Hot Damn everyone; formative experiences you're on.
Also, gosh. I want book reviews. The Halifax Review of Books. My mother always told me to write down a few words in a special book everytime I finished a book, so that I would remember. Well let’s do it collectively online. Ella – you are reading plays. I want to hear about them. And also read them in a hammock with you. But mostly read about you reading them online. Jacob – you have been reading Tompson Highway, Nick impersonated him for a long time on Facebook – I’m sure he’d like to hear about his work. Cynthia – you have just exhausted an author! I have wanted to read Douglas Coupland for a while. Well? I hereby declare a modification to the Blog format! Anyone can skip the schedule to toss 100 words down as a review of some cultural production.
Alright fine. Nevermind. ‘We’ don’t have to.
Where am I and what am I doing? I’m not sure. Many of us are in between times which is why Natalie made this blog, right?
This blog is great. How come? Well here is a long story of why. I’m in Halifax, but have just recently returned from a long two weeks in Michigan where I was with my family, grandparents, aunt and cousin.
My time was split between Ann Arbor a small university town bigger than Halifax, and our idyllic family cottage on the shore of Lake Michigan – our small chunk of a collectively owned land my grandparents were part of buying when my father was still a serious little child. It was a wonderful time to be with my family. I used to go there every summer but this was the first time in years. I have a nephew now, Istvan, who is almost 1 ½ and cute and funny as hell. He is well on his way to being a Dal jock – his two most common words (and activities) being ‘Ball’ and ‘Cheers.’ He also loves to go clubbing – particularly when ‘all the single ladies’ comes on.
We all made a special effort to be there for a sad reason. My Grandfather, Nagypapa, had cancer for the past three years – and we knew this might be his last summer. Right at the end of our visit he died. We were out shoe shopping at the time. Before we’d gone out shopping we’d been hanging out, and Nagypapa asked me what I’m excited about these days. I answered with vague excitement about the future and made comments about all my options and how I felt between communities – Toronto? Halifax? Elsewhere? Academia? Activism? Arts? Nagypapa responded that the question of roots and rootedness has been a theme of his thinking and experience throughout his life.
More recently in specific intellectual guises he has pursued the theme in studying the history of the ancient near east, and linguistics. In linguistics he is a fierce proponent of the out of Africa Theory. He holds that all languages stem from a common single language, and hence single people and single place in Africa. As opposed to language evolving separately in several homo-sapien-sapien communities already spread out geographically and culturally. In the ancient near east he studied the roots of the west, the history of the bible, Sumerians etc.
But right from his childhood Nagypapa was living during reign of nationalism and much of his life has involved crossing borders and changing identities. He was born to a Slovakian mother and a Hungarian father in 1920. 1920 that’s three years after the Russian revolution. He would be ten when the great depression would hit North America. When he turned 20 the Second World War was breaking out. He spent his early childhood in a rural town in Slovakia. He learned Slovakian and Hungarian in the home. In Slovakia he was made fun of for his Hungarian accent, while later in Hungary he would be made fun of for being a Slovak. As well as his two parental tongues his father began teaching him to read Hebrew and German when he was three. His father was a deeply or perhaps a desperately religious Jew. After a military career in the Hungarian Army (wrong side of WWI) he became a Cantor and ritual slaughterer and made a meager living as religious functionary. He would wake up four year old Nagypapa before dawn and violently force him to learn Hebrew and religion by studying and memorizing the old testament. Nagypapa loved the Bible. He identified with its stories of the poor and oppressed. But he quickly rebelled against his father’s violence and rejected religion. He consciously held himself to be an atheist before he was ten. Nagypapa found no home with god nor would he find roots with the jewish community – though he would never be gentile in his own eyes or the eyes of others.
When Nagypapa was seven his father disappeared. Seven years earlier borders had changed and Czechoslovak Republic was formed. His father had not done the necessary paperwork and found himself without citizenship. He snuck from Czechoslovakia to Hungary. A year later, the family received word that he had found a job and they picked themselves up and tried to follow him to Hungary. For travel documents they had a letter from the local Catholic priest stapled to a family photo. It beseeched Hungary’s authorities to allow the family across the border to be re-united. They tried to cross by train four times in different places and were rejected each time accompanied by anti-semitic invective.
Finally they ended up in a jail in a small border town. The town’s Jews heard that a jewish family was being kept in jail and got them out, welcoming them into their own homes instead. Nagypapa’s mother took her youngest and snuck across the border by foot. The rest of the children were scattered amongst different Jewish families in the town. They stayed with their new families for months with no concept of what was going on. Nagypapa’s adopted family began having him memorize the details of their son’s life, who was about the same age. It was a mystery to him why. Eventually, they took him across the border with their Slovakian passports, claiming to be on holiday and claiming Nagypapa as their son. He was questioned by the border guard. They passed. This occurred in various ways with his siblings and they were re-united with mother and father in a Hungarian town – Albertirsa where there was a small jewish community that his father found work.
The Jewish community was quite assimilationist. His father’s insistence on orthodox practices won the family no love. At the same time the public school he attended when he turned six had no Jews except he and his sister. He was bullied and beaten often both for his timid malnourished-ness as well as his shorn head with prominent orthodox ear locks.
Most striking to me of his tales of persecution is perhaps his story of being late. It points to those deep subtle persecutions which are often dismissed and overlooked in favour of more spectacular violence. He was a star pupil and loved school. His teacher marked him fairly but treated him coldly. She was a proud Hungarian nationalist, and as a Slovakian Jew, his bettering of his classmates was begrudged. Her anger towards him grew, however, because he was late every Monday and Thursday morning. According to his father’s practice a prayer service had to be held every Monday and Thursday morning. A ‘minyan’ of ten adult jewish males had to be present for the service to be held. The quorum was almost never met and Nagypapa was enlisted into spending each of those mornings running all over town trying to convince a few more congregation members to show up. He was inevitably late for school. But he had to meet his teachers demands for an explanation with silence that made him seem insubordinate and arrogant. In a town where jewishness and more so orthodoxy were scorned and belittled, he could not begin to explain about his father and a minyan -neither of which he himself believed in- to a proud Hungarian National. Nor could he hope to have it pass as an excuse. So he stood dumbly and received the rod.
Nagypapa describes himself living in three different worlds simultaneously at this time, none of which he felt at home in completely. One was the religious, rigorous, tedious and abusive world of his father, which he rejected, but parts of which he admired and was inspired by. One was the gentile world of school, where he saw other poor children like him, where he learned songs and stories of Hungary that he loved, but which rejected him as a Slovakian Jew. The third was his own private world in the fields, the attic, the chicken coop and other hiding places he could escape to where he mused about the world, and fell in love with nature, but felt alone and frightened of shadows and his imagination.
When he was ten Nagypapa moved away from home to go to school. He went to a Jewish seminary on singing scholarship. He was passed from jewish household to household to be fed – going to a different house each day for his meals. It was this time that he found one of his homes in revolutionary Marxism. I’ll quote him about it:
Charlie Mann, the alto soloist abandoned school and went to work in a bicycle repair shop. He was a jolly, strong, easy-going, very likable fellow. He took pity of me, as I was constantly crying. One day he told me, I will take you with me to a place, but you must never tell about it to anybody and whatever you see, you must keep it as secret forever. He took me to a decrepit courtyard in the back of it was an almost empty junky apartment with a few benches as furniture. There were pictures and some posters on the wall. It was Friday night. Soon young people began to arrive, mostly boys in their late teens, early twenties, a few girls of the same age. Their attire betrayed that they were workers or poor students. They were very friendly and treated me gently with interest and kindness.
Charlie had introduced me to a clandestine Marxist youth group. Despite my tender age, I was integrated in a cell with older kids which was led by a 17 year old student by the name of Lichtman whom I greatly admired. We met clandestinely and read, studied and discussed watered down scientific Marxist theories and leftist literature. In the spring we went on hikes in the thick forest that surrounded Debrecen. With my short but heavy life experiences I was destined to be part of this movement. It was a natural evolution of things for me that I felt I found a meaning of my life amidst these young people, to become a revolutionary, to dedicate myself to the struggle against injustice, oppression, exploitation, violence, and prejudice. We also had discussions about the peculiar situation of Jews in this configuration which befuddled us with its complexities because the Jewish proletariat was subject to all above, but in addition it also shared with the Jewish bourgeoisie the ethnic prejudice and hatred directed at them collectively as Jews. What is the solution??? Hungary was a fiercely anti-Semitic country. I remember agonizing a lot over this dilemma. In short, "the movement" became the center of my life. Charlie introduced me to the rudiments of clandestine practices of an underground movement, to watch out for informers, to see if anybody is following you, to maneuver your approaches when you go to a meeting or to the headquarters.
Hungary was led by a fascist regime from 1919 to the end of the second world war. Socialists were fiercely persecuted, and the movement had to remain absolutely underground. Eventually Nagypapa’s activities were discovered and he was expelled from school. Being expelled was a disaster for Nagypapa – for a moment his dreams were dashed. School had meant a lot to him, and he could not afford to go to any other. The seminary had been free. Further, he feared for his life. If word of his commitment to a communist reading group (then for his age ‘the movement’ was little more – apart from some hiking and singing) reached other authorities he could be jailed or killed. Cell leaders – also teenagers, had been discovered a year before. They had been arrested and thrown out the police station window. Their parents were told they committed suicide.
He eventually made it into another school by passing rigorous examinations. This time it was a more secular Jewish Gymnazium. He almost didn’t make it in, and was set back six months in his education, because of another little ethnic conflict. One of the entrance exams was in English. He had no way teaching himself English until a kind Presbyterian minister in his hometown helped tutor him with some books he’d scrounged. Unfortunately, the minister had learned his English at St. Andrews seminary in Scotland. Nagypapa’s examiner knew Oxford english. When Nagypapa opened his mouth his examiner was disgusted by his accent and failed him.
He would succeed six months later. He managed to pay by working various jobs and eventually becoming a Hebrew tutor, and then a respected tutor in general. One classmate began quietly bringing him lunch. In his second year – he could not afford to enroll and so stayed away – he classmates asked after him and then raised enough for his tuition amongst themselves and brought him back.
He graduated with dreams of becoming a filmmaker but he could not immediately afford to get to France or Italy where he would study. Also, by this time the second world war had begun. He became a shoemaker, and he became good enough that the skill, and the favour it won him, would save his life in the concentration camp.
In 1941 he was drafted into the Hungarian Army. He would not fight but was put into a Jewish Brigade of forced labourers. They were gradually stripped of their uniforms and status as citizens and finally as humans.
He survived the holocaust, he says, due to his experience with hardship and hard labour growing up, luck, and his bootmaking ability which was highly prized amongst the officers. His camp was liberated by Russian soldiers.
After the war he finally went to Paris. He wrote a letter from there to his cousins in Michigan. He’d never met them before, but had heard of them and tracked down their address. It’s a funny and amazing document – written in his school learned English, at 24 or 25 years old – he tells these distant familiar strangers about himself and asks about them. The majority of his family, including his parents, did not survive the holocaust. In the letter it is evident he is reaching out to any family he has left in the world, just for the sake of having family.
In Paris he met my nagymama – she was washing her socks at a fountain at the moment. She was an American girl, from a not very well off family in Michigan that had also found its way to hope in communism. She had collected money from friends to make the trip to france with a group to aid in restoration. After a week they agreed to be married. Then Nagymama went back to Michigan for two years to finish her university degree. The corresponded. Afterwards she returned to Paris and they were married. My aunt was born and they moved to Budapest; they were both devoted to helping build socialism in Hungary.
However, Nagypapa became frustrated in Hungary. Again, he almost did not make it across the border. Once he was in he was treated with constant suspicion because of his American wife. There was a fear that he was some sort of spy or counter-revolutionary. He got a job in a library, but wallowed in the same position for years. It was a bitter experience because he was quite ambitious.
In 1956, when my father was a two, there was an uprising in Hungary against the existing socialist regime. It was lead or sparked by the students. Nagypapa believes it to have been a real revolutionary attempt made by committed communists against a regime they considered to have strayed from the communist cause. The soviets soon moved in a squashed the uprising. They re-instated a pro-soviet status quo. But in that brief interim the borders became more permeable. My grandmother and baby father and aunt took the opportunity to defect. Nagypapa, for some reason stayed behind and followed later. I’m kicking myself right now for not remembering this particular story in more detail. But once again he was repulsed on several occasions by national lines. Finally he escaped through farmer’s fields, carrying his dress shoes in his hands.
Before he left Hungary, his younger brother, like all good brothers gave him a parting gift of a couple pairs of underwear. Nagypapa’s brother is the opposite case of Nagypapa. He did not have his ambitions blocked by the communist party. Instead in communist Hungary he found respect and rose to heights of responsibility that a poor jewish peasant could never have dreamed of otherwise. He was in the army. And his underwear were army issue, with ‘Hungarian Army’ printed in bold Hungarian script on their elastic.
Nagypapa is on a ship crossing the atlantic. He is coming from England and he is on his way to McCarthy era United States. In his bag are underwear boldly declaring their membership in the Peoples’ Republic of Hungary Armed Forces. His bunkmate is an American. Nagypapa begins to get nervous. Is his bunkmate just any American? Or is he C.I.A. – is there even a difference? Nagypapa is nervous and getting paranoid. Finally, after several days of amiable conversation, during which nagypapa is constantly on the verge of vomiting, it gets to be too much. In the middle of the night he sneaks out of his bunk anxiously clutching his underwear under his coat. He creeps up to the deck and with furtive looks around, shaking with fear, he casts his brother’s underwear as far as he can into the middle of the Atlantic. Nagypapa always laughed telling of that nervous purge and liked to wonder where those underwear ended up.
There was a huge picture and headline in the local newspaper when Nagypapa arrived in Michigan. The press snapped up any story of defectors from the Soviet Bloc. It made large of the family escaping the clutches of communism. The story Nagypapa told the reporters was that he had moved back to postwar Hungary because as an aspiring short-story writer he felt he could only make it in his mother-tongue. This was partially true. He would never say that he had moved there to help build socialism. In the united states he could never identify as a socialist and dream of a future. So began a new identity of the rigorous academic of library science.
Just two months ago, we were sitting down for lunch in Ann Arbor. We’ve gotten into the habit of singing a song before each meal (I mouth along). Nagypapa picks the songs usually. Being jumbled in ethnicities and nationalities {link?} all his life, he’s taken delight in learning folk songs and national anthems and passed them on to his grandkids. This time before we sat down he said, go and close the windows. We thought, hmm, it’s mighty hot, but we closed them. He said we are going to sing l’internationale. L’internationale is the anthem of the international communist movement. We did and when we were done he said okay go open the windows now, and we ate.
….After calling all this depth of life history to mind –being tossed between motherlands and ethnicities, being split amongst worlds, and rarely finding an unproblematic home- he said to me ‘And you know, Orion, what I finally concluded? That home is where the junk-mail finds you.’ He was grinning with pride at this bad joke, this little gem of ironic wisdom. Home is where your name is known, you have a place associated with you – and most importantly, people keep track of you. Too bad its people who want to sell you crap, but at least its people keeping track of you. So that’s why this blog is so great. We can all send each other periodic junk mail and feel a little kept track of and a little at home with each other. It’s such a nice bonus that the mail isn’t junk.
Thanks,
Orion
p.s. thanks especially if you made it through. I planned more humour - cause that happens with boundary crossings and Identity confusions --- but I dunno it went this way instead.
