Generations Missing

Lenore and Laurie

Children of immigrants often speak of being one or two generations removed. Not knowing much about my family background, I’ve always thought of myself as two generations missing, and yearned to fill this gap, but didn’t know how, always envious of friends who could trace their lineage back several generations, able to rattle off memories of their grandparents and their parents. I tried to be a good listener, hearing those endless stories about that holiday around the dinner table, or the quilt, or a funny incident, but I was jealous. I didn’t have those memories, wanted to give my life dimension, some understanding of the history that had brought me to the United States. Without that understanding, I felt single-sided, almost transparent with nothing to back me up, perpetually in mourning for something I couldn’t have.

My father came to this country from Hungary when he was 11 years old. My mother’s family was from Budapest, but as the youngest, she was born in New York City. Both parents died before I was an adult and before I was able to articulate any questions about our family background. Growing up, they didn’t share information. Maybe I was too young, or maybe like many Jewish families, they were trying to distance themselves from the Holocaust and focus on assimilation in a new country. I knew neither set of grandparents and always have felt like I was floating on an ocean, but they had sent me off on a raft of love allowing me to cope with difficult situations. My father, an amateur hand-balancer and soccer player, instilled in me a confidence in my physical body, something that was a great gift at a time when there were few sports teams open to girls.

By the time I was 18, everything began to unravel, my father had a kidney removed due to the onset of cancer. But I was grateful that I had known my Great Aunt Bertha, or Bubba as we called her. She was an amazing woman, who despite her disability lived a full life.  Bubba had poor eyesight, practically blind by the time I knew her. She had glaucoma in one eye and the other had been injured in a childhood accident. She was a talented seamstress and listened to books on tape and had learned Braille. I remember her having cloudy blue eyes and delicate hands. She never talked about my actual Grandmother, her sister for whom I am named—Lenke.  After she could no longer live with my Aunt Clara in Port Chester, she died in a nursing home. I can remember one of the last times I saw her, a shrunken reticent woman, no longer wearing her signature green visor cap.

Most of my family on both my mother and father’s side died when I was young.

My Aunt Clara was my mother’s oldest sister.  She revealed a secret on her deathbed about my maternal background. My Grandmother had become pregnant with Clara in Budapest working as a housekeeper or governess (that part of the story was not clear), for a wealthy Jewish family and had become pregnant by her employer’s eldest son, Jakob Schwartz. Lenke was sent to New York City along with her sister Bertha (Bubba). I’ve always wondered what had motivated their parents to send their two children so far away from them. Was it outrage because their daughter had become pregnant and had forsaken her virginity, or was it more than that, a hope that they would have a better life in the United States? Hungary had not yet become the country of the Iron Cross, the Hungarian militia that had allied themselves with the Nazis to rid the country of Jews. Lenke had raised my aunt in New York City, but amazingly, was joined by Jakob who crossed the ocean to marry her, and in doing so, was disinherited by his outraged family.  A poor little rich boy, without any real skill or a trade, he did not know how to make a living. Lenke and Bubbe were the main support of the family doing housework, selling dry goods, and anything else. Embedded within the kernel of this story, I learned of Lenke’s strength in defying convention and making a new life for herself and family in New York City.  I wanted to keep prying open that crevice of knowledge. The only picture I had of her showed an elderly plump woman with white hair.

For years, that’s what I had about my background, read Hungarian poets and had even made one attempt to study the language when I had worked at the University of California in Berkeley as an administrative aide, surprised to find that the language was still in my ears, still familiar. I’d always longed to visit Budapest, Hungary, and several years ago had a chance to spend a week there. I stayed with my daughter near Andrássy Avenue near the Opera House where I’d heard through a family source that Lenke once lived. We visited the former Jewish Quarter, the Erzsébeváros, and the magnificent Great Synagogue on Dohány utca where many Jews who died from hunger and cold in the year before World War II had ended, were buried in 24 common graves in the courtyard. Thousands more had died in the streets. I took everything in, grateful that my parents had escaped the slaughter, a country that had handed over its Jews to the Nazis and was later ravaged by the Communist government and its Soviet-directed policies; I walked several times across the Széchenyi Chain Bridge that spans the Danube, but it was the food and the language that brought back memories—the moment I arrived, found a local restaurant that served chicken paprikash with dumplings or nokedli, and on the corner there was a store that served palacsinta, a thin crêpe that you could order with a sweet or savory filling, actually a chain of storefronts throughout the city, and pogacsa or butter cookies that were served everywhere, including bars and bakeries. These were the foods I remembered and ate growing up in my mother’s kitchen.

Chain Link Bridge

Laurie was my second cousin, the daughter of Barbara, and Clara’s granddaughter who worked as a journalist. We knew each other from family gatherings where everyone is came to commemorate a bar or bat mitzvah, wedding, or death. For many years, I knew that she had been involved in searching through family records on my maternal side. Sites like Ancestry.com had come of age and Laurie had taught herself how to move around U.S. census records and boarding documents. This summer Laurie and I spent some time together. She she pulled open yet another curtain on our shared background—I saw the names of my great-grandparents, understood where Lenke and her family had lived when they first came to New York City, understood that we had another family by my great-grandfather’s previous marriage before he had married Lenke’s mother.  All these people are long gone, but wished to hold them in my mind’s eye and to meet them there. Working with Laurie, who had already established the family tree with dates, addresses and connections, we decided to imagine them together, what their lives could’ve been like, and in doing so, find a way to live with their past in our present.

Holding on to the Fringes of Love

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