A Chosen Few (51 page)

Whenever he was outside, Herzog’s yarmulke was always discreetly covered by a hat. But although his dress was not Hasidic, he looked clearly like an Orthodox Jew. He had short blond hair and was clean-shaven and serious-looking, with his wire-rimmed glasses. What no one knew about him, unless they were one of the few who went to services in the small, soiled, shop-worn synagogue on Dessewffy Street—a plain room whose only architectural detail was a painted design on the peeling walls—was that he had a rich lyric tenor voice.

After the Communists fell from power, Herzog, who had always circumcised the few male babies born into the Orthodox community, was suddenly in demand for the circumcision of teenage boys. They would decide to be bar mitzvahed and would learn that they were supposed to be circumcised and the family would ask Herzog to do it. But in the course of interviewing the family, it often became clear that the boy was not really Jewish. In most of these cases the father but not the mother was Jewish. Herzog turned down an average of twenty circumcisions a year for boys who he found were not Jews.

A
SIDE FROM
this little Orthodox group, Budapest Jewry belonged to the Neologue movement, a Hungarian variation that, like the American conservative movement, was fairly traditional with some liberal tendencies. Neologue was all Zoltán Gardos and Kati Kelemen knew, and it felt too conservative for them. Then they met an
English couple at the rabbinical seminary. The English couple had noticed that there were a number of young people at the Kiddush who seemed uncomfortable and out of place. “And this,” as Gardos said, “is how we met other young Jews from the big world outside.” For the first time in his life he was now free to have contacts in other countries. He and his wife went to England, and they made a discovery that greatly surprised them—“Other young people consider themselves Jews, and they don’t live in Israel and they are not even Orthodox!” It was a new kind of Jew to him. Until the trip to England he had thought he had three options: He could move to Israel or he could stay in Hungary; if he stayed in Hungary, he could attend a Neologue synagogue, which to his mind was Orthodox; or he could not be Jewish. In London, he and Kati discovered liberal Judaism, where the synagogue had Western music rather than traditional chanting and where women were called up to read Torah. They were astonished to find a Judaism that corresponded to the ideas of women’s equality that had been a part of their Communist upbringing. And they were not made to feel inadequate because of their ignorance of Hebrew and customs.

Kati and Zoltán decided to bring this new kind of Judaism to Budapest. They would start an entirely new community of liberal Judaism. As a woman, Kati would not be allowed to attend the rabbinical seminary in Budapest but would have to go back to England and study. She would either become a full rabbi or at least study for a year to become a religious leader.

They began by holding Havdalah services, the pretty little ceremony that ends the Sabbath. After the short service they had study sessions. But the official Community was not happy. The rabbinate declared that nothing liberal would be accepted, and it barred the liberals from establishing a formal Community of their own. In the official Community’s statement, it declared that liberal Judaism led to assimilation. Hungary had experience with assimilation before the war, and what happened to all those assimilated Jews? The Holocaust had proven that assimilation does not work, the Community argued. They could never be “true Hungarians.”

G
YULA
G
AZDAG
left Hungary in spring 1989 to teach film at UCLA. There he got Hungarian newspapers and read about his friends, marginalized rebels, many of whom were now deputies in parliament. The film institute had thrown out the old bureaucracy
that had been censoring them. It wrote to Gyula and asked him to come back and head the film department. In May 1991 he returned to what seemed like a different country. But in the new Hungary Gyula found a different obstacle to his film work. The state, in the process of denationalizing everything from manufacturing to pastry shops, also wanted to stop funding films. That meant Hungarian filmmakers would have to get financing from other sources, of which there were few in Hungary. Foreign financing was also difficult because Hungary was a small country with a small local market and a language no one else understood. In the future Hungarian films would have to have some kind of foreign appeal to attract foreign investors, or they just wouldn’t get made.

Though László Herzog saw a trend toward more religious education for Jews in Hungary, neither Gyula Gazdag nor George Lippner gave religious training to their children, even though they both had Jewish wives. “They are aware of the fact that they are Jewish,” said Gyula. “But it is not natural for me to deal with religion.”

George Lippner felt the same way. His two children did not attend the Jewish school where he was principal. Still, he did not give them the same upbringing that his parents gave him: He did not want to teach them that it was dangerous to be Jewish and something to keep to themselves. “I tell them that if you are a Jew, you cannot avoid being a Jew. If somebody else wants to pick on you or say something rude because you are a Jew, he will not ask you whether you think you are a Jew or not. So you have to be ready.”

Gyula was ready. He listened to the speeches about “true Hungarians,” read about the occasional murder of a gypsy, and found himself for the first time thinking about emigrating with his family. “It’s very strange. I had many conflicts and many problems during the former regime. But I never thought of leaving. I felt that I was a part of this culture, that all my roots were here, and that I couldn’t live in another country. But when it becomes about life and death, then you don’t think in these terms, and somehow you have to think about how deeply your roots go and how the whole society moved away from all those things which kept me here.”

G
YÖRGY
K
ONRÁD
, now an international literary figure and the first Central European to head the writers’ advocacy group PEN,
liked to meet people at sunset on the top floor of the Budapest Hotel and stroll on the circular outdoor terrace of this drab cylindrical high-rise. He would watch the Pest spires turn to silhouettes, the lights come on along the Buda Mountains, and the Danube turn black, its rebuilt bridges once again looking permanent, with lights that sparkled in the mist rising from the river. “It’s an ugly building but a beautiful view,” he would say with his impish smile while gazing at the voluptuous epicenter of his Hungarian-speaking universe, hard fought for and—for the moment—won.

At 60, he was in a new marriage and starting a second family. He was again going to synagogues on some occasions. He liked the atmosphere there, the way men wandered wrapped in their prayer shawls chanting a little in Hebrew and gossiping a little in Hungarian. It reminded him of Berettyó and the vanished Jewish world where he had held strings at his hip to fool the rabbi into thinking he wore religious garments.

His two sons, five and six, were of late contemplating the possibility of death. They thought it was unfair that God never dies and yet expected them to. They were also bothered by the story of Adam and Eve. They wanted to know why God punished Adam for wanting knowledge of good and evil. If we have to distinguish between good and evil, we have to know about them. So why was God angry at Adam? The two boys were increasingly suspecting that God was not always fair.

I
t was indicative of the baroque quality of repression in Czechoslovakia that playing jazz was a way to oppose the regime. Jazz was the Czechoslovakian equivalent to Hungarian filmmaking, the dissident activity that went just far enough to make opposition clear but not so clear that it was crushed. All the regime had to do was ignore the jazz musicians and they would have been reduced to being jazz musicians. But jazz was Western, from America, imperialist, decadent. Power, unchecked for long enough, will invent its own enemies to feed its addiction to crushing them.

František and Alice Kraus’s son, Tomás, became a lawyer. But he also played drums—rock and jazz and the jazz/rock fusion that was popular at the time. His group not only played, it brought in groups from the West, becoming a major link to imperialist culture. The government objected so vehemently that the group, which began in the early 1970s as “unofficial culture,” ended the decade as a famous dissident organization.

Artists of all kinds were at the heart of a dissident movement born out of the postinvasion repression. Writers had enjoyed the freedom of the Dubˇek era, and as their works were banned they formed into a tightly linked underground. Playwright Václav Havel, novelist Ivan Klima, playwright Pavel Kohout—in all, about fifty writers met regularly, planned underground work, smuggled manuscripts to the West, and celebrated New York and Vienna
opening nights in their Prague apartments. Among these writers was Karol Sidon, a playwright and screenplay writer who had collaborated on films with a celebrated Slovak director, Juro Jakubisko. During the brief Dubˇek era, they had won first prize at a film festival in Pilsen.

At the time of the 1968 Soviet invasion Sidon worked for an underground newspaper that tried to inform people of the true events of that summer. The new hard-line regime still permitted him to write for film and television, even though it knew about his newspaper activities and that he contributed to a small underground theater group. Because of his youth the government thought he might still come around. But by 1970, party officials would visit Sidon and casually suggest that he change his writing or face having all his work banned. He ignored the warnings, and soon he could not work as a writer anymore and had to find manual labor. For a while he was a coal stoker in a steel mill. Havel and Klima were also working such jobs.

In 1977 a defiant declaration of human rights, Charter 77, was circulated. Twelve hundred people—a wide range of academics, disgruntled Communists, and religious activists—had signed this dissident declaration between the late 1970s and late 1980s. But the authors, Havel and Kohout, and all of the original signers, including Sidon, came under intense harassment. They would regularly be arrested for a day or a few days and then be released. It was impossible to hold down any job. Sidon could not even be a coal stoker anymore. Each time he was arrested, government agents, strangers in dull suits, would arrive at his apartment and search it, shuffling through his and his family’s possessions, upsetting his wife and terrifying his three children.

Sidon had been thinking more and more about his Jewishness. Technically, he was not a Jew because his mother was Christian. His Jewish father had been deported and killed when Karol was only two years old. He and his mother had survived in hiding. After the war his mother had remarried another Jew, and while Karol was not Jewish, his stepfather and the legend of his father gave him a sense of Jewishness. He had grown up thinking of his home as a Jewish household, but he had no understanding of Judaism being a religion. In the Dubˇek era he was one of many people in Prague who had started pursuing an interest in Judaism. But Sidon’s interest did not wane with the normalization, and in 1978 he began studying under Viktor Feuerlicht. In time he had a symbolic,
though legally dubious, conversion. His wife, and therefore his children, were already Jewish.

It was not a good time to be a Jew, but since Sidon was already a Charter 77 founder, he had little standing to lose. It seemed that one day soon he would be arrested and not released. And he could not work. The regime wanted it to be impossible for him to live in Czechoslovakia anymore. Other writers, such as Kohout, had been permitted to leave and then were not let back in. When in 1982 Sidon was offered a scholarship in Jewish studies at Heidelberg, he moved there with his wife and children. Someday, he reasoned, the regime would fall and he would go home.

In 1984, Tomás Kraus’s jazz group was dissolved, and three of its members were sentenced to two-year prison terms. Kraus went on with life, marrying the following year, hoping for changes, not certain what to do. He did not think playing jazz was as dangerous as being active in the Jewish Community. People would be called in and interrogated for being seen at the synagogue: Why are you going to the synagogue? Who did you meet? Why? What did you talk about?

T
HE OVERTHROW
of the government was almost an accident. By November 1989, it had already happened in Poland and Hungary. Then the wall had been torn open in Berlin, and people were selling chunks of it as souvenirs of the past. The unthinkable now seemed possible, even inevitable. But Czechoslovakians were still playing the game they had long played, pushing the limits—some jazz, some theater, an underground newspaper, a peaceful apolitical public event—going as far as they could without spending time in prison. Some miscalculated and really did go to prison.

The first mistake the regime made was on November 17, 1989. On that day fifty years before, nine Czech students had been executed and all Czech universities were shut down by the Germans. In 1989 a march was organized to commemorate the event. This was possible: It was politically correct to commemorate antifascist struggles, and the demonstration had been organized by the state-backed student union. But the regime seemed to panic when they saw this march attended by fifty thousand people, many of them young. Government leaders realized that this demonstration was against them. Having seen what happened to soft Communists in neighboring countries, the Czechoslovakian regime decided to
show toughness, and it unleashed the police with a violence seldom seen in Prague. More than seventy were injured, and an unconfirmed rumor spread through Prague of four deaths.