Adriana Babeţi: What was your mother like?
Michael Heim: Her name was Blanche. She was beautiful and intelligent. But like many middle-class American women at the time, she made less of her life than she could have. She finished college during the Depression and longed to study English literature. She was the perfect anglophile: she enjoyed English tea, English novels, the English lifestyle. But she had to do what she could in those hard times, and she went into marketing. More precisely, copywriting with a little modeling of hats on the side. It wasn’t particularly thrilling, but it enabled her to make her own way. Then she got married. At that time when a woman of a certain means married, she gave up going to work. My mother read five or six novels a week; she cooked, gardened, crocheted, and did charitable work. (My wife Priscilla characterized her as “comfortingly normal.”) She played tennis regularly, and we occasionally played together. She had been Westchester County Women’s Junior Champion for a year, and I have a feeling she and my father, also an avid player, bonded more over tennis than piano lessons. Of course she also raised a child, me. She was a good mother, very hands-off. She simply expected me to do well in school and so never made anything of it. Some assumed I would follow in my father’s footsteps and become a musician, but soon my true passion came to the fore: practicing scales on the piano at the age of eight or nine, I would prop a novel on the stand and read away.
By the time my parents married, Pearl Harbor had brought us into the war. My father immediately joined the army and became a proud American citizen. When I was born, they named me Michael, not because there was anyone on either side of the family by that name but because in my father’s mind Mike was the quintessential American name. He served in the entertainment corps, playing for the troops and composing battalion marching songs and the like. But then a freak accident occurred—we never found out what it was exactly—and in 1946 he died of cancer from the consequences. I long puzzled over what connection there could be between physical trauma and the growth of abnormal cells in the body until I found an answer in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, where death comes about in an analogous manner.
In 1966 I was drafted to fight in Vietnam. I was against the war, but not being a Quaker I was ineligible for conscientious objector status. If it had to be, it had to be. But when the draft board went over my background, they discovered I was the sole surviving son of a soldier who had died in the service of his country. Drafting me was illegal. They immediately kicked me out of the office, cursing me for wasting their time.
Adriana Babeţi: What kind of contact did you have with your father’s parents in Budapest?
Michael Heim: My father had invited them to come to California, but they refused, claiming old age. When my father died, my mother determined to visit them. But by the time she’d gathered the necessary papers, it was too late: the Cold War was in full swing, and the Communists had taken over. My grandparents experienced difficulties under the Communist regime. They belonged to the bourgeoisie: they owned an apartment building and a building that was bombed out during the war, and they had a private business. Everything was confiscated. My grandfather died some time in the fifties, but I did get to know my grandmother when, in 1962, I went to Europe for the first time.
I found her wonderfully engaging. She had even managed to maintain a sense of humor throughout the disasters of her life: the loss of her son, the loss of her husband (by all accounts a jolly old soul), the loss of her very living space. She was forced to share her apartment first with a family of strangers, then with two, and was eventually moved into an old age home. We would send her monthly packages. During our visit together she brought out a leather jacket of mine we had sent when I was ten. She was so shrunken she could still wear it. My mother and I would write to her in English, and as a child I had no idea she didn’t know the language. Only after getting to know her in person did I learn that she had paid to have our letters—and her own—translated. But by then I was studying German, the second language of all educated Hungarians of her generation, and we had been corresponding in German for some time. And if she wept when she first laid eyes on me, it was not merely because I was the spitting image of her son but also because she couldn’t believe I’d actually learned German: she assumed that we, too, had hired a translator. She and I talked non-stop for a week, then maintained a regular correspondence until her death in 1965. I’ve kept a bundle of moving letters from her. The salutation was inevitably “Mein heissgeliebtes Mikykind” (My Dearly Beloved Mickey).
At the time I was passionately interested in Chinese philosophy, which to my mind held the key to a conundrum I later discovered has plagued many an adolescent, namely, whether man is born good, evil, or a tabula rasa. I hoped the answer would guide me through life. As a Columbia undergraduate I accordingly majored in Oriental Civilization (which encompassed the history, philosophy, and literature of China, Japan, India, and Islam) and studied Chinese for two years. But I was crushed when I learned that as an American I would not be permitted to travel to “Red China” to study at the source. I took my advisor’s advice and started Russian. “You will never want for employment,” he told me, “if you have the two major languages of the Cold War.” Since my advisor, F. D. Reeve, a prominent Russianist and poet, also happened to be the father of Christopher Reeve, the most recent Superman, I like to say it was Superman’s father who put me on to Russian.
In the end, I double-majored in Oriental Civilization and Russian Language and Literature, the latter taking over in the guise of Slavic Languages and Literatures when I went on to graduate school at Harvard. Although Grandma-in-Budapest accepted my original Chinese orientation with equanimity, I can imagine how thrilled she would have been to know that I eventually learned Hungarian (“Don’t forget you are Hungarian” she kept telling me) and translated some of the finest contemporary Hungarian writers including Péter Esterházy, scion of the noble Esterházy line.
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Adriana Babeţi: If I remember correctly, the first foreign language you learned in school was French. Why?
Michael Heim: Because it was the international language, the language of a great culture. Then came German, to write to my aunt and grandmother in Vienna, who sent me a birthday present every year on behalf of my Hungarian grandparents, whom the state kept from sending anything.
Adriana Babeţi: Did they ever send anything special?
Michael Heim: Yes, more than once, and I still have some things. A leather bag, for one, and something even more unusual, a camera. It was a very complicated device for me at the time, and it came with a German manual that I couldn’t read. I was eleven or twelve, and hadn’t begun any foreign language at all. The gift irritated me. What was I supposed to do? It was the first time I encountered, as an idea in itself, a foreign language. I started to take pictures. I tried to do a lot of different things, most of which did not work because there was no one to read the manual for me. I decided to become a photographer; I even set up a darkroom. I took it very seriously. I probably could have made a career out of it. When I went to Budapest for the first time, I wondered what I would have become if I had been born there, under communism. It’s hard to say. Maybe a piano teacher, or a photographer, because those fields weren’t political.
Adriana Babeţi: You said you have your father’s gift for music.
Michael Heim: When I was eight, I took piano lessons from a magnificent teacher. Later, I went to Julliard, the famous music school. I took lessons every week: piano, flute, and clarinet. Plus theory. I played in a wind quartet.
Adriana Babeţi: And yet, you didn’t go into music or photography. Why did you choose literature?
Michael Heim: I didn’t follow through with a music career because it was clear to me that I didn’t have enough talent. Music was very demanding. Next I wanted to become an architect, because we lived in an apartment and I dreamed of buying or building a house. I loved to look at plans and architecture magazines. They fascinated me. But I couldn’t draw. So I was left with literature, which was how I spent all my time,