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.
—————
*Never mind that Jews likely predated the Magyars in the Carpathian Basin, and that when the Magyar chieftains did arrive, their legions included several Jewish Kabar and Khazar con
tingents: the Magyar Conquest was a Magyar-Jewish alliance.
17
The Subtle Poison of Adjustment
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.
“Can I ask a few questions?”
Dr. Misley indicated, through my father, that he was amenable.
“Do you see a difference, since the operation?”
The doctor dawdled with his answer.
“He says my face is very nice now,” my father translated. “He says I have very few wrinkles for a man my age. This is hormones, but also genes.” She reached over and patted my face. “You have the genes, too.”
“What I meant,” I said, “was, does Dr. Misley see a difference in your personality?”
The reply was longer in coming.
“Dr. Misley says that I’m a happy man,” my father related. “A happy person,” she corrected herself. “Dr. Misley says this is very important, because we don’t know how many years a life brings, but at least a person must live it in happiness.”
Dr. Misley, I thought, dispenses platitudes as well as pharmaceuticals.
“Is my father one of your more”—I turned over adjectives in my mind—“unusual patients?”
The answer came back through the linguistic bucket brigade. “He says he has one even more unusual. He brought into the world a girl who was twelve years old.”
This did sound unusual.
“The patient was twelve years old,” my father amended. “She came to the hospital and she didn’t know she was pregnant. He had to cut open that thing.”
“What thing?”
“You know, where the vagina is.”
“The hymen?”
“Right.”
I still wasn’t following.
“Sperm got smeared on her somehow,” my father related. “There was a little hole in the hymen. The sperm got in.”
Somehow? My father conferred again with the doctor.
“The girl got raped.”
My pen froze over my notepad.
Another round of Hungarian.
“It was her father,” my father said.
“Christ,” I said.
Dr. Misley continued beaming.
Doctor and patient chatted for another long stretch. From time to time, my father chuckled. No translation was forthcoming, and after a while I retired my notebook.
“Dr. Misley wants to know how old you are,” my father said.
“Forty-nine.” And thought, peevishly: Don’t you know?
The two conferred.
“He says you look much younger,” my father said. “Like me,” she added.
And then, after a few more minutes: “Dr. Misley says that he once had a patient who had her first baby past forty-eight. … So this is your last chance. Dr. Misley wants to know if you’ve tried fertility treatments.”
“I don’t—”
“And if you’ve ever been pregnant before.”
“Not”—I hesitated—“no.”
“Dr. Misley says you should monitor your ovulation.”
The gynecologist reached into a drawer and pulled out a small plastic device shaped like a kazoo.
“You spit into it,” my father translated, “and it tells you on the days you are impregnable.”
Impregnable?
“Whether you can have a baby.” My father elbowed me. “Okay, deaaar, he says now he can do the exam.”
“No thanks,” I said.
“But he’s got free time.”
“I don’t want an examination.”
“You want to come back?”
“No, I—.”
“He says he can recommend another doctor, if you don’t feel comfortable with him.”
The doctor reached into his desk and handed me a flyer, an advertisement for Mini Mikroszóp, the ovulation monitor. On the front, in girlish pink script, and in English, it said, “Maybe Baby.”
“It will only take ten minutes,” my father said.
“No!”
My father snatched up her purse and headed for the door, her face contracting into a familiar scowl.
We rode the elevator in silence. Downstairs, we stopped at the pharmacy—she had to pick up her hormones—and found our place at the end of a long queue. A cranky clerk behind the counter took her time filling the order, eyeing my father doubtfully.
/> I could feel my father appraising me.
“This business of no children,” she said. “It’s not normal.”
Normal? At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I regarded as normal life. I remembered that it saved me. I also remembered an older woman I was close to, someone I much admired, whose life was devastated by not being able to do the same. In the mid-1950s, she had sought the help of a back-alley abortionist, and the horrors that ensued—the botched operation, a life-threatening delivery, late-term, to a long-dead fetus—was a trauma that haunted her the rest of her life. The story of her ordeal fed my young feminism.
When the prescription was finally ready, my father snatched it from the counter and flung herself through the door. I had to hurry not to lose her as she clacked furiously down a warren of back streets, her white pocketbook swinging like a mainsail from the gaff of a bunched shoulder. At one point she disappeared around a corner, and I was overcome with a childlike terror of being lost, left to wander forever amid incomprehensible signage and surly drugstore attendants.
I caught sight of the flapping purse again just as she was making the turn onto the broad thoroughfare of Margit körút. She was swallowed up by a sea of shoppers, pouring in and out of that 105,000-square-meter temple to post-Communist freedom, the Mammut Mall. (“Mammut Mall I,” that is. Mammut II, equally mammoth, was under construction on the next block.) At least here, I consoled myself, I could read the signs. (Extreme Digital, Cinema City, D.I.V.A., Royal Croissant … ) At least I knew we were only a few minutes from our destination: Moszkva tér, the city’s huge and hugely ugly outdoor transport junction still bearing at the time its Communist-era appellation. Six tram lines, eighteen bus lines, and a major subway line intersected here. By the time we arrived, I’d closed the gap. I followed at my father’s heels as she crossed several sets of railroad tracks and came to rest on the platform for the #59, the tram that headed toward the district where she lived. Some minutes into our wait, my father broke the silence.