In the Darkroom (31 page)

Such loss of blood required replenishment. In medieval Europe, Jews had long been accused of slaughtering virgin children (mainly prepubescent boys) and using their blood for ritualistic purposes. But starting around the fifteenth century, particular allegations began to recur: Jewish men, it was said, were seeking Christian blood to treat their menstrual bleeding, their flagging fertility, and their “wound of circumcision.” Jewish men of means, it was said, coated themselves with gentile blood on their wedding day. These beliefs seemed to take especial hold in Hungary. In 1494 in the Hungarian city of Nagyszombat, fourteen Jews were charged with drinking the blood of a Christian girl to stanch their “excessive bleeding” from circumcision, “arouse” their lovemaking, and “cure” their “monthly menses.” They were tortured, then burned at the stake. (Four decades later, the citizens of the same town pursued the same charge against another local Jew and succeeded in having the city's entire Jewish population expelled “for all times” by royal edict.) In 1529 in the Hungarian town of Bazin, Jewish men were burned to death following claims that they had killed a nine-year-old boy, cutting off his penis and testicles, and sucking out his blood with quills and small reeds. (The boy was later found in Vienna, alive and unmolested.) Even in the modern era in Hungary, as Joshua Trachtenberg noted in
The Devil and the Jew
, a conviction held sway “that Jews annually strangle a child or a virgin with their phylacteries, draw off the blood and smear the genitalia of their children with it to make them fertile.” Accusations of ritual murder—or “blood libel”—plagued Jewish communities in Central Europe in general, and Hungary in particular, late into the nineteenth century.

In early April 1882, a month after a fourteen-year-old Christian peasant girl disappeared in the northeastern Hungarian town of Tiszaeszlár, Jewish men in the local synagogue were accused of slitting her throat so they could mix her blood into their Passover matzohs. The girl's body was found two months later floating in the river, bearing no signs of violence; forensic examiners later concluded she had drowned, likely a suicide. The accused were eventually acquitted. Nevertheless, the incident became one of Europe's last and most sensational ritual-murder accusations, evidence that the Golden Age was already under siege. The “Tiszaeszlár affair” launched the continent's first anti-Semitic party, the Országos Antiszemita Párt, and provoked a nationwide wave of anti-Jewish hysteria and violence; mobs in two hundred cities and villages attacked Jews. To this day, as ethnographers discovered when they canvassed the region, many still believe that the Jews of Tiszaeszlár murdered a Christian teenager to get her blood. (In 2012, a right-wing MP rose in Parliament to protest that the Tiszaeszlár Affair had been “whitewashed” by Hungary's “Jewry and its then leaders.”) Cases like Tiszaeszlár made the equation explicit. Jews were dangerous precisely because of their weakness, which required them to prey on the vitality of healthier races. Blood libel, by conflating effeminacy and aggression through the body of the Jewish man, served as a linchpin between religious hatred and sexual phobia.

Anti-Semitism has many wellsprings, but the Jewishness that threatened the modern fascist state wasn't only Jewishness as religion. It was also Jewishness as gender. German publisher Theodor Fritsch crystallized the threat early on in his 1893 bestselling tome,
The Anti-Semitic Catechism
: “The Jew simply has a different sexuality from the Teutons; he can't and won't understand them. And when he tries to transfer his own attitudes to the Germans, this can lead to the destruction of the German soul.” (In the Viennese slang of the time, “the Jew” was, literally, the clitoris, and female masturbation was “playing with the Jew.”) A few decades later, when the future Nazi interior minister Wilhelm Frick introduced a bill in the Reichstag in 1930 to castrate gay men, he dubbed homosexuality “that Jewish pestilence.” Heinrich Himmler famously proclaimed Germany “a masculine state” and cinched that connection: “The conspiracy of homosexuals must be viewed side by side with the world Jewish conspiracy. … Both are bent on destroying the German state and race.” By then, as historian Sander Gilman observed, Europe had “witnessed not just the emergence of the modern Jew but the emergence also of the modern homosexual.” The twin births were “more than historical coincidence,” Gilman wrote. “Modern Jewishness became as much a category of gender as race.” It was something that Freud had suspected as well, years earlier, when he wrote in his 1909 analysis of a boy who feared the loss of his penis, “The castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism.”

The belief in Jewish male effeminacy would be internalized and promulgated by a host of leading Jewish writers, scholars, doctors, and politicians of the modern era. Ethnologist and rabbi Adolf Jellinek: “The Jews belong as one of those tribes that are both more feminine and have come to represent the feminine among other peoples. A juxtaposition of the Jew and the woman will persuade the reader of the truth of the ethnographic thesis.” Physician Heinrich Singer: “In general it is clear in examining the body of the Jew that the Jew most approaches the body type of the female.” Weimar industrialist and statesman Walther Rathenau, reproaching his fellow Jews in “Hear, O Israel”: “Look in the mirror! … If you recognize your poorly constructed frame—the high shoulders, the clumsy feet, the soft roundedness of form—as signs of bodily decadence, you will, for a few generations, work for your external rebirth.” And famously, Viennese philosopher and wunderkind Otto Weininger, whose 1903 bestselling sensation,
Sex and Character
, spelled out the equation between religion and gender most baldly: “The Jewish race is pervasively feminine. … The Jews are much more feminine than Aryans … and the manliest Jew may be taken for a female.” Weininger tried to escape his own verdict by converting to Protestantism—and more covertly (it seemed) sampling sex-gland extracts to fortify the heterosexual virility he feared was flagging. In any event, the cure didn't relieve a deeper despondency. In a testimonial that he titled “Condemnation,” he likened himself to a shuttered house: “What does it look like inside this house? A wild desperate activity, a slow terrifying realization in the dark, an eternal clearing-out of things. Do not ask how it looks inside the house.” A year later, in 1903, having moved to a rented room in the house where Beethoven had died, he wrote a letter to his father and brother announcing his imminent death, and then, at the age of twenty-three, shot himself in the chest. A few decades later, Weininger's ideas would enjoy a second coming under the Third Reich: its propaganda office quoted from his book in radio broadcasts, and Hitler, a great fan, declared of Weininger, “There was one decent Jew, and he killed himself.”

What had been the cost, I wondered, to one striving-to-assimilate Jewish boy growing up in such a system, under such an ethic? Young István had come of age in a culture where the men of his “race” were slandered as neurasthenic sissies and the women petted as paragons of feminine grace. As a child, he'd watched as his “diva” mother blended in so effortlessly in her furs and jewels, charming her way through the Budapest social scene and flirting with the future Christian prime minister at Ráday 9's German patisserie. And then as a teenager, he'd witnessed his man-about-town “cultured” father reduced to a fearful fugitive, unable to save his family when that liquid brew of distorted identities calcified into racial genocide. Surely the experience would have taken a toll.

My father admitted to none. Anyway, she maintained, whatever rage she might have felt in the past was dissolved by her new incarnation, her latest identity. “Why would I be angry?” she said. “Everyone is very nice to me. I am accepted better now as a woman than I ever was as a man.”

“And as a Jew?”

The dismissive hand swatted the air. “No one sees me as a Jew,” she said. “Because
I
don't see me as a Jew.”

I was dubious. I remembered from my youth all her earlier protestations that seemed to protest too much: the oversized Christmas tree with its giant nativity star, the Little-Drummer-Boy greeting cards, the booming oratorios, the annual pilgrimages to Easter Holy Mass. I didn't buy her claims of equanimity now any more than then.

When I was a teenager, my best friend, a devout Catholic, became enamored of the Charismatic Renewal movement. Its adherents gathered in the social room in the local St. Patrick's Church to call on the Holy Spirit for prophecy and faith healing. I tagged along a few times to watch the spectacle at what were largely female prayer meetings, the suburban housewives and their daughters speaking in tongues and laying on hands to cure the afflicted. As always, I regarded myself as the inquiring reporter, on the lookout for a story. The senior parish priest, a crotchety traditionalist who took a dim view of glossolalia, had retired by the time the Charismatic Renewal craze took hold, and a young and more sympathetic Rock Hudson idol had assumed his place and pulpit. My friend and her mother, perhaps hoping I'd be inspired to convert, arranged for me to have a personal audience with the priest. I mentioned the invitation to my mother. She made the mistake of mentioning it to my father. She found the prospect amusing. He did not.

As I was drifting off to sleep that night, my door flew open. My father stormed in. “I created you,” he shouted as he yanked me out of bed. He grabbed me by the neck and began knocking my head against the floor. His torrent of wrath was largely incoherent, but his point was clear—that he wouldn't have a Catholic child. “I created you,” he repeated as my head hit the boards. “And I can destroy you.”

Thus did one daughter come to know that her father was a Jew.

—————

My father broke into a run, pounding across the plaza to the entrance of a ten-story commercial building a few blocks from the Danube on the Buda side of the river, skirt rustling, black pumps clacking on the concrete. She jammed a leg in the glass door just as it was closing behind a mail carrier. We had arrived at her doctor's office.

“They lock the entrance,” she called over her shoulder. “
Come on
.” We took the elevator to an upper floor.

The physician's quarters were at the end of a long tatty corridor. The interior wasn't much better. In the waiting area, two sagging vinyl couches were pushed up against opposing walls. The scruffy carpet was balding and matched the mud color of the couches. A line of baby photos was thumbtacked to one wall. There was no reception window and no receptionist.

“Where did you find this doctor?” I asked.

“Phone book,” my father said. She settled on a couch and leaned down to adjust her white anklets, which she was wearing over her nylons. “He takes good care of me, because, you know, he brings babies into the world. … Waaall, I give him a big bribe.” She meant a tip, or the euphemistic term of art, a
paraszolvencia
or “pseudo-solution” payment, standard practice in a country where doctors are poorly paid, even in Budapest's tonier districts.

“How much?” I asked.

“Ten thousand forints.” A $40 gratuity.

I flipped through the few periodicals stacked on a chipped end table. They were back issues of sailing magazines.

“Don't you want one of these?” My father was pointing at the baby pictures.

I pretended not to hear, and studied the large plaque to the right of them: dr. misley endre, szülészet-nőgyógyászat. Dr. Endre Misley, Obstetrics and Gynecology.

The inner door swung open before she could ask me again. A very tan and silver-haired gent in an Izod shirt and doctor's smock greeted us.

“
Kezét csókolom
,” he said to me. I kiss your hand. And then, turning to my father, “
Kezét csókolom.
”

My father grinned and gave me a nudge. We followed the gynecologist into his consulting room, a small space with a cluttered desk and a credenza lined with sports trophies. My father settled her pocketbook on her lap and began chatting away in Hungarian. The bronzed Dr. Misley beamed and nodded affably. After a while, he made some notes on a prescription pad, tore out the sheet, and handed it to my father. A refill for her estrogen. That was the thing we'd come for. My father deposited the slip in her purse.

“I was just telling Dr. Misley,” my father said, turning to me, “that I am the ‘mother' of you.” She made air quotes with her fingers. Pause. “Who is
not
a mother.”

“Who?”

“
You
. Not yet anyway.”

How did he get those trophies? I asked. I was changing the subject.

“Dr. Misley is a
greaaat
yachtsman,” my father explained. “He has a twenty-foot boat, and he's won many prizes.”

She translated her flattery to Captain Misley, who beamed some more.

“He sails in Bavaria,” my father continued. “Waaall, he's German.”

My father turned back to Dr. Misley and carried on for a while, pointing a finger at me from time to time.

“I'm telling him about your problem,” she said.

“I don't have a problem.”

“There may be physical reasons.”

“There are no—”

“My mother smoked when she was pregnant,” my father interrupted. “Maybe that's why.”

“Why what?”

My father gestured toward her body. “Why I'm so weak. She had that miscarriage, you know.”

Dr. Misley put away his prescription pad. I pulled out my reporter's notebook.