Inside the Upside-Down World of Ancestral Trauma
There’s no “test” for ancestral trauma; some people aren’t convinced it even exists. But on a trip to Hungary, I saw how it might be running my life in subtle—and not-so-subtle—ways.
I hid the book in the bottom of my suitcase, under my socks.
This is ridiculous, I thought. No one’s going to care. But then I imagined hard-eyed customs officials digging through my belongings, saw myself being taken to some backroom in the airport, strip-searched and deported. I took the book and placed it back on the shelf along with all the other books about Hungarian Jews.
Better safe than sorry. But later that day I did the same thing all over, hiding the book in my suitcase and then taking it back out again.
What was this inflammatory volume, you ask? It was Masquerade, by Tivadar Soros. You’ve probably never heard of him—though you’ve definitely heard of his son, George. The reason it seemed so radioactive was that I was packing for a month-long trip to Hungary, where I’d be digging into my family’s backstory, and where Soros the younger is seen as a real-life supervillain, thanks in large part to the fact he’s Jewish.
And therein lay the rub. Here in America, I’d never really engaged with my Jewishness—I’d never had to. Now, as my departure date loomed, I found it was occupying a great deal of mental real estate, even if there was no way to tell how big of a deal it really was.
Not for lack of trying. In the last few weeks, I’d checked in with my Jewish friends and family in Hungary. It was thrilling to imagine us being reunited—it’d been nearly twenty-five years since my last visit there, with my then terminally ill father. But whenever I’d ask them about the political scene, or what it was like living under the autocratic government of Viktor Orbán, they’d go strangely quiet, almost as if they feared someone else was listening in. What was it they couldn’t tell me?
Into The Mystery
I should’ve brought the book: There were no customs officials on duty at Budapest’s Ferihegy Airport. The place had changed since the last time I was here. I’d thrilled at the sight of the aging Ilyushin and Antonov airliners parked on the tarmac then; now the airport looked less Hungarian, more European. I could be anywhere.
Almost. As I waited by the baggage carousel for my luggage, a giant overhead screen flicked from an ad for a Hungarian dub of Game of Thrones (“Trónok harca!”) to one in English: “Spíler Deli, serving modern and Jewish classics!”
Jewish classics? I mean, I didn’t expect to see symbols of the Arrow Cross—Hungary’s version of the Nazi Party—painted on the walls, but still: I was confused. Everything I’d learned about this freshly sanitized version of Hungary suggested Jewishness was less tolerated than ever. Obviously the ad was aimed at foreigners like me, but what was the takeaway? That Hungary actually loved its Jews? Or merely their food?
As I walked out to the bus stop, the scents of cigarette smoke and cheap detergent told me I was back in Eastern Europe. But it was the internal sensations that had my attention, an uneasy swirl of emotions: Partly the thrill of finally making it here, and partly deep dread about what I’d stepped into.
Historically, Jews have never exactly been welcome here. But in 1867, Hungary entered into a union with Austria called the Dual Monarchy, which initiated a reshuffling of ethnic and political blocs. The Magyars, who considered themselves the “true” Hungarians, needed to demonstrate they represented a majority share of the population. And for this they needed the Jews on their side.
As incentive, Jews were granted full legal emancipation, and many responded with patriotic fervor, flocking to the merchant, cultural, and political classes. Later, historians would call this the “Golden Era,” an epoch of harmony and tolerance. By the time my grandparents were born, at the tail end of the 19th century, they had access to most of the same social opportunities as non-Jews—though it’s telling that many swapped their Jewish last names for more Hungarian-sounding ones. I have no idea what our original name was but I doubt it was “Lőrinci,” the name of a small town on the sleepy Zagyva River to which we have no apparent connection.
The Golden Era came to an ugly end with the start of the First World War. As one half of the hapless Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary suffered stupendous casualties and writhed under wartime deprivations. As the depths of the Army’s ineptitude became clear, coded messages began to appear in newspaper editorials, spouted by opportunistic politicians. Perhaps Hungary had become infected by some unpatriotic pathogen; might there be certain social elements whose loyalties lay elsewhere? Scandals involving the sale of shoddy equipment to the military stoked resentment against Jewish-owned provisioners. It was well known, remarked Baron Gyula Madarassy-Beck, a financier and member of Parliament, that behind any bank one could always find “the Jew.”
The end of the war unleashed a tidal wave of mass violence, starvation, and political unrest. In a seeming instant, all the privelege and opportunity my upwardly mobile grandparents thought they’d enjoyed was washed down the drain. By the time my father was born, in 1929, there was no possible way to misunderstand exactly how Hungary felt about Jews like them, and it was a lesson he made sure to pass on to me. “One can be Jewish or Hungarian,” he told me once, when I was still quite young. “Not both.”
Out On the Street
As I settled into my stay, I found myself scanning the streets for clues. Every alleyway and corner seemed to hold a thousand stories; when I said as much to the docent at a small Jewish museum in Central Pest, she shot me a look I couldn’t quite read. “A few months ago,” she finally said, “I walked my father to the market down the street. He bought a bag of tomatoes, and then he pointed to the wall. He said: ‘In 1944 there was a wooden box right there. I watched my mother surrender her last thing of value, her wedding ring, and put it in the box before we went inside’.” I realized, with quiet shock, that the museum was at the edge of Budapest’s former Jewish ghetto.
More surprises were in store. As it turned out, my fears about bringing Tivadar Soros’ book weren’t entirely unfounded. Tivadar’s son, the Jewish philanthropist, is Public Enemy #1 here. I mean that literally: During my visit, I saw numerous government-sponsored billboards depicting George Soros’ grinning, liver-spotted face, warning Hungarians not to be hoodwinked by a wealthy Jew.
One afternoon as I strolled down a quiet sidestreet, I was struck by a flyer wheat-pasted to a wall. It was a painting of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister, done up in a Socialist Realist style so retro I wondered if it were a caricature. When I asked my friend Kata about it, a few days later, she assured me it wasn’t a joke.
“It’s not subtle at all,” she said, a hard edge to her voice. “You know those round news posts you see on corners, and the posters that say ‘Brüsszel’? That’s a taunt to the E.U., saying we won’t accept their quotas of Syrian refugees. Only there aren’t any quotas. It’s all made up to help rally people behind Orbán, and it’s working!”
Though I don’t speak Hungarian, I engaged with people as best I could. Even in sometimes halting conversations, something quickly became clear: No one here seemed very happy. Riding in a taxi from a friend’s apartment in the suburbs, I was struck by how the cabdriver hinted at (but never actually admitted to) being a Romani—Hungary’s other bogeymen besides the Jews. And he told me, in broken English, something I’d hear time and time again from people at nearly every strata of Hungarian society: “If it were simple, easy, I would absolutely leave this place tomorrow.”
The Monument
As I headed into the final week of my trip, it felt like everything I thought I’d known about my Hungarian forebears—my father, my Aunt Csupi, my grandparents—was suddenly up for grabs. I’d plumbed the darkest recesses of their backstory; now I had a glimpse of the forces that had shaped them, and thus me. I thought about my own seemingly innate habits and predilections, my strong aversion to crowds and political rallies of any kind. Now I wondered if those fears were actually mine.
There was one more confrontation with the past—or perhaps with the present. I’ve written before about the Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation, perhaps the most controversial monument in all of Budapest. It’s without any doubt the most cynical piece of public art I’ve ever encountered, both a garish claim of Hungary’s victimhood and a refusal to take responsibility for the murder of roughly half a million of its Jewish citizens.
The monument itself isn’t much to look at; a statue of Archangel Gabriel—a symbol of Hungary—being attacked from behind by a Teutonic eagle. I was more interested in the informal counter-monument set up nearby: a collection of suitcases, shoes, and other items belonging to Jews deported by Hungarian police to German-run death facilities in 1944. “My mother was killed at Auschwitz,” read one placard. “Thank you Archangel Gabriel.”
Gazing at the detritus of all those squandered lives—many of my own family among them—I felt something stirring inside. It was the sound of a distant voice, telling me it wasn’t safe here among all these reminders of Jewish tragedy. That I should walk away, keep my head down, bask in the Americanness my father had fought so hard to grant me.
A snippet of memory floated back to me, a conversation with my father’s sister, Aunt Csupi. “He told me that even in America, he could only be seen as a Jew,” she’d said over a transatlantic phone line. “He was quite bitter over it.” He’d never expressed this to me; I wondered what other feelings he’d kept under wraps.
As I stood before that awful monument, flooded with revulsion, I recognized that what had happened here some 75 years ago wasn’t ancient history or an abstract. That like it or not, its echoes lived on inside me. I had no urge to claim any kind of victimhood—what, after all this time, would that achieve? And yet I saw now the ways I’d distanced myself both from our backstory and our Jewishness, the screen burn lingering after the television clicked off.
Over and over, my forebears had hidden themselves in ways both subtle and overt, always standing outside the circle, ready to run—or change their style of dress, or their address, or their name—at a moment’s notice. In Budapest, as I absorbed what it meant to be seen as a Jew, I recognized that denying it was no longer optional—even as it tied me to a past laced with trauma and a future uncertain at best.
Maybe it was the newfound recognition of my own heritage; maybe it was the close encounters with my family’s ghosts, or the unhappiness that seemed to permeate Budapest like mildewed carpeting. But I saw now that I had skin in the game. I hadn’t asked to be born into this lineage, but it was up to me to make of it what I must.
Very compelling read...especially considering our political turmoil and the authoritarian proclivities of the right in this country.
Thank you for this candid insight into what it’s like to visit Hungary now as an American. I was there in the early 90s with my FIL and his brother and remember feeling the undercurrents of Jewish history there. It sounds like there’s still a façade of “we are ok with the Jews” from the food advertisement with the Socialist highlight of a time past that isn’t going away. Did the undercurrents of being Jewish ? It feels confusing to me that they have the almost token memorials next to the Angel statue yet are telling its citizens watch out for the Jews with the Soros billboards. Definitely the threat exists of, “You are Hungarian before anything else.”
How do you identify here? American Jewish Hungarian or American Hungarian Jew? Or all equal? Even though I’m a 3rd- 4th generation American I still hid my Jewish part in most places. It’s ingrained in me to be careful.
Anyway, I would love to discuss this sometime and I appreciate your exploration! I’m writing a piece now on what it has meant to be Jewish in a Buddhist community. Thanks, Seth!