I learned to read perfectly in Hungarian very quickly.
But for the rest of my life, as perfectly as I could read Hungarian, I didn’t read it. I would read books in English about Hungary and Hungarians, but I would never read my … mother tongue.
St. Stephen, my mother taught me, was the founding father of Hungary. He united all the Hungarian tribes and taught his people to pray to God. That’s why his right hand was still alive today, thousands of years after his death, paraded through the streets of Hungary before the Communists took it over.
St. Stephen was no one to trifle with. He cut an enemy’s head off and then chopped his body up into little pieces and let the wind blow it away. St. Stephen’s son was St. Emeric, who didn’t become king because he was gored to death by a wild boar as big as a horse.
King Kálmán, my mother taught me, was the greatest Hungarian king after St. Stephen. He was known as Kálmán the Bookworm because he loved to read and encouraged all Hungarians to read.
When he was dying, King Kálmán the Bookworm was afraid that his brother, Álmos, would try to be king instead of King Kálmán’s son, István. So King Kálmán the Bookworm summoned Álmos and Álmos’s son, Béla, to his deathbed.
And King Kálmán the Bookworm had his soldiers stick fiery-red swords into their eyes. King Kálmán died peacefully, knowing his son would be king.
The Tartars, my mother taught me, invaded Hungary from Russia before there were Komchis in Russia.
They burned all the houses down, raped all the women, and cut all the men’s heads off. Tartar children used Hungarian children as human targets when they wanted to practice with their bows and arrows.
The year before they invaded, Hungarians knew there would be bad news. Wolf packs came down from the mountains. The sun disappeared from the sky at noon. And on a summer night, a blazing star with a long tail crossed the sky.
Then came the Tartars.
· · ·
The Turks invaded Hungary, my mother taught me, and cut Hungarian heads off with curved swords. They took women and children to Turkey, where they sold them in the slave markets. Beautiful Hungarian girls could be bought for a pair of boots.
The Turks were helped by a Romanian named Vlad Drakul, who, my mother said, was the greatest monster in the history of the world. She didn’t tell me why, but my father did.
Vlad Drakul made men sit on spikes that went through them. He boiled people alive and decorated his castle with their severed heads. He cut women’s breasts off and hung them on his walls.
The Hapsburgs, my mother taught me, spoke German, invaded Hungary, and made it into the new country of Austria-Hungary. They didn’t burn or rape or cut heads off, but they treated Hungarians like slaves and forced them to speak German. Until Lajos Kossuth, the Hero of Freedom, the Torch of Liberty, the Greatest Hungarian, organized a revolution against them.
Kossuth, my mother told me, was like my father. A writer. An editor. And when Kossuth lost his revolution, he had to leave Hungary. But he continued writing. He worked for Hungary’s freedom in America. Like my father.
Kossuth’s dream was freedom for Hungary. Like my father’s dream.
But it didn’t happen. Kossuth died in Italy. Old, half blind, and poor.
My mother worked in the printing shop at a linotype machine with the Franciscans and other Hungarian men and women. I watched her sometimes as she typed, her eyes squinted, the cigarette ever present in her mouth, while a few inches from her face a red-hot bar of lead melted into the machine.
She came back from the printing shop once crying. She closed the door to my father’s office but I could hear her through a crack near the linoleum floor.
She was alone, she said, and she was locking up, and she heard a noise in the back. She went to see what it was and she saw one of the priests, Father Peter … naked, on top of one of the other women who worked there.
“What kind of priests are these?” my mother cried.
We shopped for our clothing at the Salvation Army on Bridge Avenue near West 25th Street. All three of us would go.
My father bought suits for a dollar. My mother was very excited to find a black velvet dress with a matching black hat. They bought me a winter overcoat, but it was so big I could have fit in it twice.
After I wore the coat a few times my mother said to my father, “What kind of man are you? How can you stand to watch your son wearing something like that?”
They started to argue.
I kept saying, “It’s fine, Mama. It’s a nice coat.”
And when I was a rich American man, I found myself obsessively buying winter jackets and overcoats of the finest quality, Polo and Sulka and Giorgio Armani.
In California, where it was never cold, where I couldn’t even wear them.
At noon every Monday, the city had a civil defense air raid drill. America was in a cold war with the Communists. Atomic and hydrogen bombs could turn all of us into watermelon juice.
At noon every Monday, thousands of sirens all around the city began to wail. More sirens than I’d ever heard. I started to wail, too. I shook so badly I couldn’t get into the closet to which I was assigned to hide from the atomic bombs. I screamed and shook until the sirens stopped.
The nuns at St. Emeric’s tried to calm me, but couldn’t. My father told me to stop acting like a hysterical girl.
My mother started coming to my school five minutes before noon every Monday. She held me as I screamed, and when the sirens stopped, she left.
There was a famous American man, my father excitedly told my mother and me, who understood about the Komchis.
He was a zenator. And a Catholic like us. Mekarti. Zenator Jozsef Mekarti from a place called Viskonzin. Mekarti was a hero. Not afraid to speak out. Not afraid of the Komchis. He knew there were Komchi spies everywhere.
My father wrote about Mekarti in his newspaper. All his friends talked about him too.
Mekarti! Mekarti! Mekarti!
As a young American man, I learned about Senator Joe McCarthy. The hero. Tail gunner Joe. The opportunist. The liar. Who had varying lists of innocent men he slandered as Communists. Who had no decency. Who was condemned by the Senate. Who died a drunk and a broken, humiliated man. Joe McCarthy, my father’s hero.
My day began at 5:30, when I dressed quickly and walked the block to Timar’s Bakery to pick up a fresh loaf of rye bread with caraway seeds.
Mrs. Timar, a second-generation Hungarian, had an agreement with the Hungarians in the neighborhood. If we bought the bread before six in the morning, we could have it for half price.
I raced home with the hot bread and my mother made the two of us strong black coffee. My father drank tea. She put a load of sugar into the cups and we dunked the bread into the sugary coffee.
I heard the word Nyilas often as my father spoke to his friends.
What is a Nyilas? I asked him.
They were Hungarian Nazis, he said, the Arrow Cross. Their symbol was an arrow and a cross. They were crazy like Hitler. They wanted to kill the Zsidos.
There were many of them in Hungary, he said, and many of them had come to America. He didn’t like the Nyilas, my father said, and they didn’t like him either. He said he was proud that when millions in Hungary were joining the Arrow Cross Party, he had never joined.
“Tell me about Hitler,” I said to my father.
My father told me this: Hitler ate chocolate bars for breakfast and vegetables the rest of the day. Hitler hated cigarettes and loved his dog, who was named Blondie. Hitler farted so much that they had to open all of the windows after he had a long meeting. His pimpli was so small, it barely stuck out between his legs.
Hitler vacationed all the time when he was a boy at Spital, the location of our last refugee camp. When we were walking around outside the camp avoiding TB, we were probably walking in Hitler’s footsteps!
There was a Hungarian printer and linotype operator named Oszkár Moldován, younger than the priests in the printing shop.
He always had a radio on near his machine with the sound of a man talking and sometimes yelling in English. The word that I heard yelled from his radio, as I ran about the print shop in my kovboy hat and with my guns was, “Horun! Horun!”
“Bazball?” I asked Oszkár in Hungarian. “Do you like bazball?”
Oszkár smiled. “Do you, Jozsi?”
I told him yes, I loved bazball.
He asked me if I liked the Indians.
“No,” I said. “I am a kovboy—I shoot Indians.”
“The Klevland Indians.” Oszkár smiled.
“There are Indians in Klevland?” I asked.
“Al Rosen,” he said. “Bobby Avila. Bob Feller. Larry Doby. Dale Mitchell. Don Mossi.”
I saw Father John Mundweil on the way to school. He was with the bums in the alley by the market. He was wearing a white T-shirt over a pair of black pants. He was yelling at the bums.
“You leave these kids alone!” he yelled. He had a slight Hungarian accent. “If you bother these kids, I’m going to come back here with the police! You hear me?” His face was red. The bums nodded and mumbled.
“Get out of here!” Father John yelled. “Now! Get the hell out!” The bums started walking away from the market.
Father John stood there, and then he lit up a cigarette. He saw me watching him.
“Do you want to be late for school?” he growled in Hungarian.
“No, Father.”
“Then go!” he said.
I ran.
“Who knows who invented the telephone?” Sister Rose asked.
“Tivadar Puskás,” I said.
Everyone in class laughed.
“Thomas Edison,” Carol Ann Hill said.
“Alexander Graham Bell,” Joey Kish said.
“No,” I insisted. “Tivadar Puskás! My father told me.”
Everyone in class laughed again.
When I got home, I told my father what had happened.
“You are right,” he said. “Tivadar Puskás invented the telephone. We will prove it.”
We went down to the Carnegie West Library at Lorain Avenue and Fulton Road. The book said Tivadar Puskás had been Thomas Edison’s assistant.
“But it doesn’t say he invented the telephone,” I said.
“If he was his assistant,” my father said, “they worked on it together. If they worked on it together, he invented it, too.”
He looked at the book again.
“Puskás,” he read, “also invented the telefon hirmondo,” the speaking newspaper—which sent news to subscribers.
“You see?” my father said. “The telephone—that is nothing. Tivadar Puskás also invented the speaking newspaper. That is something!”
Edward Teller, a Hungarian, my father said, had invented both the atomic and the hydrogen bombs. All Hungarians, he said, were proud of Edward Teller.
Before I told anyone in class, I went down to the library and read about Edward Teller in an American book. It said Edward Teller had worked with a man named Einstein and had persuaded Einstein to make the atomic bomb.
But then it said Edward Teller was “the father of the hydrogen bomb” which could kill “ten million people with one flash.”
I wasn’t sure whether I was proud of Edward Teller or not. Ten million people!
One flash!
I learned about Klevland in school. It was founded by a man named Moses Cleaveland, an investor in the Connecticut Land Company. The company had bought the area called the Western Reserve west of Pennsylvania. Moses led an expedition to survey the land. The principal settlement, it had already been determined, would be where a big lake (Erie) met a little river (the Cuyahoga).
Moses arrived at the site and found an old and crooked river, its banks marshy and boggy. Silt stuffed its mouth. Sandbars made passage nearly impossible. The flatland around the river was nightmarish. Side pools smelled like rotten eggs. Foot-long snakes slithered on the shore. Clouds of ravenous mosquitoes obscured the sun.
Moses Cleaveland finished his survey in one day, named the place after himself, and went back to Connecticut. He never returned.
George Washington, Sister Margaret told us, was not only the father of America, but he was also the man who looked at a map and told Moses Cleaveland to build a city there.
So George Washington was not only the father of America, but the father of Klevland, too.
My father gave me a lesson about America.
“Everybody says ‘Hov arr yu?’” he said. “But they don’t mean it. If you tell them how you are, if you say—‘So-so, I have a headache, I think I’m getting a cold, I’m worried about money, my wife and I had an argument,’ they look at you like you’re crazy.
“What they want to hear is fein. Hov arr yu? Fein.
“If you are dying, if you have nothing to eat, if your best friend has betrayed you, if you are about to kill yourself, and if they say Hov arr yu? Fein fein fein.”
On those summer nights when the windows were open and the drunks left Papp’s Bar, I received Hungarian lessons, enriching my vocabulary with words my parents never used:
AZ ANYÁD PICSÁJÁT—Your mother’s pussy!
LE VAGY SZARVA—You are shit upon!
SZARHÁZI KURVA—You’re a whore from a house of shit!
SZAROK RÁD—I shit on you!
BASZD MEG—Fuck you!
BASZD MEG AZ ANYÁD PICSÁJÁT—Motherfucker!
One of the men who came to my father’s office was Dénes Kacso, a Hungarian poet. He was a short, overweight, but fierce-looking man with blazing black eyes. He cleaned toilets at an old-age home.
“I clean their shit,” he said, “and I write my shit.”
He lived in a shack on a little street not far from us. The shack had no electricity or heating. Dénes filled the shack’s fireplace with limbs he sawed off the trees on neighborhood streets. He had bought a saw at the Sam Finesilver hardware store and he lurked around in the predawn dark collecting his firewood.
He ate mostly dog food. He came to my father’s office with his pockets full of different cans and explained that America was such a rich land that even dogs ate the finest meals.
I was on the linoleum floor in the kitchen, watching the ants, and I listened to my father yelling at two of the Franciscans. He was yelling about a priest named Father Galambos, who wrote a column for the newspaper. My father was saying he was the editor and he wouldn’t run a column this priest had written because it was “Zsido ellenes”—against the Jews.
“Stop it! Stop this madness!” my father yelled at the priests. “You can’t say these things here! Didn’t you learn any lesson?”
When the Franciscans left, he turned to me and said, “Remember this, Jozsi. Jews are people like any other people, some good, some not so good. Just like Hungarians. Some good, some not so good. Never judge a man by his nationality or his color or his religion. Judge him by his character. Whether he is a good man or a not so good man.”
My mother said, “Politics. Always politics. Always yesterday.”
“No!” my father said angrily. “Not yesterday! Today! This is about America.”
He pointed to me. “This is about his life. This is about him!”
And as an American man studying the Holocaust, I discovered that many of the Nazi butchers who got away—Mengele, Eichmann, Bormann—got away thanks to an underground which shuttled them from one monastery to another and then smuggled them onto boats which took them to South America.
It was an underground operated by Franciscan priests and monks.
I overheard my mother reading to my father from a book containing the now-being-tortured Cardinal Mindszenty’s words:
“Dearly beloved faithful, my brethren. We Hungarians are frequently reminded of the sins of the past. Sometimes it seemed that other peoples considered us Hungarians the dregs of European society, the scum of the earth, and a cursed race living among a choir of angels. Other nations have openly reviled us. In fact, there
is no end to the sins others lay at our door. The whole world has acquired a distorted view of Hungary’s role in the war. My conscience will not allow me to believe that Hungary is truly responsible for all the crimes she is accused of.”
I got up off the linoleum floor and walked into my father’s office and asked, “What are we accused of? What’s a ‘crime’?”
“Nothing,” my mother said. She seemed angry that I had overheard them.
“You are too young, Jozsi,” my father said. “When you are old enough, I will tell you.”
“Is it true?” I asked.
“Is what true?” my mother said.
“What we are accused of.”
“No, Jozsi,” my father said. “Go play. It is not true.”
Oszkár Moldován took me out into the alley behind the printing shop and handed me a stick he had found on the floor. He threw me a red rubber ball.
And when I hit the red rubber ball over the cyclone fence of the Num Num Potato Chip factory, the American drivers standing around their trucks threw it back and cheered.
One of them yelled, “Attaboy, kid! Horun! Horun!”
Dénes Kacso, the Hungarian poet, smelled of wine every time he came to my father’s office. Every time he came, he brought my mother and me a piece of strudel from Timar’s Bakery.
As I was playing ball by myself in the concrete yard, I heard shouts from the circulation office. Then the door from the office burst open and one priest after another ran out and fled into the printing shop. Father Gottfried was last and behind him, screaming and swearing, was Dénes Kacso, who had a pocketknife held high in his hand.
Father Gottfried got away—Dénes said he had insulted one of his poems.
Sometimes I went out into the alley alone when Oszkár was working or when he had his days off. And I hit the red ball against the brick wall of the Pep Up soda bottling company, which faced the cyclone fence of the Num Num Potato Chip factory.
And sometimes one of the drivers from Num Num or one of the American men working at Pep Up would come into the alley and throw me the red ball so the others could yell “Horun! Horun!” and “Attaboy, Joee!”
Hollywood Animal Page 20