A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [171]
Gyula was ready. He listened to the speeches about “true Hungarians,” read about the occasional murder of a gypsy, and found himself for the first time thinking about emigrating with his family. “It's very strange. I had many conflicts and many problems during the former regime. But I never thought of leaving. I felt that I was a part of this culture, that all my roots were here, and that I couldn't live in another country. But when it becomes about life and death, then you don't think in these terms, and somehow you have to think about how deeply your roots go and how the whole society moved away from all those things which kept me here.”
GYORGY KONRAD, now an international literary figure and the first Central European to head the writers’ advocacy group PEN, liked to meet people at sunset on the top floor of the Budapest Hotel and stroll on the circular outdoor terrace of this drab cylindrical high-rise. He would watch the Pest spires turn to silhouettes, the lights come on along the Buda Mountains, and the Danube turn black, its rebuilt bridges once again looking permanent, with lights that sparkled in the mist rising from the river. “It's an ugly building but a beautiful view,” he would say with his impish smile while gazing at the voluptuous epicenter of his Hungarian-speaking universe, hard fought for and—for the moment—won.
At 60, he was in a new marriage and starting a second family. He was again going to synagogues on some occasions. He liked the atmosphere there, the way men wandered wrapped in their prayer shawls chanting a little in Hebrew and gossiping a little in Hungarian. It reminded him of Berettyo and the vanished Jewish world where he had held strings at his hip to fool the rabbi into thinking he wore religious garments.
His two sons, five and six, were of late contemplating the possibility of death. They thought it was unfair that God never dies and yet expected them to. They were also bothered by the story of Adam and Eve. They wanted to know why God punished Adam for wanting knowledge of good and evil. If we have to distinguish between good and evil, we have to know about them. So why was God angry at Adam? The two boys were increasingly suspecting that God was not always fair.
28
In the
Czech Republic
IT WAS INDICATIVE OF THE BAROQUE QUALITY OF REPRESSION in Czechoslovakia that playing jazz was a way to oppose the regime. Jazz was the Czechoslovakian equivalent to Hungarian filmmaking, the dissident activity that went just far enough to make opposition clear but not so clear that it was crushed. All the regime had to do was ignore the jazz musicians and they would have been reduced to being jazz musicians. But jazz was Western, from America, imperialist, decadent. Power, unchecked for long enough, will invent its own enemies to feed its addiction to crushing them.
Frantisek and Alice Kraus's son, Tomas, became a lawyer. But he also played drums —rock and jazz and the jazz/rock fusion that was popular at the time. His group not only played, it brought in groups from the West, becoming a major link to imperialist culture. The government objected so vehemently that the group, which began in the early 1970s as “unofficial culture,” ended the decade as a famous dissident organization.
Artists of all kinds were at the heart of a dissident movement born out of the postinvasion repression. Writers had enjoyed the freedom of the Dubcek era, and as their works were banned they formed into a tightly linked underground. Playwright Vaclav Havel, novelist Ivan Klima, playwright Pavel Kohout—in all, about filty writers met regularly, planned underground work, smuggled manuscripts to the West, and celebrated New York and Vienna opening nights in their Prague apartments. Among these writers was Karol Sidon, a playwright and screenplay writer who had collaborated on films with a celebrated Slovak director, Juro Jakubisko. During the brief Dubcek era, they had won first prize at a film festival in Pilsen.
At the time of the 1968 Soviet invasion Sidon