A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  21

  In Budapest

  HUNGARY HAD A LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER OF EXTRAORDI-nary endurance who had never won any Olympic medals. Rather than compete in sports, he ran to publicize political events. For the centennial of Lenin's birth he ran from Budapest to Moscow. He had carved out a strange career for himself—a runner who never competed. To Gyula Gazdag, it was what everyone had to do—shape and fit a career to the needs of the state, let yourself be used; rather than compete in the real world, offer yourself to the slate in a symbolic gesture. This was the subject of his first documentary film.

  The state, not surprisingly, did not like being portrayed in documentary films in this ironic light. Under Janos Kadar, Budapest had begun at last to lose the dark, bombed-out look from the war. The last of the great historic bridges that connected Buda and Pest across the Danube was rebuilt in the 1960s. By 1970, the last of the bombed-out lots had been cleared and rebuilt. Limited private initiative was tolerated. But films satirizing the system were not.

  Most of Gyula's subsequent films were not appreciated by the state either, and six of them were banned. After Gyula made a film, he would be called into a political office, and the ideological problems of the work would be explained to him. Sometimes he would be told that if he did such a film again, he would no longer be allowed to make films. He was frequently spied on. “I didn't know Gyula was applying to military school,” a neighbor once said to his parents.

  “What!?”

  “They came by. Said he had applied to military school and needed to ask us certain security questions about him.”

  Gyula had been one of only eleven accepted out of some 900 applicants to the film institute. But while being a film director was a privileged position, it earned a very low state salary. Because Hungarian Communism believed in incentives, the bulk of a filmmaker's income was paid on delivery of projects. When a film was banned, not only would the filmmaker not get his money, but neither would anyone else who worked on the film. When Gyula's film was banned, he was letting down his friends and colleagues. That was how the system worked under the soft Hungarian dictatorship of Janos Kadar, the man known as Father Joe. “It seems that people here, even when grown up, need a father to tell them what to do,” Gyorgy Konrad wrote.

  Konrad also tested the limits of the system's vaunted tolerance. Two-thirds of the essays he wrote following the 1956 uprising were not published. He would play with the system. With a certain editor, certain things would get by for a time. Then editors would change. Classics would work. Politics would not. Things had to be hidden or carefully woven. Thinking there must be something more worthwhile to do than write essays that no one was allowed to read, he became a social worker, and from 1959 to 1965 he worked with troubled children.

  “I believed it was better to have jobs that were independent from the ideological literary scene because there I was more dependent. Here, I do something that corresponds to my own values, because to do something for children is okay. And to edit the classics is also okay, so I can earn my livelihood and support my family in two solid activities, and I'm not depending on the censors.”

  In 1969, Konrad's first work of fiction was published, a novel based on his work experience, called The Case Worker. This was a surprisingly liberal period in Hungary, considering the repression taking place in neighboring Czechoslovakia. The Hungarian uprising was now more than a decade in the past. During the Six-Day War the government attempted an “anti-Zionist campaign.” The government official who led it was of Jewish birth. But Jews responded with surprising assertiveness. Even the official Jewish Community, which was often resented for legitimizing government policy, dared what was to be remembered as its bravest moment. Community leader Geza Seifert, without the customary gerrymandering of phrases, declared the support of Hungarian Jews for Israel in its struggle.

  Unexpectedly, the Six-Day War had stirred up forgotten sentiments in Konrad. He had gone to a newsstand, bought a newspaper, and started reading. Suddenly he felt faint, the sickening flutter of anxiety in his stomach. The war had broken out. Jews were once again being singled out for a slaughter. Could this be happening again? He began to think increasingly about the fact that he was a Jew and to read Jewish history. But when the anti-Zionist campaign started attacking Jewish government officials, attacking some of the very people who were censoring writers, Konrad had little sympathy for the Jewish officials. “I am not interested in the fact that they are Jews,” he would say. “Only that they are censors.”

  Gyorgy Gado was so angered by the government's only slightly modified Soviet anti-Zionist line that he turned in his party membership. In the government statistical bureau where he worked, he was demoted to a low-level clerk.

  As in Poland, support for Israel during the Six-Day War was seen as an expression of anti-Russian sentiments. Jews found themselves with the most unlikely of allies. Andras Kovacs took an excursion on the Danube and visited a small village inhabited by ethnic Germans who had been living in Hungary for many generations without losing their German identity. Kovacs was sitting on a park bench enjoying the setting when the village guide came over to him and started talking in German. Kovacs answered in German, and as they talked, he realized that the guide was extremely drunk. The guide at about the same time realized that Kovacs was Jewish.

  “Aha,” said the guide, scrutinizing Kovacs through drooping eyelids. “Are you Jewish?”

  “Yes,” said Kovacs, preparing himself.

  The guide, leaning forward, stared into Kovacs’ eyes. “I am German,” he said. “We are eternal enemies. I fought in the SS in the Second World War, and I was put in a prison for twelve years.”

  Then he clamped a thick hand on Kovacs's shoulder and lowered his voice. “Now times have changed. Now we are on the same side. I fought the same Russians that you fought in Israel.”

  IN THE EARLY 1970s, Konrad helped to smuggle a friend's manuscript out of Hungary. The friend had been expelled from the university and given a laborer job and had written about his experience. For his part in the smuggling, Konrad lost his job, but he was able to get another as an urban sociologist for a planning institute. This experience led to his second novel, The City Builder. He was informed that the novel was “too dark/’ lacking in optimism, and it was refused Hungarian publication. The book was published in the United States.

  Since Hungarians do not learn other languages and others do not learn theirs, translations are always in demand. When Gyorgy Gado's low-level clerical job was finally taken from him, for the next twenty years he could not get a job and he survived by doing translations from Russian and German. Andras Kovacs was also forced into the free-lance translation trade. He had been an editor in a publishing house as well as a teacher of philosophy at the university. But like Konrad, he was writing for the underground press, and he decided as a deliberate provocation to run an article that, rather than being anonymous, would bear his byline. He was removed from both the publishing house and the university. In 1980 a West German university offered him a one-year teaching position. After descending into a labyrinth of bureaucracy, Kovacs finally got a Hungarian passport so that he could travel. But it came with only one exit visa. He could leave but he could not come back. It was a virtual invitation to emigrate. Konrad received a similar passport.

  Kovacs left and taught in Bonn for a year, then moved on to Paris and New York. But Konrad stubbornly held to his Hungarian-speaking country.

  ZOLTAN GARDOS was born two years after the Hungarian uprising. He had always been aware that his parents had a painful secret. They would be watching television, and if something about World War II came on, Zoltan would look over at his father, staring silently into the blue light of the television, and he would see tears running down his cheeks. Nothing was said.

  When Zoltan was 13, he met a girl in school who, although not a practicing Jew, talked very openly about being Jewish, and in his conversations with her Zoltan began to suspect that he might also be Jewish. At 15 th
ey were in love, and he wanted to know more about Judaism.

  Slowly he got the truth from his Communist atheist parents. He learned that his father, who was an accountant, had wanted to be a lawyer but had been barred from higher education before the war because he was Jewish. While his father was in a Russian forced labor camp, his family had been deported to Auschwitz —his mother, wife, and son—and were all killed. After the war, he remarried to Zoltan's mother, also a Jew, who had survived in hiding. Zoltan never did learn more than these vague details, which were so fraught with emotion that he too started to find the subject difficult to talk about.

  He would not think about it for the present. Someday, after his parents died, he thought, he might try to explore this secret more. But his girlfriend wanted to talk about it. Soon he began to realize that some of his friends also had the same secret. Then he realized that most of his friends had this secret. Why was it, he wondered, that unknowingly he had been drawn to so many Jewish people?

  At 19, Zoltan nervously made his way through the dark old Jewish section of central Pest, to the ornate cathedrallike Dohany synagogue, said to be the largest synagogue in Europe. He observed strange things going on in this imposing building, in a strange language with strange music. Zoltan may have been drawn to other Jews, but he did not feel that his place was in the Dohany.

  When he was 21 he met Kati Kelemen. As a small child, Kati had come home from school mouthing anti-Semitic slurs, meaningless curses she had learned from other children. Her parents, Communists who believed in working toward the egalitarian society, told her then that they were Jewish, but they never told her much more about it.

  Zoltan and Kati married and continued to ambiguously pursue Judaism. Budapest was the capital of officially sanctioned Judaism in Central Europe. It had the largest community and the only rabbinical seminary. Everything Jewish was either officially sanctioned or unofficial and banned. There were official social functions. The seminary offered a Kiddush, a social gathering centered around a wine blessing to sanctify the Sabbath, and the turnout for this was generally large Zoltan and Kati sought out other Jewish gatherings, and they began to stumble across the unofficial ones, including one in the home of a couple who had secretly invited people there for a Passover seder. The same couple would also invite five or six young people over for Friday nights. The couple were regularly warned by the police against these activities, but they continued to invite people to their home; The police would call them in for questioning and would warn them that they would lose their jobs and have their passports revoked.

  Zoltan and Kati also met a young dissident rabbi, Tomas Raj, a graduate of the Budapest seminary in a class of four. Raj had already aroused the displeasure of the authorities for attempting a Saturday afternoon study group in the town of Szeged, where he had been rabbi. When he produced a play about Moses at the synagogue, the Jewish Community leaders had removed him and sent him to work at a home for the elderly in western Hungary. He continued his activities, and in 1970 he was expelled from the rabbinate.

  The officials of the seminary and the Budapest Jewish Community leadership, MIOK (the Hungarian acronym for National Representation of Hungarian Israelites)—which was directed by Geza Seifert and, after his death in 1976, by his wife Ilona —worried about maintaining their own positions and about keeping what they had operating and on good terms with the state. Because of this, the state could often rely on the central board to stop unapproved activities. This was the system for state management of Judaism throughout Central Europe. An older generation remembered that it had also been Eichmann's system. To a younger generation, including Zoltdn and Kati, it meant that they could expect no help in learning about Judaism from the official Jewish Community. There were no courses or books or any guidance for Jews wanting to learn the basics. Their only chance was to meet other Jews, and for this reason they started going regularly to the synagogue.

  “You couldn't catch a word/’ said Zoltan. “I can't catch a word because I don't know Hebrew, and even if you know Hebrew you can't possibly understand what is going on if you are not told where you are.”

  They joined a group of young professionals who studied with Rabbi Raj. Studying rendered them ever more confused: What did it mean to be Jewish? Was it a nationality, like being Hungarian? Or a religion that they did not know how to practice? If it was a nationality, then did they belong in Israel? In 1983, through an Israeli contact in Budapest, Zoltan and Kati were able to arrange an illegal trip to Israel. They told the government they wanted to visit neighboring Austria and were given passports and visas. In Vienna they were met by a Jewish organization with visas and plane tickets to Israel. In Israel they were taken around the country 1o meet Hungarian Jews who had immigrated. Everyone told them of the good Jewish life in Israel and showed them only the best and most beautiful sights.

  But they could not make the decision to move there. Their lives, all their friends and relatives, everything they knew was in Hungary, and they hadn't even had a chance to say good-bye. They hadn't dared to tell anyone what they were really doing. After four weeks they returned to Hungary even more confused, and for years afterward they would periodically think about Israel.

  22

  In Warsaw

  and Cracow

  GOMUFCKA WAS FINALLY DESTROYED, NOT OVER ANY OF the student issues, not over democracy or free speech or anti-Semitism, but rather because of the price of meat. A 36 percent hike during Christmas 1970 led to strikes, and he was replaced by Edward Gierek. The change was welcome news for Marian Turski and the staff of the besieged Polityka. The independent Communist newspaper had been advocating a shift toward Western financing, opening opportunities for a private sector, and making infrastructural improvements such as a highway system.

  This was exactly Gierek's approach. Gomulka had wanted nothing to do with the West. “In a way, there was something in common between him and De Gaulle,” Turski later said of Gomulka, “… a very selfish man with a very large, unlimited ego.” Gierek was a pragmatist who had been educated in the West. Promising economic growth, he obtained Western loans and started a Polish automobile industry and built roads, including the main highway from Katowice in the south to Warsaw. Poland showed impressive growth rates and was soon ranked the tenth strongest industrial nation in the world, only slightly behind East Germany. At the time these were probably the two most overrated economies in the world. By 1976, supposedly thriving Poland was forced to reveal that it was literally bankrupt and could not even service its debts. Just as Gomulka could not be forgiven his sins once his great virtue of holding down prices was proved hollow, Gierek without economic growth did not have much appeal.

  It was a period of change when the old faiths weren't working, a time when Poles were asking many questions. Ever since a thug had called him a Jew and punctuated it with a smack in the face, Konstanty Gebert had been asking himself, “What was I supposed to do about things? How come I'm a Jew? What does I mean?” He was not going to start going to a synagogue. Synagogues and churches were “relics of the past,” not something for an enlightened modern Communist. Gebert was not even sure where to find a synagogue. He suspected that some of his friends were also Jewish. But you could not go to your friend and say, “Are you Jewish?” He compared it to saying to someone, “Are you an ape?” In Poland to ask someone if he or she is a Jew is to make an accusation.

  The alternative was reading. He tried reading the Bible, but it did not speak to him. So he turned to the great nineteenth-century Yiddish literature. Writers such as Russian-born Sholem Aleichem a ad Polish-born Isaac Leib Peretz had been recognized by the regime as part of official culture and therefore were translated into Polish and made available to the public very inexpensively. Culture for the masses was a Communist ideal, and these writers had been included. What amazed Gebert when he read these stories of Jewish life in Poland and Russia—the world that had been exterminated shortly before he was born—was that it did not seem alien. Though he had
never seen a shtetl or met religious Jews, they seemed very familiar and understandable, as though somehow certain values and ways of thinking had been passed on to him without the hat, beard, language, or rituals. Was Jewishness, then, a way of thinking?

  In 1971, Gebert decided to visit the United States and look up some of his father's old Jewish Communist friends. He discovered a great-uncle in Sacramento, California, whose family included a grandson his age. They were not deeply religious, but they did observe the Sabbath, and Gebert, for the first time, went to a synagogue and to a family Sabbath meal. Although he was intrigued, he could not imagine living like that. In 1976 he met the family again in London. He even tried hosting his own Sabbath meal with Warsaw friends. But it didn't really work.

  By then, Gebert, a psychologist by training, was reading more intellectual Jewish writers such as Martin Buber. When Carl Rogers, the American humanist psychologist, came to Poland to meet with Polish psychologists, Gebert and most of his friends went to see him. After a general talk, Rogers suggested that they break up into groups of special interest. There could be a group on divorce, one on parents of small children—

  “How about a Jewish group?” someone said. Everyone laughed. Jews were always a good joke. But the person who had said it wasn't joking. He ignored the laughter and stubbornly added, “Well, anybody who is interested, meet me in my room at eight o'clock.”