My Immigrant Parents #3

Sandor Petofi

As a young man in his twenties, my father wore a Stetson pulled down at an angle over his eyes. He was a thoughtful man who hid his complexity behind a Jack LaLanne physique. There are many photographs of him posing in a bathing suit flexing his muscles. An avid gym member, he nonetheless derided men who worked with weights to develop tremendous muscle mass and told stories of how he had learned to step aside from men wanting to pick a fight. Growing up as his daughter, I came to know him as a highly spiritual man.

Sometimes I heard him talk with his friend, Willie, about Kabbalah, and how a person was not supposed to begin studying the more mystical aspects of the Jewish tradition until after age 40 when he had the maturity to understand its full import. His studies as a young man to become a rabbi were never far away. Beachcombing was a weekly meditation. Friends sought him out for advice. He also had the soul of a poet and introduced me to the work of Sándor Petöfi, who played a central role through his poetry in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.  Petőfi had read Nemzeti dal (The National Song) to a gathering crowd on March 15 in Vörösmarty Square in Budapest where people chanted the refrain as they began to march around the city, seizing printing presses, liberating political prisoners, and declaring the end of Austrian rule.

On the God of the Hungarians \ We vow, \ We vow, that we will be slaves \ No longer!

While still alive, my Uncle Irving, my father’s youngest brother, confirmed a loose family history thread. Sometime during the Depression while helping to organize the Painter’s Union in New York City, Martin became involved with the Young Communist League through the Hungarian-American Social Club, a fact also confirmed by my Aunt Jeanette. It’s where my parents met.

Martin left New York following a demonstration where a police officer was killed by a falling brick from a roof. Although my father was not responsible, he was afraid of retaliation, and lived in Cleveland until it became safe for him to return.

Every day in his shop he worked with toxic chemicals like acetone. Cancer claimed him in 1972.  My mother succumbed to cancer a year later.

My parents said that their highest achievement had been in sending their three daughters to college. I talked to him during the sixties about leaving college to become a full-time activist.

“Over my dead body,” he threatened, which is the only time I can remember him becoming angry. I did not say a word to challenge him and graduated from the City College of New York.

At this point my parents are both mist, gone for so long and never present as I’ve walked through my own life cycles; they didn’t have the opportunity of knowing their grandchildren, never saw me age and become more tempered in my own beliefs, and I will face my own old age not having the experience of walking that path first with them.

What they did give me feels at its core essentially Jewish: a reliance on family and love to create stability in this flawed life and to also leave this place better than I found it.  I reach back to them to discover the continuity that I longed for growing up, to understand the secrets that were withheld from me, and to share my own. To leave a fragment of myself.

Hungarian

Something faded
so far into the background
a stain of my parents
after dinner after homework after brushing teeth
exchanging code in another language
reverting to Hungarian,
the mother-tongue we were never taught
water falling over rocks in shushes
so adults could protect us
from the war secrets of their generation.

Here I am
with words for horses
grass plains
a sense of being
invaded
by strangers
once too many–

They’ve gone upstream,
all of them.

I found Béla Lugosi, that vampire man
who lived more than one lifetime
with a stare from a disciplinarian father
an understanding of darkness from the mines,
Dracula, my first teacher
educating me
with a kiss
on the stone wall
by the vacant lot
who spoiled me
for any other lover.

A sound of basil and violets crunched underfoot.

Harry Houdini, a distant relative, a Weiss,
who perfected escapism to an art–
A boy who refused the Princess’ hand
because he promised to marry a gypsy–
a renegade like me.