However ill-gotten her fiancé’s gains, Rozi had landed, at twenty, the richest catch of the four sisters. She didn’t have much to do with the landing: the marriage was arranged—based on a desire of the patriarchs of both families to meld their wealth. The bride and groom barely knew each other when they were wed in an extravagant ceremony in the Grünberger home and headed off, first by horse-drawn carriage and then by first-class coach, to a fairy-tale honeymoon in Venice. They returned to a sumptuously appointed apartment in one of Jenő’s buildings in Pest, where they spent their days at cards in the casino, their nights at the opera. Their only child was raised by a succession of nursemaids, governesses, and tutors. Rozi’s one other pregnancy, my father told me, ended in miscarriage.
Once in a while when I was young, my father would allow me a glimpse into the vanished world of his childhood, a pinprick or two of light in a landscape otherwise dark. “The parents,” he would say, opening the pasteboard family album my mother had created and pointing to a creased and curling-at-the-edges tinted picture of his progenitors, the lone representative in the album of my father’s side of the family. The photo is a formal studio portrait, vintage ’20s with its soft-focus lighting and pretensions to motion-picture glamour. A halo of light wreathes the heads of two newlyweds, a vignette effect fading into shadow at the edges. Bride and groom stare toward the camera, not smiling. My grandmother Rozi has the severe dark beauty and hooded eyes of a silent-movie star. Her eyebrows are tweezed to pencil-thin crescents and she sports a Joan Crawford hairdo, cropped and set in a tight wave, dark lipstick, and a double-stranded choker of pearls with matching pearl earrings. My grandfather Jenő looks older—which he was, by nine years—and wears an expensively tailored suit; his thinning black hair is oiled and slicked back.
As for the post-wedding life of Rozi and Jenő, their bitter separation when my father was twelve, their forced wartime reconciliation, and their miserable last years in Israel, my father had little to say. But it was clear to me whom she held responsible for her parents’ troubled marriage. Rozi, my father told me, was a “spoiled diva” and a “phony” who “put on airs,” read “lowbrow” books, and was either at the hairdresser or out chasing “rich men.” “She wasn’t interested in a relationship with her child.” Jenő, on the other hand, was “very cultured,” a “true gentleman” who delivered occasional poems at dinner parties and wrote letters in “pearly handwriting,” a man who knew how to mingle in “educated circles.” Jenő was a prominent figure in the Jewish community, an observant but modern Jew who enrolled his son in the most prestigious Jewish educational institutions for boys in Budapest: the elementary school run by the Rabbinical Seminary of Hungary and then the Zsidó Gimnázium, the elite Jewish high school in Pest celebrated for its world-class teachers. “But my father was not Orthodox,” my father stressed, a statement that perplexed me; the Friedmans belonged to the Kazinczy Street Synagogue, which was Orthodox. What she meant was that Jenő didn’t look like an Orthodox Jew, whose appearance might, as she put it, “provoke.”
My father liked to parse out the same several set pieces of this early domesticity, more interior design than life experience, decorative backdrops to a privileged and assimilated bourgeois lifestyle. “My father had all his suits tailored in London.” Or: “We were the first on our street to own a car,” a Renault with leather seats, wood paneling, “a lace curtain on the back window,” and a dashboard vase that “held one rose.” Or she’d recall their “wind-up record player, spring driven,” and the first tune young Pista had played on it, “The Fox and Goose Song”:
Fox, you have stolen the goose.
Give it back to me.
If not, the hunter will get you
With his gun.
More than anything, my father talked about the family real estate: the summer villa in the Buda Hills with its swimming pool and gardening staff, the two apartment houses in posh sections of Pest, and, most of all, the “royal apartment” at Ráday utca 9. The Friedmans’ majestic domicile featured a double balcony, soaring ceilings, French doors between every room, a “salon” to receive guests, and maid’s quarters. My grandfather’s study, which contained “first-edition collectibles” in a locked bookcase, featured heavy carved-wood furnishings with red and brown upholstery in what my father called a “Napoleonic Empire style.” The salon boasted emerald-velvet love seats and chaise longues, a vitrine stocked with Rosenthal porcelain, and a writing table in a “Louis the XVI theme.” One wall displayed three near-life-sized family portraits commissioned from the then noteworthy Hungarian artist Jakab Ödön. The paintings depicted the Friedmans in aristocratic poses: my grandfather in a smoking jacket, my grandmother in a floor-length evening gown, and my ten-year-old father in velvet cutaway coat and matching knee pants. Until, that is, my father “came of age,” at which point the artist was recalled—at the insistence of the adolescent subject—to paint on a pair of long trousers. Young István was already Photoshopping. “It wasn’t manly to be in short pants,” she explained.
In the salon presided over by these imposing regal portraits, my grandparents hosted “balls,” the name my father gave to their dinner and dance evenings. Sent to bed early, Pista would lie in the dark, a crystal radio he’d built by hand pressed to one ear “to drown out the noise.” On other nights, the parents would don their finery to make the rounds of high society and attend opening nights at the theater and the Hungarian Royal Opera House. The Golden Age had been good to Jenő and Rozi Friedman.
“Finally, O Jew, your day is dawning!” József Kiss, son of poor Orthodox parents and acclaimed as turn-of-the-century Hungary’s “most popular” poet, exulted in his first collection of verse, published in 1868. “Now you, too, have a fatherland!” By the end of the century, Jews had full religious standing, too. The 1895 Law of Reception elevated Judaism to a “received” religion, recognized by the state.
The Magyar nobility had its reasons for facilitating the rise of a Jewish bourgeoisie. To accomplish such liberal reforms as civil marriage and nationalized education, the aristocrats enlisted Jews to counter the influence of the Catholic clerics. Also, Hungary desperately needed to modernize and industrialize. In the enterprise vacuum that yawned between its complacent nobles and gentry and its wretched peasants, the Jews formed an essential bourgeois class. The Christian noblemen also had political reasons for aiding Jewish assimilation: the nineteenth-century Magyar electorate was 5 percent short of a majority in a multicultural region teeming with restive Germans, Slovaks, Romanians, Ruthenians, Serbians, Slovenians, Croatians, and other ethnic minorities, all contesting for their rights. The Magyars made up the deficit through artful use of an 1868 “nationalities” law—originally intended as an act of tolerance for minority cultures and languages—to enforce a linguistic Magyarization. Henceforth, anyone who declared Hungarian as their primary language in the national census would be declared a Magyar. Jews, more than other minorities, took the option. By the century’s end, more than 75 percent of Hungary’s Jews claimed Hungarian as their mother tongue (compared with only 54 percent of its Catholics), and the Magyar population had thus magically risen to 51.4 percent. In a country where voting was limited to educated and propertied taxpayers, affluent Jews in urban districts enjoyed significant electoral clout; in Budapest, Jews were more than 20 percent of the population, and 40 percent of the voters.fn1
Whatever the self-serving motives of the old aristocracy, the benefits for the bourgeois Jews of Hungary were unparalleled. “No country in Europe was more hospitable to Jewish immigration and assimilation and no country had more enthusiastic support from its Jews than the pre–World War I Hungarian kingdom,” noted historian István Deák observed. And maybe no Jewish population did more to bring its country into the industrial age. By the 1900s, Hungarian Jews had launched and were running most of the country’s major banks, heavy industries, mining concerns, and the largest