her.

  That was why she wasn’t gassed, my grandmother had once told me. Because she had been deported separately from her family and hadn’t been holding a younger sibling when she faced Dr. Mengele at selection. Anyone holding a child was automatically gassed. Her whole family had been murdered on the same day. She was the only one who made it past selection and was deemed qualified for labor. But she had never told me anything else, except that she had been liberated from Bergen-Belsen. The time in between her arrival at Auschwitz and her liberation from Bergen-Belsen was a question mark in my mind. How would I ever delve into the secret of her courage and endurance if I didn’t know what sustained her through that blank period?

  The mayor asked if I wanted to meet the Jewish family that lived in town. I said I was game. We crossed the square to a house of similar stature. The mayor told the Gypsy woman working in the yard that we were looking for Orsi Neni. Zoltán told me that the mayor and Orsi were quite close and had an excellent relationship. He seemed to be trying to say that race wasn’t an issue here, especially not now. “She is one of the most beloved people in town,” the mayor said.

  Orsi Neni emerged from her home, a tiny old woman with very round eyes set in a deeply wrinkled face. Her voice was a crackly whisper. I asked her if she spoke any Yiddish. She shook her head no, explaining that her father had spoken it but she had never learned it. She didn’t remember my grandmother, she said, but probably because she had been very young during the war.

  “How is it that you were able to come back?” I asked.

  “They hid in Levelek,” Zoltán told me, referring to a larger town about fifteen minutes north. “The whole town helped, and they refused to give them to the Nazis.”

  “My grandmother said she was born in Levelek. Is there a hospital there or something?”

  Angelika translated for the mayor, but he shook his head. “There’s no hospital there that I know of.” He couldn’t say for sure why she would have been born there instead of in Kántorjánosi, where she grew up.

  “Levelek is our next stop,” Zoltán said. “I know the registrar there.”

  Before we left, I asked whether Orsi Neni still lit candles on Friday night and baked challah.

  “Of course!” was her answer.

  “Do her children do so as well?” I asked.

  “No, just her,” Angelika said.

  How strange it was to find a Jewish woman here who had grown up in the same circumstances as my grandmother but who by some reverse twist of fate had never left home. Orsi Neni still baked the challah and lit the candles, but she was the last Jew in the town, and her children had become completely submerged in secular Hungarian life. I recalled my thoughts from earlier that morning—how easily this could have been me: uneducated, missing teeth, never seeing the world! Would my grandmother have been just like this woman?

  As we left, the Gypsy woman, her brows knitted together in her dark and wrinkled forehead, gripped my hand tightly.

  “What does she want?” I whispered to Angelika.

  “She said she just wanted to hold your hand.”

  I flipped over my palm to see if she wanted to read it. The Gypsy dropped my hand suddenly, as if it had grown hot.

  “She says she doesn’t do that stuff anymore,” Angelika said.

  The mayor was talking to Zoltán about the town. “There is no anti-Semitism here,” he said. “Jews, Gypsies, and Hungarians have always lived well together here.” It was as if he was presenting the town as a model for tolerance. “We never had this problem of racism,” he said proudly.

  We drove to Levelek, whose mayor appeared slightly more sophisticated. He was younger and well dressed and had bright blue eyes. He said that his family had come to Hungary during the Polish revolution. “That’s why he’s good-looking,” Zoltán joked. His secretary, who doubled as the registrar, was a sweet and smiling middle-aged woman with ash-blond hair. She embraced Zoltán when we arrived.

  The secretary apologized for not having any bottled water to serve us. “The stores are all sold out because of this heat wave,” she said.

  “Oh, so you mean it’s not always this hot?” I asked.

  “Would you care for raspberry soda instead?” Zoltán and Angelika both nodded their heads. The soda tasted like seltzer mixed with sugary syrup. It was served on a silver tray with crystal goblets. As if we were visiting royalty.

  Ledgers were open on the mayor’s table, and he invited me to peruse them. There was the marriage certificate of Laura Schwartz from Levelek to Jacob Fischer from Nyíregyháza, my grandmother’s parents. Their names, places of origin, and occupations were all listed clearly. Jacob was a Talmud scholar, which confirmed my belief that his parents had been wealthy—only the wealthy could afford not to work. I saw the record of my grandmother’s birth, on January 8, 1927, a few years after their marriage. They had come to report it five days later, on the thirteenth—the very same day my grandfather had been born.

  “Perhaps they lived here in Levelek for the first few years, if that’s where Laura was from originally. Then it makes sense that their first child would be born here, before they left to open a store in Kántorjánosi.”

  “The mayor says he can take us to the Jewish cemetery,” Zoltán said. “Perhaps you’ll find more information on your family there.”

  We drove to the cemetery in the mayor’s car. He was decidedly more upbeat than the Kántorjánosi mayor and seemed very excited to talk to Zoltán and Angelika. It felt vaguely surreal to know that I, a twenty-something woman who easily blended into a crowd in New York City, was the cause of so much excitement and fuss in a small village thousands of miles from home.

  A shirtless man met us at the entrance to the cemetery. The sweat glinted like dewdrops on his hairless chest. Angelika translated for me, explaining that the man and his wife had decided to take care of the cemetery about ten years ago, as their home abutted the property. We followed him down a dirt path to a brick wall with a small gate in the middle and waited as he unlocked it.

  My hopes deflated as soon as I was on the other side of the wall. All I saw was an empty field, the grass mostly yellow straw. Then I noticed stubs of tombstone poking out from the brush.

  “Most of the stones were stolen by Gypsies before he started taking care of it,” Angelika said, listening closely as the caretaker explained sheepishly. “They are considered very valuable for the quality of the rock.”

  “So they’re all gone?” I asked.

  “Almost.”

  I had noticed two on the other end of the cemetery and one in the far eastern corner. I approached the single one first, but noticed as I got closer that all of its writing had eroded. I trudged back.

  “I can’t read the writing anyway,” I said. “It’s all faded. It doesn’t matter; they’re probably not here.”

  “Don’t you want to take a look at those other two before we leave?” Zoltán asked.

  “All
right,” I said and took off my shoes to wade through the weeds.

  Somewhere close to the stones I must have brushed against stinging nettle. I had never encountered the plant before, and didn’t know what it looked like, but the painful feeling spread quickly around my ankles and up my calves—it felt like I was being bitten by a colony of ants.

  “Ow!”

  Angelika laughed. “She stepped on some csalán!” she said to Zoltán.

  “Don’t worry, Deborah,” he said. “It will go away in ten minutes.”

  When I straightened up, I noticed I was standing in front of the stones. Perhaps it was my stinging legs that prevented me from grasping what I was looking at right away. The writing on the two stones was perfectly legible.

  “Woman of Valour, Faiga Leah,” read one. “Saintly woman, Faiga Pessel,” read the other. The only two legible stones in the cemetery belonged to my great-grandmother and my great-great-grandmother.

  “Oh my God!”

  The others looked over, pausing their conversation briefly. Angelika looked up from her phone.

  “It’s them!” I shouted.

  They hiked over. “That’s Laura’s grave,” I said, pointing. “Of all the stones in the cemetery, these are the only ones here still in decent shape! There has to be an explanation, Angelika. Can you ask him if anyone ever came by and paid money to have these graves maintained?”

  The caretaker insisted no one had ever visited this cemetery or interfered in its upkeep. “It’s just a coincidence,” he said. “These were the only ones left when I started taking care of the place.”

  It couldn’t be a coincidence, I thought. Then I noticed the message on the bottom of the tombstones: “Descended from the holy Leibel from Oshvari.” I had heard stories as a child of the ancestor who was a lamed-vav’nik, one of the thirty-six pillars of the world who supported its continued existence with anonymous good deeds. His saintliness had been discovered only after his death, when his charitable efforts suddenly ceased and his beneficiaries came forward. People had started visiting his grave, but if they ventured too close, bad things would happen, until eventually they had to put a fence around it, my grandmother had told me. It was the closest thing to magic I had ever heard of in my world. I wondered now if, given what I understood to be a superstitious stereotype attributed to Gypsies, it was possible to suppose that they might have stayed away from those stones out of fear of that very same legend, passed down among their own.

  On the way out of the cemetery, we stopped to pick sour cherries from slender trees with dark green leaves that grew wild along the path. The cherries were incredibly juicy and plump. I watched as Angelika sucked a whole bunch of them effortlessly off their pits, stopping to grind them into the ground again with her shoe. For each cherry she consumed, a whole lot of them might grow in its place.

  How incredible, I thought, to have food growing wild on the street. I tasted a cherry, and it was perfectly ripe, emerging from its thin, still-delicate skin in one tart, juicy burst on my tongue. I closed my eyes and remembered the taste of my grandmother’s cold cherry soup, the one she served on hot summer days like this one. I wondered if she missed picking the fruit from the tree or lamented the quality of store-bought or canned sour cherries.

  On the way back we stopped for lunch in a village called Napkor. Zoltán instructed his driver to pull up in front of an inn with stone walls and a sloping log roof. Potted geraniums dangled from the overhang and onto the wraparound veranda.

  “Zoltán knows all the best places to eat in the area,” Angelika informed me. “You’re lucky.”

  “I never eat in the cities, Deborah,” he said to me in German. “I always stop somewhere along the way, at the places most people would overlook.”

  We made our way inside, and were greeted by the host, who clearly knew Zoltán well. The restaurant was quite large, but empty at this hour. I glanced at the heads of boar that were mounted on the walls; their black bristles quivered in the breeze coming from the air vents and their pink snouts were ringed with condensation. They served as a stark contrast to the tables set in pristine white cloths, topped with crystal goblets and delicate flatware. The restaurant had an aura of unstudied and effortless elegance, despite the setting.

  “We’ve got to decide which animal we’re having,” Zoltán informed me once we were seated and had been presented with enormous, leather-bound menus. I skimmed quickly; there were over a hundred options. “They’ve got to have enough notice if we want to eat within the hour.”

  Angelika looked at me with a mischievous sparkle in her eye. “Here they only slaughter the animal once you say you’ll eat it. Otherwise it’s a waste.”

  “You mean they’ll actually go out there and grab a chicken and kill it, right now?” I asked, incredulous.

  Zoltán chuckled. “Can’t get any more fresh than that.”

  Angelika mocked my flabbergasted expression. “What, is it better somehow, knowing they already killed it yesterday?”

  I turned my attention back to the menu in silence, trying to process the idea. This was farm-to-table on a whole new level.

  In the end we all opted for duck. While we waited, ostensibly for it to be slaughtered and cleaned, a series of appetizers were delivered to the table. I pounced eagerly on a cold pear soup, served with sweet strips of palacsinta, or Hungarian crepes, as noodles. The flavors were impossible to place, a hint of something like nutmeg, a kind of cream that was neither sour nor sweet, but faintly tart, and a dash of zest that might have been from a kumquat. My spoon came up empty all too quickly, but this was soon forgotten, as our duck arrived in clearly identifiable parts, a crispy-skinned leg each for me and Angelika, a breast for Zoltán, and an assemblage of parts and organs for our driver. The duck was served on beds of caramel-colored mashed potatoes with generous sprinkles of sweet paprika and accompanied by shredded cabbage stained a deep purple by the prunes it had been cooked with. We dug in, and silence reigned at that table until the plates were cleared.

  Afterward I marveled at how it was possible to eat such meals, meals that easily outranked the numerous ones I had been served at New York City’s top restaurants, in such a far-flung setting and at such ridiculously cheap prices. Was it really as simple as recipes honed for generations, water drawn from deep springs and wells, fertile, unspoiled land that nourished crops and animals? I supposed, in such circumstances, even a Michelin starred chef would be rendered superfluous.

  It was late afternoon when we arrived back in Nyíregyháza to visit the synagogue before it closed. The Jews had been rounded up for deportation right in front of it, and it was there that I had most wanted to stand, in the spot where my grandmother’s own exile had so horribly begun. The square was now paved over, with decaying apartment buildings serving as wary witnesses around its perimeter. Their shabby terraces with peeling blue paint strips seemed like so many eyes half-closed in fatigue. This was not the Nyíregyháza my grandmother had seen on that day, but it seemed somehow to retain the memory of that moment in its tired bones nonetheless.

  The street in front of the synagogue, a stately building with small high windows and a secure gate, was quiet except for the occasional passing car. Now that I was looking directly at the spot where it had happened, I couldn’t imagine a roundup taking place there. These were events dramatized in movies, or vividly evoked in books I’d read, but they couldn’t possibly happen in such a quiet and ordinary place. Reality would have to split apart for a moment to allow something like that. Life as I understood it, the banal pursuit of food, salary, and entertainment, would have to completely collapse; it would have to be replaced with something alien and otherworldly.

  The synagogue was painted pink with white trim. It looked nothing like the shuls I had grown up around, and more like the reform temples I had started to visit recently. Inside, the synagogue had a low, unenclosed women’s gallery, and in such a small building,
those women would have been clearly visible to the men below. The synagogues I had grown up with had women’s sections that were fully separated from the main room by height and enclosure.

  This had been a very modern Orthodox community, nothing like the one I remembered my grandmother being a part of.

  I asked the rabbi, “Were there any Hasidic Jews living here before the war?”

  Angelika translated. The rabbi shook his head slowly.

  “None that I know of. From what I heard, there was a small group of them over in Satu Mare, now in Romania, and perhaps another small community in the southern region, but there were no Hasids in this area back then. In the eighties they came to Budapest, the Lubavitchers, and tried to convert everyone. They even tried to convert me. Like I wasn’t a good-enough Jew for them.”

  The rabbi and his associate gave us a ride back to the college, as our chauffeur had left for the day. I heard the two of them talking in exuberant Hungarian in the front seat, and I could just about make out that the conversation was about me. I asked Angelika to listen in.

  “He is saying,” she said with a laugh, “that he doesn’t understand how someone can talk so much and listen so well at the same time, that your brain works so fast. But he says you are very sweet.”

  “Ach, you are translating for her?” the rabbi said. “No, don’t be offended. We just don’t often get such intense visitors—we are accustomed to a slower pace here.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, smiling. “It’s not the first time I’ve heard that.”

  Zoltán walked me to my room when we got back.

  “I’m so thrilled that we were able to do this,” he said. “This is what I want to show, that Hungarians can help! There is no anti-Semitism here. There never was.”

  When I left Nyíregyháza some days later, I looked out the window at the passing world, thinking that this planet was like a snow globe that received regular shakes. The war had been a particularly vigorous one, and because of that, my grandmother had drifted over to the other side of the world amid the chaos, forever changing the legacy of our family.