Marianne Szegedy-Maszak - I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary

This is a work of nonfiction.

Copyright 2013 by Marianne Szegedy-Maszk

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Szegedy-Maszk, Marianne.

I kiss your hands many times : hearts, souls, and wars in Hungary /

Marianne Szegedy-Maszk.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

Ebook ISBN: 9780679645221

1. Szegedy-Maszk, Marianne. 2. HungariansUnited StatesBiography.

3. World War, 19391945Hungary. 4. Holocaust, Jewish (19391945)Hungary.

5. JewsHungaryBiography. 6. HungaryBiography. I. Title.

E184.H95S85 2013

940.5318092dc23 [B] 2012043179

www.randomhousebooks.com

Jacket design: Tal Goretsky and Greg Mollica

Jacket photograph: courtesy of the author

rh_3.1_c0_r1

For the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories: and he was the last to have any unusual memories, anything different from those of other families.

GIUSEPPE DI LAMPEDUSA, The Leopard

THE
WEISS FAMILY

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I was brought to our house on Patterson Street, in Washington, D.C., four days after I was born in the spring of 1955, and I grew up to the sound of languages I couldnt understand. My father was fifty-one when I was born, my mother thirty-nine, and my brothers, Peter and Andrew, were much older than I, five and seven years respectively. My mothers parents and older sister lived with us, so I spent much of my childhood observing the complex interplay of the many adults in my life, longing to be included in the combative exclusive society of older boys, and sitting silent, daydreaming, picking up the gist of topics, as conversations in the many secret languages in which they were all fluentHungarian, French, German, to a lesser extent Portugueseswirled around me.

My older brother Andy spoke German and Hungarian but at age five had concluded that these were far less useful than English, which was what was spoken in kindergarten. Following the tradition of immigrant children everywhere, he refused to speak German and Hungarian when at home, thereby persuading all the elders that in America children needed to assimilate, and assimilation meant speaking only English.

By the time I appeared, smack dab in the middle of the Eisenhower era, Hungarian belonged exclusively to the adults, its alchemy of pervasiveness and inaccessibility creating in me a potent and powerful and frustrated longing for linguistic versatility that has lasted a lifetime. Like someone who lacks one of the five senses, I learned how to compensate and became fluent in understanding gestures, facial expressions, and emotions that were unexpressed, at least verbally.

The speed with which my father rubbed his index finger over his thumbnail could signal his level of parental anxiety. The intensity of my mothers focus on somethinga conversation, a crossword puzzle, a person, a telephone callwas demonstrated when she bent her left arm, her hand playing with her pearls, while her right hand held the elbow. If my grandmother tilted her head to the right, an echo of girlish flirtation, I knew that she liked the person with whom she was speaking, but the vertical position was simple politeness. My grandfathers hands folded a few inches away from his face, elbows propped on the armrests, indicated that what he was about to say would be profound. My aunts cigarette propthe long inhale, say, or the longer untapped ashwas so articulate, she could have spoken only Chinese, and I would have known how she felt about a subject.

The house on Patterson Street was big and red brick and the largest on the block. Set back from the street, shrouded by a tangle of boxwood, holly trees, and azaleas, it so overshadowed our lives that when we referred to it, we simply said Patterson Street, as if it were the only house there. And for us, it was. My grandmother had shopped for the house with my mother in 1954. She bought furniture at an auction, managed to salvage some family art stored in France, and aside from a few changes of carpet, lightbulbs, and paint, for over fifty years the furniture remained just where she put it, and the pictures hung just where she hammered the nails.

It wasnt a shrine, though. In fact it was an active, jolly place with lots of coming and going, many guests and parties, a fortress against the impositions of the outside world. An enclave of civility and good conversation and utter predictability, it was more Budapest in 1935 than Washington in the latter half of the twentieth century. Each season came accompanied by a particular smell immediately noticeable when you walked into the front hall: my favorite was summer, a perfume of cigarettes, flowers, sherry, and warm dust.

We were not a conventional nuclear family but a sprawling, diffuse, middle-European, three-generation household dominated by the Kornfelds, my mothers people, converted aristocratic Jews. The dinner table was a diorama of the power structure in the household, with my baroness grandmother, Marianne, presiding. Once a noted beauty in Budapest, she possessed a kind of regal quality even as an old womanher nails always painted a dusky pink, her white hair in a bun held by tortoiseshell pins, and large, heavy-lidded blue eyes that contained, if not sadness, then resignation.

On her right sat my grandfather, Baron Maurice de Kornfeld. He was always dapper in a three-piece suit and spatsa sartorial requirement that became increasingly difficult to satisfy in the United Statesdespite the fact that he rarely left the house and spent his days reading, writing, and playing solitaire in his little office. Even in his eighties he was never stooped, though he also never seemed to go very many places. As a child, I would visit him in his study as he played solitaire, and together we would arrange the cards. Bald, with a tidy mustache and a wise and gentle face, he exerted the compelling poetic force of a patient and deep intellectual; there was not a book not worth reading for him, whether philosophy or agrarian tracts or anything historical or merely entertaining like Wodehouse or Maigret.

My mothers unmarried, older, and dazzling sister, Mria, had been as beautiful as a porcelain doll as a child, and in the family craze for diminutives, she became Puppa. She had dark hair that she permitted to gray and then whiten, and her mothers heavy-lidded eyes, though in a soft brown. She always wore glasses and, astonishing to me, had so much trouble with her teeth, she actually decided to have them all pulled and wore unobtrusive dentures. (I had always assumed that adults would not have their own teeth, but this seemed a bit radical.)