It’s not good for the Jews, she heard people saying at her grandmother’s house. These Hungarian patriots would kill the Jews. Sophie said she wanted to fight for her country. They were all laughing. “They won’t let you, you’re a Jew.” Every morning she prayed for the resurrection of Hungary.
Hungary was where you were born and really belonged; Hungary was your home, not the little red villa but a great expanse of land under the sky that went on beyond the hills of Buda. It was great mountains, lakes, forests, rivers. The Danube flowed from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. Hungary was the lowlands: the shepherd with his flock and dog. It was peasant girls wearing lace-hemmed skirts and boots, and fishermen mending nets on the shores of Lake Batalon. Shepherds, the lowlands, huts, wolves, storks, peasant girls and boys were more truly Hungarian than Budapest. All these things she saw in pictures, and drew in her class notebook with great care and love, the storks especially. Storks standing on one leg in a swamp. Stork nests on chimneys. The stork feeding its little ones. Storks in flight, that was the hardest to draw.
Fireworks on St. Stephen’s Day, the celebration of the fifteenth of March when everyone wore a ruffled pin with the colors of the flag, some quite fancy with a crown in the center or the picture of the poet Petofi—all this belonged to the present together with NO, NO, NEVER stickers on every wall. Trianon was neither a place nor a treaty but an act of butchery: posters showed it clearly: a knife held in a hairy fist slicing the land. “Trianon” named the crime depicted on the poster. The answer to Trianon was: “No, no, never.” Hungary was the four seasons, but mostly spring when the storks returned from Africa to build their nests; when the grass was new and very green. The red, white and green pins worn on the fifteenth of March belonged to that sense of freshness and expectation in the same way as the first snowflower. It was very hard for Sophie to imagine that it could be as truly spring anywhere else as in Hungary—because in Hungary it was already in the colors of the flag—the red, white and green in the blue sky: the red blood of soldiers who died for their country, the white for the snow and clouds, and the green for grass.
Why did she have to go to Hebrew lesson when her father didn’t believe in God? One day she told her father she had had enough. “Humanity isn’t ready,” he pleaded. Sophie was ready. “Shh,” he said, “there is a patient in the waiting room.” She took the Hebrew Old Testament from her schoolbag and flung it to the ground. It landed open, the pages all messed up near his foot just at the threshold of his office. Her father picked it up without a word. She took her schoolbag and went to her room.
PASSOVER was at Grandmother’s, on the second floor of an apartment house in Pest, across the river. All the Landsmann family came to celebrate Passover at Grandmother’s. Nobody in the family, with the exception of the aunts who married rabbis in far places, was religious. Not even Uncle Benji who lived with Omama because he was a bachelor, and worked in a hospital. He joked about religion and didn’t observe the rituals outside of the house.
Religion was something old and shabby; it was a dusty ugly piece of furniture you were ashamed to have in your own house, even in the back room, but you couldn’t get rid of it any more than you could get rid of Grandmother.
But there was another side to this. Religion was embarrassing; but you were proud to be a Jew. Why? Superiority of being a Jew was so obvious to everyone, her family looked dumbfounded and disapproving when Sophie asked. Jews were different from all other people, couldn’t she see that? Of superior intelligence, they were too intelligent to be religious. Her father attributed his scientific mind, his atheism, to Jewishness. And conceded most reluctantly and with reservations that a non-Jew could be a truly great thinker. Specialists, technicians, artists, but when it came to facing the truth...Nietzsche was the one exception. Her father quoted Nietzsche: “I’m not genius, I am dynamite.”
It was very confusing. When she woke up in the morning or ran along the street jumping over puddles she wasn’t Jewish. But at Grandmother’s house you were Jewish: you did things religious Jews did. Being Landsmann and being Jewish were the same thing—that’s what was confusing. It was the way everybody talked, even Granny who was angry at them all, and wanted them to be different. If one of her children or grandchildren was praised voices rose, “Naturally, he is a Landsmann,” or, “A Jew is always smart.” A Landsmann child. A Jewish child. They meant the same. The only exception was Omama. She had her own excellence, neither Jew nor Landsmann. If anybody else in the family did something clever it was being Landsmann and Jewish. Omama made the greatest Passover feast because she was Omama.
Omama was a very angry, offended, suspicious old woman, sniffling at you from the moment you walked in, rubbing the material of your coat in her hand to assess the quality of the fabric, asking, How much did it cost? She looked you over, feeling your cheeks, arms, sides and hips like women at the butcher store buying a goose. “What’s
