A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [128]
Kovacs left and taught in Bonn for a year, then moved on to Paris and New York. But Konrad stubbornly held to his Hungarian-speaking country.
ZOLTAN GARDOS was born two years after the Hungarian uprising. He had always been aware that his parents had a painful secret. They would be watching television, and if something about World War II came on, Zoltan would look over at his father, staring silently into the blue light of the television, and he would see tears running down his cheeks. Nothing was said.
When Zoltan was 13, he met a girl in school who, although not a practicing Jew, talked very openly about being Jewish, and in his conversations with her Zoltan began to suspect that he might also be Jewish. At 15 they were in love, and he wanted to know more about Judaism.
Slowly he got the truth from his Communist atheist parents. He learned that his father, who was an accountant, had wanted to be a lawyer but had been barred from higher education before the war because he was Jewish. While his father was in a Russian forced labor camp, his family had been deported to Auschwitz —his mother, wife, and son—and were all killed. After the war, he remarried to Zoltan's mother, also a Jew, who had survived in hiding. Zoltan never did learn more than these vague details, which were so fraught with emotion that he too started to find the subject difficult to talk about.
He would not think about it for the present. Someday, after his parents died, he thought, he might try to explore this secret more. But his girlfriend wanted to talk about it. Soon he began to realize that some of his friends also had the same secret. Then he realized that most of his friends had this secret. Why was it, he wondered, that unknowingly he had been drawn to so many Jewish people?
At 19, Zoltan nervously made his way through the dark old Jewish section of central Pest, to the ornate cathedrallike Dohany synagogue, said to be the largest synagogue in Europe. He observed strange things going on in this imposing building, in a strange language with strange music. Zoltan may have been drawn to other Jews, but he did not feel that his place was in the Dohany.
When he was 21 he met Kati Kelemen. As a small child, Kati had come home from school mouthing anti-Semitic slurs, meaningless curses she had learned from other children. Her parents, Communists who believed in working toward the egalitarian society, told her then that they were Jewish, but they never told her much more about it.
Zoltan and Kati married and continued to ambiguously pursue Judaism. Budapest was the capital of officially sanctioned Judaism in Central Europe. It had the largest community and the only rabbinical seminary. Everything Jewish was either officially sanctioned or unofficial and banned. There were official social functions. The seminary offered a Kiddush, a social gathering centered around a wine blessing to sanctify the Sabbath, and the turnout for this was generally large Zoltan and Kati sought out other Jewish gatherings, and they began to stumble across the unofficial ones, including one in the home of a couple who had secretly invited people there for a Passover seder. The same couple would also invite five or six young people over for Friday nights. The couple were regularly warned by the police against these activities, but they continued to invite people to their home; The police would call them in for questioning and would warn them that they would lose their jobs and have their passports revoked.
Zoltan and Kati also met a young dissident rabbi, Tomas Raj, a graduate of the Budapest seminary in a class of four. Raj had already aroused the displeasure of the authorities for attempting a Saturday afternoon study group in the town of Szeged, where he had