The County of Birches Read online

  “Talmud-Torah scholars were available by the dozen. Grandfather Aron had his pick of the best. Soon a brilliant tutor and his family were established in a Tanya farmhouse to teach the Weisz boys the ancient wisdom of our people. For almost a decade this was the only formal learning from which we benefited. My beloved father had cherished a dream of a secular education for his sons, but édes Anyuka mistrusted gentile thought. Her cause was furthered by our studying at home, since secular scholars did not wander, hungry, around the countryside like itinerant yeshiva bochers. No professor could be found to meet my father’s specifications.

  “During that childhood decade, the Great War raged and reduced the Austro-Hungarian empire. An aborted Bolshevik uprising forced the család to abandon the Tanya for a brief period, and seek refuge with relations in the capital. The Romanians occupied the country temporarily, which we took note of principally through an eruption of my Uncle Szedrás’s outrage that resulted in a duel between him and one of the local Romanian constabulary and, to smooth things out, the near depletion of Grandfather Aron’s reserves, already taxed heavily by wartime demands. But it was as though history stormed around us while we enjoyed a perpetual calm. For us boys, tutored and raised at home, childhood was an arbour of familial doting. We felt that no matter what went on outside, we were protected and blessed.

  “It is best not to ask too many questions. My devout mother held that the Lord would not take me. And she was right. He did not. But it was my beloved father’s faith, finally, in secular learning that overruled their fear of surgery and had him rush me to the surgeon who saved my life. I was saved. My life endured, the one that had hung by a thread. All the others, sturdy stalks that bloomed and bore fruit that was the finest of its kind, the others burned to the ground.

  “Perhaps Abraham’s love for Isaac was a big mistake. The Lord required a sacrifice, and He would have it one way or another.”

  Looking directly at me, Gábor demanded, as though I had challenged him, “Why did the család not know? Why did we brothers not realize if we were so smart? And we were. Dreadfully clever. My beloved father in due course achieved his dream for our education. An illustrious instructor, tanár-úr Hász, was lured from the Debrecen föiskola—secondary school—no doubt induced by a handsome offer from my grandfather, who indulged my father like one of his own. By then I was a young man of fifteen who had long since discarded the corset and could tramp the Tanya fields like any other gentleman farmer. To Hásztanár’s credit, within four years the Weisz brothers, all three of us, were accepted, despite the quotas restricting Jewish enrolment, into the Debrecen Académia. Even I with my tone-deaf ear became more fluent in Latin than the gentile students, for the entrance requirements to the Académia were much stricter for Jews. Very smart. Eventually all three of us graduated with honours, and Miki went on to Vienna to earn his Doctorate of Law.

  “The name Szemes was a curse. We prided ourselves on clear-sightedness, the ability to see past the limitations of sand and poverty to a vision of an irrigated oasis in the desert. But it blinded us from seeing what is evident even to the eyes of a child, what you can see for yourself—that we should have used whatever influence we enjoyed to make the sacrifice. We should have given up everything and run for our lives. Indeed we were szemes, the kind of corn fodder that is turned back into the earth to enrich it.

  “Csapati the coachman said something to me once that I will never forget. By then he was old and bald except for the rag of a moustache he still chewed like a nagging riddle. I had found my way home. The skin that hung on my bones was good only for lice. At the beginning of February I had left the Tanya for what I assumed would be my last service in slave labour. The Russians were on our doorstep. The Americans had landed in the west. Germany would get squeezed from both sides. My little daughter Clárika hung from my neck and I felt her breath on my cheek sweet and light and more perfect than a kiss. For the first time since the outbreak of war my heart didn’t crack as I held her. The end was in sight. ‘When you come back…,’ she whispered, but I didn’t let her finish. I wouldn’t let her make her promise, because the promise was mine. I hugged her with a kind of joy, promising it would be the last time I would have to tell her good-bye.

  “Winter was yet to come when I returned in November. There had been neither spring nor summer. The seasons had stopped. The land lay fallow. Since mid-March I had received no response to my sporadic letters. No more letters reached me listing the family’s confiscations and shortages. No reports of my brothers at their labour camp postings. No childish drawings. I could tell I had stumbled onto Tanya ground because the soil when I stooped to touch it was hard and cracked, not crumbly as Nyirség sand. The Tanya was bare except for a bent figure also scratching in the dust. It rose to the sound of my shuffling approach, thinking in that chewing way with its mouth.

  “‘Csapati, don’t you know me?’ I asked.

  “‘Know you, Master Gabi? Who knows anyone now? Recognize you? Perhaps.’

  “I opened my hands. Speechlessly I indicated the Tanya, afraid to ask what had happened here.

  “He raised an eyebrow, squinting with shrewd intelligence and trying to guess what I knew to be fact and what I only surmised. I knew the Germans in retreat had hauled away a last catch in their deadly net. All trains had headed east. My labour detachment too had advanced towards Germany. The relentless eastwards march showed me I had no alternative but to desert. I escaped, but that is another story for another day. Few were as lucky. Bandi, my beloved brother, I later learned suffocated in a copper mine on the Yugoslav border. I found out too that Miki, the család’s pride, home on an unexpected leave, was rounded up with the rest. You ask me why I am always so gloomy at this time of year. This is it. There is a period before winter when the earth is barren, not festooned in snow and ice, nor brimming with harvest. Merely over and done with. It was at that time of year that I returned to the Tanya. Neither autumn nor winter, but what over here they call aptly the fall.

  “This was when Csapati said the words I can still hear plainly, especially their sly innuendo.

  “‘Not many are left around here,’ he said, ‘not since it pleased you all to take off.’

  “Pleased us. He said it pleased us. He was afraid, you see, that I might hold him accountable in some way. Pleased us to take off. As though we had left of our own volition. If only God had so willed.

  “Why? Why, you want to know, did we not leave before it was too late? Across Europe Jews were dying. We did not acknowledge it, but we knew. In Hungary it was different. We felt protected by an independent government. Hungary was not occupied by the Germans until the very end. Hungary supported Germany, but stopped short of the final solution. In the desert of Nazi Europe, until the very end, Hungary was an oasis in a manner of speaking. When the Lord surveyed what He created, He found it was good. Why would we have questioned His judgement?

  “You think you are smart, still a child but already you think you know everything. Then answer me this. Do you think we’d be here now—me, you, your sister and your mother—in a land thick with forests—if you children hadn’t sprouted from the ashes of the dead?

  “I left my homeland for more reasons, probably, than even I can guess, stripped like my ancestor Itzig to nothing. And I came with a new family to a strange land, with only the legacy I carried in my heart. I brought with me my father’s name, a name I loved because there was nothing grósz, nothing grand, about it.”

  * * *

  Before the War that brought about the Fall of the Jews of Europe and the Rákóczi Tanya, as well as the failure of Love, Gábor said there was Light. I imagined a red dawn glowing in the east. A world emerged on that horizon. Under its sun a small paradise bloomed that was heaven and earth together. And in that world there was Life, not just its shadow, Memory. Who was I to question?

  THE COUNTY OF BIRCHES

  My mother, Sári, met my father, Gábor, in a schoolhouse in September 1945. She sat with the women at the back
of the schoolroom that smelled of dust and dry leaves and a trace of chalk, like ash. The evocation of ash was almost sensual. Powdery and soft as child’s hair, and that unreal. Murmuring was subdued, because of those who weren’t there.

  The young men improvising the Rosh Hashanah service sat up front behind a lectern. One by one they stood to read the prayers they knew by heart, avoiding the eyes of those who had gathered.

  “And this one?” Sári whispered. “Who is the one pulling his ear like a sidelock? Kramer, you say, from Nyirbátor? And the one with red hair…?”

  She had drifted to her first husband’s county when she had found no one of her own in Beregszász. In any event, the conference in Yalta had traded her hometown to the Soviets. She left while the boundaries were just dotted and pencilled in, as empty-handed as she’d arrived. What could she have taken that would have survived the war, a bolt of cloth from her mother’s shop?

  “What about this one, the big one? Weisz? Weisz, you say? What Weisz? Which Weisz? From where—Vaja? The Vaja Weiszes? No.” No, János had never mentioned any relations from that village.

  Sári Friedlander Weisz shared Gábor’s name by marriage. She would have passed him over like the rest had she not learned from the other women that he was head of local JOINT, where those who came back sought assistance. Gábor Weisz was the man to see about finding János.

  Sári observed him reading. The voice tuneless but proficient, round head nodding to an age-old cadence, thick fingers turning the page ahead of his words, just like any old-fashioned davening Jew. He couldn’t have been more different from her János. Weisz. The same name, and from the same county. It was a cruel coincidence that another Weisz, but of no shared blood, belonged to this sad scrap of earth.

  The town of Nyiregyháza where Sári met Gábor is named for the birch tree, like many of the cities and hamlets of the plain in northeastern Hungary. This flatland is actually more distinguished by the acacias that grow profusely in its sandy soil than by anything we North Americans would recognize as birch. Nonetheless, my father’s region abounds in tributes to the white-barked tree. The Nyirség, it is called—the state of being birch—and its towns reflect this birchness in name if nothing else: Nyirmada, Nyirgyulaj, Nyirbátor, Nyirvásvári, Nyirmegges, Nyirjákó, Nyirvaja. The birch names are as ubiquitous as they are unpronounceable in English.

  I begin here, when, after the service, Gábor passed through the congregation clasping hands. Round-faced Gábor, his nose long and sorrowful, his brown eyes initially shrinking from something so lovely as this woman with hair she threw back like a mare tossing its mane, accepted the hand Sári held out first. Sári Friedlander Weisz deliberately flaunted her hair as though it had grown thick and rich, long and dark, out of defiance. Her inborn vanity had not been expunged by near death from gas and starvation. She was a woman who had grown back hardier and harder, like a rosebush pruned close to the quick. Her hair had been fair before it was shaved.

  I imagine myself conceived when my mother, tossing back her hair, felt my father’s eyes upon her. Light-sensitive eyes that had sworn off joy. Deeply impressionable, they drank in her hair, brown and unfettered like his first wife Miri’s had been only in the privacy of their bedroom, and her legs like a doe’s slim and long, and her hand outstretched like a man’s.

  I begin at this point when my father’s heart rekindles, though theoretically I go back further, before the great conflagration that reduced the numbers of his family from over a hundred to fewer than twenty, to the very beginning in fact of what we know of his ancestry, the pious vagabond without a surname called Itzig the Jew, which may have been a name generic to every Jew in the countryside. Itzig the Jew dragging his caftan in the dust of the Hungarian countryside at the end of the eighteenth century. I also hark back to the vineyards where my mother grew up and she and her six siblings played hide and seek, though it was forbidden to touch or trample the valuable fruit. (Among seven children, there are always a few young and small enough to wriggle belly down along the furrows, and fast enough to flee the raised fists of the field hands when they are discovered.) The story really starts with them, because who my parents once were and where they came from is a sum I repeatedly figure, trying to calculate how it adds up to me and my sister.

  Like any child, most of all I care about the I. The I that clamours to speak for itself. This I owes less to the piety of generations of orthodox Jews or to the mercantile candour that characterized my mother’s family than it does—its very inception—to the war that wedded them and to which it became reluctant heir.

  I knew this war like I knew the pale hand that held the spoon to my mouth. A hand moderately proportioned, distinguished by its smoothness and the incipient arthritic swell of its knuckles. I felt these joints when I played with her wedding band, working the ring up and over the first knuckle. Even the second one arched slightly, causing the ring to skin its surface. I have always known the war like I knew the impatient withdrawal of that hand if food was not taken quickly enough or if the ring slipped and fell from my stubby fingers. I have never not known of the war, though I don’t recall hearing about it for the first time any more than I remember the first chime of my mother’s voice or kiss of fresh air.

  The war came to me with all that is good. It dawned on me like my own sweet flesh and buds of toes and the bright gold band that lay on the soft pads of my palm.

  * * *

  My mother’s marriage, the one before Gábor, was hardly more than a courtship. Promenading arm-in-arm along the korzo, she in her smart suit and box hat, her military man uniformed, they made a decorative couple. People mated during the disastrous decade. People stepped out and showed off. They would wake up one day and the nightmare would be over. A beautiful girl like Sári, her parents reasoned, would need to be married. My mother dwelt on that, the promenading, the handsome figure they cut as a pair. It was all she had to tell us, all there was to that match.

  And that on her wedding night she was slipped under the wire of the labour camp. She’d say that matter-of-factly. On her three-week honeymoon she was smuggled into the camp nightly. Under the wire of the labour camp.

  Sári, my mother, who squirmed away impatiently whenever Gábor gave her fanny a friendly pat. Sári who, kissing me goodnight, pulled both my arms from under the bedclothes and pressed them firmly over the blankets, admonishing me to keep them that way. Sári who educated me early in the decorum of intimacy with the cryptic warning, “Remember, it’s always the man who takes and the woman who gives.” Her stance was prudish and ingenuous, as though she had never been touched by men’s hands.

  Yet every night for three weeks, she had allowed herself to be smuggled onto János’s pallet. Risking military discipline, they made a love that must have been memorable. Love, among the coughs and groans and gases of male strangers. He waited for her in the dark beside the wire fence he and his friends had clipped and disguised, then pulled her through the dark into the barracks that smelled of boots and sweat. This young woman who had accepted his kisses coquettishly, always drawing back, who had lived sheltered in her parents’ home, never exposed to danger. In that animal kingdom of men and their fear of death, I assume he used humour to disarm her. Humour. Because what we knew about my mother’s first husband, we had heard from Gábor.

  My father described János Weisz as a professional soldier, an officer in fact, who had served as captain in the Magyar army. Stripped by the so-called “Jewish Laws” of his rank and career, János Weisz was conscripted into the labour service in the fall of 1941, just like Gábor and his brother Bandi, agronomists by profession, and their lawyer-brother Miklós. They were thrown together with village boys so poor and unschooled my father and his brothers had to take them in hand, show them what part of the boot to polish, simple village Jews whose main skill was the practice of Jewish tradition. János Weisz became their natural leader. When the actual sergeant turned out to be a Hungarian peasant much like themselves, pulled from his hut and put in cha
rge of a regiment, no one questioned the authority of János Weisz over the ragtail band. The military officer was relieved to lie low in the local café.

  The first labour service bore little resemblance to what would follow. As the war progressed, licence with life was taken increasingly. But when the labour service was first established, Hungarian Jews were emboldened to believe that if this was all that was going to happen—this and their restriction from professions and owning land—if what was to be taken from them fell short of breath, they could bear it. Labour service would kill Bandi in the copper mines of Bor and abandon János Weisz on the Russian front, but it saved my father from Buchenwald.

  Gábor respected János Weisz. János was not a big man, but his military bearing gave him stature. He was younger than Gábor but, Gábor said, you could see that he was a man of the world, not easily intimidated. My father was impressed by the distance János Weisz kept from the rest of them, for the sake of authority.

  Enlistment took place a few weeks before Jewish New Year. For many of the men in the troop this would be their first Rosh Hashanah away from home. Business and education had led Jews of the monied class out into the world, but it was usual for poor Jews of the countryside to live their lives in one village. Observance of the High Holy Days was through prayer and strict abstention from work. The village Jews assumed that the Lord would see to it that His Law, as intrinsic as the laws of nature, would prevail. Tension mounted as the High Holy Days approached and the Lord had not indicated what they should do.

  János Weisz became aware that the poor Jews in his company had started looking on him as the unlikely instrument of the Lord. They were fearful and uncertain, bowed beneath centuries of religious tradition and secular authority. János Weisz knew the ways of their military and Christian masters. They didn’t accept him as a real Jew; he was too worldly, too tainted by outside influences. But in his own way he was enough like them to understand their dilemma. János Weisz grew aloof. He withdrew and ate alone, giving no indication of how he would direct them on upcoming Rosh Hashanah.