The story is about a marriage, she thinks, sitting in her father’s consulting room. It’s the story of the true marriage, as told by the son of that marriage to his adolescent daughter who always heard it with a mixture of nostalgia, resentment and indifference, thinking it had nothing to do with her, and would never happen to her and still wishing she had been born into that other world where a girl was given into marriage simply by her father, like her grandmother was; knowing she could never be that kind of woman, and angry that it was denied to her because of the way the world had changed, changed already in her father’s youth before she was born, so that she was the product of that change: of a father who broke away from his parents’ traditional home, to whom his own marriage was a problem or a joke; who took her to America where she could dissociate herself from her childhood in Budapest, where she would not be tied by roots to land or people, because America was just this hard pavement given to push oneself away from and create one’s own truth, which was for the best, the young girl wanted to believe, since this was in fact her destiny; but still at odds with herself and always wondering as she listened to her father, what was this change, trying to grasp the awfulness that whatever her grandparents and all the generations before them experienced in their youth, giving their lives sanctity, mystery and meaning, had been irrevocably outruled and superseded in the name of Progress, Reason and Enlightenment. But what was it in fact? The reality always reduced to the streets of Garfield and her psychoanalyst father telling her about his religious childhood in Galanta and her inability to experience the world he was describing, to be touched by it, its irrelevance to her to whom he had not given such a childhood and the pointlessness of his telling her about it on Clinton Avenue.
She looks at the family tree before her now: it begins with a certain Jokab born in the village of Szered, 1730. Drawn up by various members of the Landsmann clan before the two brothers left for America in 1939, the document was recopied recently by her cousin Tibor, escaped freedom fighter, who drew the now eight generations in different colors. How strange to see the names Joshua, Toby, Jonathan, children of Sophie and Ezra, on that tree.
Counting from herself only to the seventh generation, the lives of two hundred and fifty-two individual men and women had to cross and a hundred and seventy-six nuptials had to be consummated in order for Sophie to exist. Of these hundred and seventy-six nuptials, all but one were hallowed. Whatever the individual failings of the persons involved, the stupidity or outright selfishness of the fathers who arranged these marriages, whatever the unhappiness of the couples, it was the objective validity of these marriages that impressed Sophie. As for her parents’ marriage, she had never been able to think of it as a true marriage.
The story is about a marriage, she thinks, sitting in her father’s consulting room: the false marriage of Rudolf Landsmann to Kamilla Ripper, as felt by the daughter, and her own marriage a few years after the end of the Second World War in New York City, which was to have been the true marriage. The marriage of Sophie Landsmann to Ezra Blind, the young rabbi and visiting scholar from Vienna, who had singled her out at a lecture, in its way as mysterious as her grandmother’s: two people, practically strangers entering upon a life commitment without any romance and the usual preliminaries of courtship, without so much as a dinner, a movie date, without a word of endearment having been spoken, or any kind of intimacy between them; oddly impersonal, formal, totally unsentimental and yet curiously free and comfortable with each other; a marriage that happened on the basis of a sermon he delivered to her alone on the evening they met and the next evening when she answered his marriage proposal by asking him to deflower her, the sermon and the proposal repeated for the next six weeks, always the same sermon delivered by the young rabbi from Vienna to the psychoanalyst’s daughter who argued against God and marriage, till the night she could not answer him: she wanted only to feel simple and comfortable like the night he deflowered her, she wanted all her life to be simple like that; and they became engaged. It’s the story of her marriage to a man to whom it mattered that she was the granddaughter of the former chief rabbi of Budapest, she thinks, still trying to understand what that marriage was all about, looking at the telephone beside her father’s chair to which he shuffled from his bed when she called at three a.m. (she didn’t know what time it was), Ezra at her side urging her to make the call to Garfield after he had cabled his parents, Ezra taking the receiver from her as soon as she had stated the fact, her father brokenly gasping, “What do you mean—getting married? Who is this Ezra? You can’t do this to me!...” Then Ezra’s voice, equal to the occasion, “Father, if I may call you Father...” speaking now in English then in Hebrew, already the son-in-law, proud and festive, prolonging the conversation in a tone of gentle irony, soon on joking terms with his
