How far back can you trace your family tree?
That’s a good question, only it’s something that never really interested me. Well, however I scratch my head, I get stuck at my grandparents. As far as I know, my forebears were ordinary town-dwellers or, in some cases, peasants of assimilated Jewish background.
Peasants?
Why? Does that surprise you? My paternal grandfather may have been Jewish, but he was just a poor farm labourer. Until he committed himself to see the world. Family legend had it that he walked barefoot to Budapest from the village of Pacsa, near Keszthely, at the southern end of Lake Balaton. That would have been at the end of the nineteenth century, the time when many big careers were made. When he was strolling along what was then called Kerepesi (now Rákóczi) Avenue, his attention was caught by an elegant haberdashery, as they called those shops at the time. He took a huge fancy to the way the shop assistants were bustling around the customers and the counters, so without further ado he entered the shop, and within no time at all he was taken on as an assistant himself. His subsequent life shaped up in much the way that fairytale stories of those days regularly do. He married the youngest daughter of Mr. Hartmann, who was the proprietor of the shop (and I know nothing further than that about this great-grandfather), and before long he set up in business on his own account and opened a haberdashery himself. “A posh emporium on Rákóczi Avenue, with mirrors and chandeliers and seven shop assistants,” as family legend had it. By the time I got to know him, though, the poor chap was living in a bedsitter on Tömő Street in darkest Józsefváros, in the Eighth District.
Did he go bust?
In the First World War: he put all his money, his entire wealth, into war bonds. He was very patriotic …
You mention somewhere that he Hungarianized his family name.
Yes, my grandfather was originally called Klein, and he Hungarianized it even before the first world war. As to why he should have chosen Kertész, of all names, heaven knows. “Adolf Kertész, Haberdasher. No credit”—that’s what I remember a sign hung up in the shop said. But that shop was in Prater Street in Józsefváros, with only my grandfather and grandmother serving the clientele, who were mainly housemaids from the neighbourhood. “Young Ma’am” or “Little Missy” is how he addressed them, and in the days leading up to Christmas he would give them a pair of silk stockings as a present. He kept his Western Hungarian dialect to the end of his days, so I remember, for instance, he would use the word “underdrawers” instead of “underpants.” He never visited a doctor in his life, he never took a tram, and he didn’t wear a winter overcoat. I could tell stories about him for hours.
Go on, then. What did he look like?
He was a tall, gaunt man; not a spare ounce of flesh on him. He shaved his head bald. He would sometimes bend down his weatherbeaten and always stubbly face in front of me so I should give him a kiss. He was immoderately proud of the fact that he wore size 10 footwear. I always saw him in the same suit, winter or summer. There were times when he had to go round the wholesalers to stock up on wares. In those days the wholesalers had their warehouses on what was then Kaiser Wilhelm (nowadays Bajcsy-Zsilinszky) Avenue in the Fifth District. I recollect there were grey, frosty days when he would tell his wife, “I’m going into town.” As I said, he never took a tram or bus; he didn’t wear a hat; he would thrust his hands in the pockets of his grey jacket, keeping the thumb sticking out on either side, turn silently at the door, and vanish in a puff of his own breath like a wizard.
You speak about him with such love …
Yes, and the funny thing is I’m surprised by it myself. It seems he had a greater effect on me than I would ever have supposed. Yet we hardly spoke to each other; now I sense that he treated me like one of the more fragile pieces of merchandise that has to be handled with care lest it is broken. I, on my side, was rather afraid of him. In truth he was a rather dour, taciturn man. He would occasionally crack a lame joke. “I know some Latin as well,” he would say. “Listen to this: adduc aqua cingo. A duck a-quacking go.” You had to laugh over that. He had only completed the six years of elementary school that were compulsory at that time. Very rarely, he would go off to synagogue on a Friday evening, but there were other times when he would take me to the Turkish baths in Dandár Street, since there was no bath in his place on Tömő Street, and for the WC one had to go out to the end of the outdoor corridor. There was a big rusty key to it, hanging up on a nail in the kitchen. He never went to the theatre or a cinema. He and Grandma would close up the shop and walk home together. Their supper was invariably the same: matzos crumbled liberally into a mug of milky coffee — you know what matzos are, don’t you?
You bet! A biscuit of unleavened bread.
Well, that’s what they ate every evening. The crumbs of matzo would soak up the milky-brown coffee to produce a sort of pulp of indefinable colour that would then be scooped up out of the mug with a spoon. After that, my grandfather would sit by the window so as not to have to turn the light on, and he would pick his way through a newspaper as evening drew in until it was dark. They went to bed early and got up early; a maidservant cooked them dinner and took it round to them at the Prater Street shop in a nest of blue enamel dinner pails.
You mean to say that even with their modest living conditions they employed a maidservant?
“Serving girl” as my grandfather said. There’s no need to be so surprised: remember, poverty was so rife in the country in those days that it was quite normal for girls to leave home and go into service in Budapest for bread and board and a pittance for pay. I well recall a long string of “Nellies” who served as maids for my grandparents. The dark “main room” had an extension in the form of a lighter annex that they referred to as the “alcove,” where my grandfather and grandmother slept in a vast marriage bed, with my father (until he remarried) at the other end, toward a window that overlooked the Botanical Garden, and me along with Father if I happened to be staying with him. There was a separate kitchen, and that was where the Nellies lived. I was fond of each and every one, and they were fond of me. One of them accustomed me to a taste for cigarettes of the Herczegovina brand, which were made of a light and bright tobacco and had a card mouthpiece. We would sit down next to each other, blowing smoke, at the bottom of the steps: I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. It was the same Nellie who said to me one summer morning: “I’ll take the young Master off to the butcher’s, and there we’re going to buy some paprika-spiced bacon rind and pickled gherkins and you’ll find out just how scrumptious that is! You’ll be licking your fingers afterward! Only you mustn’t let out a peep about it to anyone.” My grandparents, you see, kept a kosher household, which simply amounted to forbidding themselves from eating any pork product or cooking with pork fat. So, this Nellie was embroiling me in sin, and she watched contentedly as, one after the other, I tucked into the “soldiers” that she sliced off with her own pocket knife and offered to me on its tip. That Nellie must have been rebellious by nature, I supposed, and she did not like my grandfather one bit: “the old skinflint,” was how she referred to him, to my great consternation, because I had no idea what I was supposed to do with such a massive secret. There’s no question that this confidence caused me an identity crisis for a while, because on the one hand I had no wish to betray poor Nellie, but on the other hand I was, after all, more inclined to take grandfather’s side. On top of everything else, she took me off on one occasion to a church service; it must have been some feast day or other, though that’s only now that I think about it, because at the time I had not the least suspicion about where we were going. The afternoon was already dark and sleet was falling. My hand was in Nellie’s, and she was clutching it tightly; she probably had the jitters. “The young Master will see!” I think we went along the Józsefváros end of Üllői Avenue, and we dropped into a church somewhere round there. I partook in the same sort of experience that I was later to recognize in the legend of Parsifal, because a mysterious door opened up before me as it did before Parsifal. I stepped into a dazzling space where a long row of trestle tables laid with spotless white tablecloths had been set up. Nellie and I sat down at one of these. We heard some music and ate something. A jingling priest in a spotless white robe came. I had no idea where I was or what was happening, but I was transfixed by a peculiar sense of wonderment and rapture; I was turned totally inside-out.