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“Can you help me with something?”
My father was standing with her back to the door. She was in her bedroom slippers but still wearing her dress.
“I can’t get the zipper … Will you do it?”
I stood there for a moment, then reached for the zipper pull. I stopped when it was halfway down her back.
“You can get it from there,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
I watched her pad back down the hall. And wondered: how could someone so hidden be so intent on being unzipped? If, indeed, that’s what she wanted. All these exposures and disclosures seemed, literally, skin deep.
In the days to follow, my father continued her guided tour of surface ephemerality, leading me through the dresses in her closets, the lingerie in her bureau drawers, the cosmetics in her vanity table, the estrogen patches and dilation rods in her medicine chest, all the secret curiosities in her many Cabinets of Wonder. I couldn’t tell if she thought she was dispensing revelations or distracting me from the real secrets. Look at me, but don’t look at me. As the daughter of a photographer, I knew that letting light into a darkroom can illuminate the evidence or destroy it, depending on your timing. My father and I were in a battle over time, past and present. She wanted me to admire the decorations in Stefi’s new display windows. I wanted to know the contents of another sealed chamber: the lockbox in the basement.
7 (#ulink_b0f62386-8adb-5b2b-82ca-addf032f0062)
His Body into Pieces. Hers. (#ulink_b0f62386-8adb-5b2b-82ca-addf032f0062)
On the sixth day of the visit, my father decided to lift the house arrest. “If you want to see something authentically Hungarian,” she said, “we could go to the Castle District.”
The Castle District, the former domicile of nobility, sits atop the two-hundred-foot-high limestone escarpment of Castle Hill, overlooking the Danube on the Buda side. It is now a high-toned tourist trap, home to the Royal Palace and, perched above that, the colonnaded Fisherman’s Bastion, a viewing terrace and promenade of turrets and parapets from which seemingly every panoramic picture postcard of Budapest is taken. It is as removed as my father’s own redoubt from the city I wanted to see. Still, it was out of the house.
We rode over in Der California Exclusive in the early afternoon. My father dressed for the excursion in a polka-dotted skirt, white-heeled sandals, and her usual pearl earrings. “Before I decided on Stefánie,” my father told me, “I was thinking of naming myself Pearl.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I like how it sounds,” she said. “Pearl” in Hungarian, which also serves as a female name, is Gyöngy. I flashed on one of my father’s attempts at forced feminization fiction, titled Gyöngyike Becomes a Maid: Confession of Sissy Gyöngyike—Let the Party Start. “Anyway,” my father said, “I love pearls.”
“And Stefánie?” I pressed. I knew that it was also the name of one of my paternal grandmother’s three sisters. “Did you pick it for your aunt Steffy?”
My father shrugged. No more divulgences were forthcoming.
There was no place to park and we made many circles in the camper before my father backed into a space of questionable legality. “It doesn’t matter if I get a ticket,” she said. “The camper’s registered in Rosenheim. They can’t get me.” She reached for the two cameras she’d brought, strapping one to each shoulder. I put my notebook in my back pocket. I was wearing blue jeans.
We descended the cobblestoned steps to the broad forecourt of the Royal Palace, a magisterial muddle of Neo-Medieval and Neo-Baroque architecture, topped off by a gigantic dome in the shape of a studded helmet. Presiding over the parade grounds was a heroic equestrian statue of Prince Eugene of Savoy, whose armies beat back the Turks from Hungarian territory in 1717, and a giant bronze of the Turul, the mythical bird that, according to legend, engendered the country’s thousand-year Magyar rule, the fabled “Hungarian Millennium.” The Royal Palace was now showcase to the National Library, the National Gallery, and the Budapest History Museum, a diadem set atop the city, containing the glittering artifacts of Hungarian antiquity and culture. I was pleased. Not only had I convinced my father to leave her own castle on the hill, I’d managed to get her to visit a palace that housed her past—or at least her nation’s past. Or at least the past her nation claimed to have, for its history was as shrouded in fancy as my father’s.
The Hungarian Millennium is said to have begun when Árpád and six other Magyar chieftains rode over the mountains from somewhere in the East and conquered the great Carpathian Basin sometime in the ninth century, setting the stage for their heirs to establish a Christian monarchy, the Hungarian Kingdom, sometime around the year 1000. What actually happened is hard to say. The story of the “Magyar Conquest” is derived from the Gesta Hungarorum, an account written three hundred years later by a royal notary identified as P. dictus magister (“P. who is called master”), who drew on folk ballads, medieval romances, and the Bible to create a cast of Magyar heroes and the enemies that they allegedly vanquished. The Árpád dynasty, in any event, was extinct by 1301. Kings drafted from foreign dynasties (but generally claiming a drop of Árpád blood) occupied the throne for the next two centuries. And for even more centuries the country was ravaged by invasions, defeats, and occupations from foreign forces—Mongols, Turks, Russians, Habsburg Austrians, Germans, and Russians again. With few exceptions, Hungary’s liberators, like so many of the country’s most celebrated figures, were “foreign,” too. As Paul Lendvai observed in The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat:
One of the most astounding traits of Hungarian history, subsequently suppressed or flatly denied by nationalistic chroniclers, is that the makers of the national myths, the widely acclaimed heroes of the Ottoman wars, the political and military leaders of the War of Independence against the Habsburgs, the outstanding figures of literature and science, were totally or partly of German, Croat, Slovak, Romanian or Serb origin.
In other words, not Magyar.
Hungary achieved its cultural zenith in Europe’s Belle Époque—under the rule of the Austrian Habsburgs. In 1867, Habsburg emperor Franz Josef loosened the reins by creating the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy—usually called the Dual Monarchy—a compromise that granted Hungary a large measure of self-determination and ushered in a cultural and economic revival. The country’s long sense of itself as an autonomous kingdom seemed validated, though the Dual Monarchy’s sole monarch was still Franz Josef. The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I finally brought full independence, albeit with destruction hot on its heels.
The Treaty of Trianon, the 1920 peace agreement reached at the Grand Trianon Palace in Versailles, forced Hungary to relinquish a whopping three-fifths of its population and two-thirds of its landmass to the successor states of Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Austria. If the nation was thus constricted, its self-image as sacrificial lamb was confirmed. “We are the most forsaken of all peoples on this earth,” Hungary’s national poet Sándor Petőfi had written in the mid-nineteenth century. After Trianon, Hungary became all the more a martyr among nations, a people identified by its stigmata. “The realm held together by the Holy Crown has been dismembered, and the lopped off limbs of the Holy Crown’s body are faint with the loss of blood,” jurist Kálmán Molnár pronounced at the time, in language as typical as it was overheated. “In a swoon, they await death or resurrection.” To Hungary’s more recent irredentists, Trianon remains the unholy desecration, a devastating wound, an appalling act of national identity theft undimmed by the passage of more than eighty years.
My father and I headed for the Hungarian National Gallery, which was offering a retrospective of Mihály Munkácsy. The celebrated Hungarian painter had been born and buried in Hungary, but little else. Born Michael von Lieb to German parents, he was trained in Munich and Düsseldorf, spent most of his career in Paris, and died in a sanitarium in Germany. Nonetheless, he was one of Hungary’s most venerated artists—venerated especially for having been celebrated as a “great Hungarian” in the world beyond Hungary. After Munkácsy’s death in 1900, the authorities gave him a state funeral in the city’s sacred Heroes’ Square, his body displayed, beside the plaza’s galloping statuary of the seven Magyar chieftains, on a forty-five-foot-high catafalque surrounded by flaming bronze torches.
The museum’s ticket taker, another crabby granny, scowled at my father as she handed us our passes. I couldn’t tell if the disapproval registered; my father gave no sign. In the exhibition hall, I gravitated to Munkácsy’s earliest efforts, bleakly realistic renderings of impoverished peasant life. (The desperate conditions of the rural Magyar populace, deep in semifeudal penury well into the twentieth century, earned Hungary the moniker “The Country of Three Million Beggars.”) My father frowned; this period didn’t put Hungary in a “positive” light. “You’re making too much of that,” she said, pulling my sleeve as I lingered before paintings of careworn women gathering firewood and tending to hungry children. My father was eager to move on to Munkácsy’s later and more famous creations: the salon portraits of fashionable Austro-Hungarian aristocracy and the epic extravaganzas of biblical dramas and victorious scenes from the Magyar Conquest. “This is authentic Munkácsy,” my father said, directing me to the walls that displayed the artist’s final blast of bombastry.
When we’d exhausted the Technicolor lollapaloozas, she led the way to the permanent collection, a labyrinth of galleries dominated by lugubrious melodramas of Magyar affliction displayed in heavy gilt-edged frames. I sped through the next dozen halls showcasing scenes from Hungary’s genesis—from the heralded arrival of Prince Árpád to the nineteenth-century revolution led by Lajos Kossuth, “The Father of Hungarian Democracy”—and sank onto a bench in a corridor to wait for my father. The room was hushed and dark; light filtered weakly through a set of high grated windows. I thought of catacombs, and that endless trip we took as a family to Hungary in 1970, when my father was so insistent that we tour the nation’s cathedrals and monasteries. Endless, that is, from the perspective of an eleven-year-old who experienced the sepulchral quarters, the cloying smell of candle wax, and the echo of heels clattering on yet another cold marble ambulatory as her own private purgatory. Why, I wondered, did we never visit a synagogue?
There was no sign of my father. A stout matron in a guard uniform inspected me darkly from her wooden chair in the corner. Maybe it was me. Maybe these battle-axes weren’t staring at my father in a dress, after all. Maybe they disapproved of a girl wearing jeans. Or maybe they just didn’t like foreign women. After a while, I got tired of the evil eye and retraced my steps. I found my father many rooms back, transfixed before Gyula Benczúr’s The Baptism of Vajk, an operatic depiction of the tenth-century christening of Hungary’s first king. The Magyar tribesman Vajk kneels bare-shouldered before the holy font and gilded chalice, about to shed his pagan name and receive his new Christian one: István, Stephen. My father’s namesake.
I studied the baptism of the former Vajk over the former István’s shoulder.
“Isn’t it a bit”—I searched for the proper word—“histrionic?”
“It’s a work of true greatness,” she said with a flourish of matching grandiosity, her polka-dot skirt billowing with her enthusiasm. “It’s characteristically Hungarian.”
In an eggheaded attempt to prepare for my visit, I’d read István Bibó’s scathing inspection of “Hungarianism,” in an essay published at the end of World War II. The political scientist saw his country’s identity as Potemkin, a society “deceiving itself” and held together by little more than “wishful” thinking and “frills and veneers.” “Today’s Hungarians are among Europe’s least well-defined groups,” Bibó wrote—and Hungarianism a “grand illusion.” As I recalled Bibó now, the afternoon’s displays threatened to turn hallucinogenic. Everything we were looking at seemed oddly, fatally confectionary, the face of a nation montaged onto one fantasia after another: The anointed Saint Stephen was the “patriarch” whose patrimony had no heirs; Prince Eugene was the (French-born) Austrian Imperial Army general who freed Hungary from the Ottoman Empire only to hand it over to the Habsburgs; Lajos Kossuth was the Father of Hungarian Democracy whose 1848 bid for Hungarian independence (celebrated every March 15 on National Day) was stillborn; the Turul was mythical herald to a thousand-year Magyar reign that never hatched.
I considered the illusions hanging from these walls. As we worked our way back through the echoing galleries, I looked at my father in her polka dots and the image that flashed momentarily through my brain was of a tour guide in theme-park costume, leading me through a tarted-up history that concealed a darker past, a Tinker Bell guide to a storybook culture, neither person nor place what they really were. What the Magyars were was humiliated. Just about every power that had ever dealt with Hungary—whether the Mongols in 1241 or the Turks in 1526 or the Austrians in 1711 and 1848 or the Soviets in 1956—had seen fit to kick it in the teeth.
In the next station of our Castle Hill cultural tour (the Budapest History Museum), my father lingered admiringly before another hagiographic painting of another lionized Hungarian. This one was at least more modern than Vajk. He was dressed in a naval uniform, pinned with rows of medals: the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, whose governance of the country from 1920 to 1944 encompassed the arc of my father’s youth. Her reverence for the man who presided over the deportation of nearly a half-million Jews galled me.
A make-believe royal, I pointed out. (Horthy was elected Regent by the Hungarian National Assembly in 1920, intended as a placeholder for the exiled Habsburg king, who never reclaimed the throne.) And what’s with the “Admiral”? A navy in a landlocked state?
“You don’t know anything,” my father said. “Trianon took away the Hungarian coast. A tragedy. A catastrophe.”
She was right about the coast. The treaty at the end of World War I, which dealt Hungary the harshest penalties of any warring state (including Germany), had stripped the nation of its seaports, along with 65 percent of its waterways, 88 percent of its forests, and all of its coal, salt, and silver mines. In the Second World War, Horthy’s Hungary would ally itself with the Axis in hopes of resurrecting “the lost territories” (and Hitler, indeed, returned two land parcels that Trianon had lopped off). When my father and I would finally make it down into the city, I’d notice the ubiquitous image—plastered on walls, affixed to bumpers, appliquéd onto backpacks—of the map of pre-Trianon “Greater Hungary,” also known as “the mutilated motherland.” The map featured the nation as a butchered torso, surrounded by its four severed appendages. The defenders of Hungarian honor call Trianon “the amputation.”
“It destroyed the motherland!” my father said now, her voice rising. “It cut his body into pieces.”
“Hers,” I corrected.
My father hiked up her purse on a camera-burdened shoulder and headed for the exit.
We left the museum and, instead of descending to the streets of the city I so wished to visit, we climbed even higher to Fisherman’s Bastion. My father wanted to take some “panoramic” pictures.
A turnstile blocked the entrance. You had to buy a token if you wanted to see the view. My father forked over some forints, and we were admitted to the Neo-Romanesque stone arcade punctuated by viewing turrets, viewing balconies, and seven viewing lookout towers (in honor of the seven Magyar tribes). Despite the name, the bastion wasn’t built for fishermen; it was designed in the 1890s as a viewing terrace. “It was meant to be like a fairy tale,” as one chronicler put it, to “feel like history rather than be history.” Follow the Yellow Brick Road, I thought, as I morosely trailed my father’s footsteps.
She stopped at one of the designated lookout towers to take some shots of the city across the river. “A good thing I brought the telephoto,” she said, wrestling the lens out of her purse. While she clicked away, I leaned through a vaulted arch to bask in the fading autumn sun and, despite my cynicism, admire the view. The Danube was a broad dusky ribbon under the city’s seven bridges. To my left, I could see the enchanted greensward of Margaret Island and, beyond it, the approaching river’s long bend to the south.
On the far shore, Pest was a hazy blur. The Hungarian Parliament, a Neo-Gothic wedding cake encrusted with half a million precious stones and nearly a hundred pounds of gold, took up nine hundred feet of prime waterfront real estate. This temple to democracy, the largest parliament building in Europe and the third largest in the world, was built in the late nineteenth century, when Franz Josef reigned and less than 10 percent of the Hungarian population could vote.
On this side of the river, the red incline train, the Sikló (“the Little Snake”), was inching down the cliff. Directly below, the Chain Bridge arced across the water toward the Neo-Renaissance splendor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The learned society was inaugurated by the same man who spearheaded the construction of the Chain Bridge, Count István Széchenyi, a preeminent Hungarian statesman of the nineteenth century. Széchenyi’s quest for an authentic national culture would end in personal despair. “We have no national habits,” Széchenyi lamented once. “Our existence and knowledge depend on imitation.” Subsequent seekers of Hungarianism have been equally riddled with doubt. They have generated two centuries of literature, journalism, and oratory devoted to the question that doubles as the title for many of their angst-ridden jeremiads: “Who Is a Hungarian?” Long before Erik Erikson coined the phrase, Hungarians were having an identity crisis.
My father traced the descent of the shiny red funicular with her camera lens. “I was so happy when they reopened the Sikló,” she said. “The first time I saw it, I cried.”
I asked why and she said, “Because the Russians had destroyed it.” The Sikló was bombed, along with pretty much everything else along this stretch of the Danube, during the Siege of Budapest, the fifty-day Soviet campaign in the winter of 1944–45 to evict the die-hard Waffen-SS and Hungarian troops bunkered along Castle Hill.
“Would you have preferred the other side won?” I asked.
“You have a very stupid American concept of this.”
“Enlighten me.”
“The Russians destroyed everything that was Hungarian.”
Later I would pick up a brochure on the history of the Sikló and take a perverse pleasure in finding that it was put back in service in 1986, under Soviet rule. I didn’t bring it up with my father. By then I knew better than to stick a pin in Hungarian “grand illusion.”
8 (#ulink_f4319e9a-30aa-540c-aa3b-f0fa200f65f5)
On the Altar of the Homeland (#ulink_f4319e9a-30aa-540c-aa3b-f0fa200f65f5)
I learned to time my more probing questions to my father’s golden hour. She was at her most expansive over late-afternoon coffee, which she took with a slice of Linzer torte or Sacher torte or Dobos torte or some other confection evoking the Austro-Hungarian era. Cake was always served with a hefty dollop of freshly whipped cream, because that’s “the correct Viennese way to do it.” The Habsburg Empire lived on in my father’s prandial habits.
The ritual was lifelong, though in Yorktown Heights confined to the weekends and the selection from American bakeries, which my father found contemptible. Even in his guise as suburban dad, my father had asserted his Old European taste. Weekends, he’d sit in his armchair in his beret and cravat, a demitasse balanced on one knee and classical music thundering on the hi-fi, and heap scorn on Reddi-wip, Cheez Whiz, and ice cubes in drinking water, along with his American children’s proclivity for pop tunes with drum tracks and sitcoms with laugh tracks. He went into a swivet once when it became clear I had never heard of one of his treasured European authors, the Austrian (and Jewish) writer Stefan Zweig. “You have no culture,” he yelled, ripping out of my hand whatever “tacky” novel I’d been reading. On a series of weekend afternoons, my father attempted to get me to master the basic waltz steps in our burnt-orange-carpeted living room, Johann Strauss on the turntable. The lessons ended badly. “You are leading again!” he would shout as I stepped on his foot, not always entirely by accident. “How many times do I have to tell you? The woman does not lead.”
In the years after my father moved back to Hungary, he made regular pilgrimages to Vienna, often with his friend Ilonka in tow, to shop for the “correct” Viennese comestibles and tour the faded palaces and hunting lodges and architectural glories of Emperor Franz Josef’s nearly seventy-year reign, photographing the last vestiges of the empire that collapsed with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. Or he’d take Ilonka to Switzerland, where they paid homage to the ancient Habsburg Castle, the dynasty’s original seat. Or to Germany, where he made a long detour so they could cruise past the Bavarian villa of the then still living Archduke Otto of Austria, last crown prince to the Austro-Hungarian throne. “The best time was under the Habsburgs,” my father told me. “Even as a young child, I could still feel its good influence. If only we could bring the monarchy back—all of Hungary would welcome it.”
My father’s latest transition, from man to woman, debuted in the Habsburg emperor’s former guesthouse. Over coffee and Esterhazy cake one afternoon, she waxed nostalgic about the scene at what was now the Parkhotel Schönbrunn, where she attended the LGBT Rainbow Ball the year before her operation.
“Everybody was beautifully dressed, very elegant,” she said.
“Yes, I know,” I said. She had shown me the video she’d made of the ball, formal dancers in white satin gowns and black tie, white gloves, and cummerbunds, stepping in stately minuet formation across a polished parquet floor while an all-female orchestra played “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” At the end of the evening, each performer received a single rose.
“They always have good taste in Vienna,” my father sighed, licking the last speck of whipped cream from her demitasse spoon. “Even Ilonka enjoyed it.” In my father’s image gallery in the attic, she kept a photograph of the two of them at the ball. In the picture, he (still pre-op) is wearing a bleach-blond wig and a midnight-blue velour evening gown with spaghetti straps; Ilonka is in a plain navy sheath. They are holding hands. My father stares straight into the camera, with a pasted-on smile. Ilonka is looking away from my father, her mouth downturned. Her eyes are sorrowful.
“She didn’t want you to have the operation,” I said, a question.
“Ilonka thought it was a game. She never thought I’d go all the way with it. Ilonka wants nothing to change. Everything has to be the same way it was in the past. She even has to sit in the same pew in the church. I’m not like that. I get used to new things in five minutes!”
She grinned and took another forkful of cake. It seemed like a good moment to press my inquiry.
“Are you used to being a woman?” I asked.
“Waaall, that was easy.”
“How so?”
She held up her arms, as if for surrender. “Look at this,” she said, waggling her arms up and down, a fledgling out of the nest. “Does this look like a man’s body? I never developed. There’s hardly any hairs on my body.” Did this mean the Ugly Duckling had been a swan all along? “Waaall, I had the organs, I did my job, as a man. But I didn’t fit the role. They didn’t approve of me.”
“Who didn’t approve of you?”
“Women didn’t approve of me. I didn’t know how to fight and get dirty. I’m not muscular, I’m not athletic, I had a miserable life as a man. And it became more miserable when I wasn’t accepted for the umpteenth time. By your mother.” My father liked to characterize her that way, your mother. “She didn’t accept me and she threw me away.”
“She didn’t—”
“I wasn’t in the proper role. They can sense that. Now, as a woman, women like me more. I fit my role now better as a woman than when I was miscast in the wrong role.”
I flashed on hostile Magyar babushkas. “Why do you have to cast yourself in any role? Why can’t—?”
“Before, I was like other men, I didn’t talk to people. Now I can communicate better, because I’m a woman. It’s that lack of communicating that causes the worst things.”
“Like what?”
“They see you as some sort of monster. Because you are not doing the things others are doing. They don’t know what you do. You’re vermin. They gas you. They—”
We had fallen through one of my father’s verbal trapdoors.
“—don’t want you around. It’s like once when I was flying to Hungary, and the stewardess heard this man sitting across from me talking and she said, ‘Oh, you’re Hungarian!’ And this man said very angrily, ‘I am not Hungarian! I’m Israeli!’ This is a provocative attitude we don’t need. It helps that I’m a woman. Because women don’t provoke.”
“Some women do,” I provoked.
“You can’t switch back and forth,” my father said. “You have to develop a habit and stick to it. Otherwise, you’re going to be a forlorn something, not a whole person. The best way is not to change someone into someone else, but to put the person back as the person he was born to be. The surgery is a complete solution. Now I am completely like a woman.”
Completely, I thought, or completely like?
“You have to get rid of the old habits. If you don’t, you’re going to be like a stranger all the time, with this”—she fished around for the right words—“this anxiety of non-belonging.”
She repeated the phrase. This anxiety of non-belonging. She polished off the remains of her cake. “That would make a good title for your book,” she said.
She got up and started collecting the dishes. “Back to the kitchen!” she trilled as she left the room. “A woman’s place!”
I didn’t budge from my chair as she washed the cups and saucers.
“Susaaan!” My father was standing at the foot of the stairs. It was early morning, and I’d hoped to sleep in. My father had other plans. “Susaaan, come down here! You’ll be interested in this.” I threw on some clothes and stumbled into the dining room. She had set out on the table the contents of a file folder marked “Stefi.”
“These are my media appearances,” she said, pointing to a fanned-out collection of articles, a cassette tape, and a book. She’d given interviews about “The Change” to a Hungarian LGBT magazine (the only one at the time), an alternative radio station called Tilos Rádió (Forbidden Radio), an academic social-sciences journal called Replika, and a freelance photojournalist who was putting together a coffee-table book titled Women in Hungary: A Portrait Gallery, in which my father was featured, described as a “feminista.” I studied the stash with some astonishment. All of Steven’s life, he’d been behind the camera; Stefi, it seemed, had decided she’d be in front.
The Stefánie who appeared in these pages and recordings was a bit of a coquette. She told her interlocutors that she was a “typical woman” who “loved gossip.” When they asked how old she was, my father answered coyly, “Now, it’s not appropriate to ask a lady her age!” In the photo spread for Mások, the Hungarian LGBT magazine, my father perches on the edge of a planter on her deck, in a floor-length floral dress with a ribbon at the waist. She is clutching two daisies. As she made clear in the accompanying article, she was 100 percent female, “a woman in complete harmony with her wishes.” She was taking dance lessons, she told the magazine, and could waltz “all the female steps,” and had attended a ball “in an elegant full dress.”
The longest account appeared in the academic journal Replika. A young PhD student studying social anthropology had come to my father’s house to interview her for two days. The resulting Q & A was nearly twenty-five thousand words. That morning and for several mornings to follow, my father translated the text for me, altering the parts she didn’t like. (“Don’t write that down! It sounds better if you have me say it this way …”) While the purpose of the interview was to discuss her change in sex, my father had been eager to expound on life in Hungary before the “catastrophe”—the catastrophe, that is, of 1920.
“The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a very peaceful world,” my father said, reading (and revising) her words from the opening pages of the interview. “Hungary grew very fast. Railroads came in, economies were growing. It was a world of plenty. One minority, the Jews, dealt especially with commerce. Many were managers of noble estates. I had an uncle who was managing a noble’s estate and also my great-grandfather was the director of some estates of the wealthy … Then came the tragedy. Trianon. The country lost its thousand-year-old borders. And the era when minorities still lived nicely together came to an end. Whatever they say, there was no persecution of minorities in that time.”
“No persecution?” I sputtered.
My father gave me one of her you-know-nothing looks. “It was the best time,” she said. “The best time for the Jews.”
Her history wasn’t so Pollyanna. From the 1867 passage of the Jewish Emancipation Act, granting Jews civic and political equality, until the 1920 signing of the Treaty of Trianon, an extraordinary set of circumstances led to the “Golden Age” of Hungarian Jewry. The era yielded a spectacular opportunity for the bourgeois Jewish population. And unprecedented acceptance. For a significant subset of the country’s Jews in that period, it seemed possible to be “100 percent Hungarian.” Our family was among them. A century before my father changed gender, her forebears had crossed another seemingly unbreachable border.
My father’s parents, Jenő and Rozália Friedman, came to Budapest out of the hinterlands of what was then northeastern Hungary (and after Trianon, part of Czechoslovakia, and now Slovakia). The members of my grandmother’s side of the family, the Grünbergers, were among the most prominent Jews in the town known in Hungarian as Szepesváralja and later, in Slovak, as Spišské Podhradie—both of which translate roughly as “The Place under the Beautiful Castle.” Overlooking the town atop a limestone cliff is a hulking twelfth-century ruin, the largest castle in central Europe and erstwhile home to Magyar nobles. (It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and perennial location for Hollywood movies, among them Dragonheart and Kull the Conqueror.)
As I later learned from my Grünberger relatives, the baron of the town’s commercial age was Rozália’s father, my great-grandfather, Leopold Grünberger, who owned the biggest lumber enterprise in the region. The train tracks into town terminated in front of his mill. He had risen from poverty in a nearby village, served in the Habsburg cavalry in World War I, and was a Hungarian patriot and avid believer in Central European culture; he reportedly abhorred Zionism. He sat on the town council and was head of the Jewish community, the latter position due less to his piety, which was pro forma Orthodox, than to his wealth and philanthropy, both of which were substantial.
The Grünbergers vacationed at spas in Baden-Baden, skied in the Tatra Mountains, and ordered their clothes, bespoke, from boutique tailors in Bratislava and Budapest. The four sons were sent to universities in Paris and Prague, the four daughters to music lessons and finishing schools. Among the family’s many emblems of privilege (along with the first running water, gaslight, refrigeration, and electricity) was the town’s first telephone—phone number “1.” The Grünberger home was a showpiece of gentility, from its fountain-adorned courtyard and gardens to its chandeliered salon with a grand piano draped in a Shiraz rug and an extensive Rosenthal and Limoges porcelain collection, from its full retinue of maids, cooks, and governesses to its stable of groomed horses. Persian rugs hushed footsteps in every room. The linens were from Paris and monogrammed.
The region’s lumber trade had become a lucrative industry, thanks to the invention of steam-powered electricity and railway construction in the late nineteenth century, which turned the virgin Slovak forests into a commercial honeypot. More than 90 percent of the lumber mill owners and wholesale suppliers in the region were Jewish. The area’s artisans, merchants, and professionals were, likewise, predominantly Jews, and had been ever since the ban on Jews in towns and cities was lifted by government edict in the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1920s, the Jews of Spišské Podhradie owned thirteen of the nineteen grocery and general stores, six of the seven taverns and restaurants, all of the liquor stores, all of the tool and iron shops and small factories, the saw mill and flour mill. They were the doctors, the lawyers, the pharmacist, and the veterinarian.
The Jews in the Hungarian countryside no longer had to live in remote primitive villages or skulk around the edges of towns, peddling their wares. They no longer had to pay a “tolerance tax” to the nobles for the privilege of renting a hovel on their estates. Some of them even owned agricultural land. My great-grandfather’s property included a working farm with cornfields and livestock. Spišské Podhradie also became a flourishing rabbinical center for Orthodox Jewry, with its own synagogue, cheder, yeshiva, beit midrash, mikveh, and charitable and community associations, and (on a patch of hillside two miles out of town, granted because it was too steep to be arable) a walled cemetery. In 1905, after the town’s first synagogue burned down, my great-grandfather marshaled the funds to build a new temple, with a Neo-Classical façade and a Moorish interior. It was installed a few doors down from the Grünberger family home—on Stefánikova Street.
When I visited Spišské Podhradie in 2015, the synagogue (which became a furniture warehouse in Communist times) had recently been restored but sat unused: the town’s last postwar Jewish resident, a dentist named Ferdinand Glück, either left or died (no one seemed to know) in the 1970s. The Grünberger manse, now shabby and painted in Day-Glo colors (with a satellite dish on the roof and curtains for doors), was subdivided and occupied by several generations of a poor and devout Christian family. The old carriage entrance displayed a dozen Madonna icons. In the courtyard, a giant plaster Jesus hung on a four-foot cross. On the outskirts of town, weeds flourished in the Jewish cemetery. Many tombstones were missing, looted over the years, or fallen. The lone Grünberger headstone, marking the grave of Moritz Grünberger, firstborn son of Leopold and Sidonia, who died at sixteen, lay on its back in the grass.