Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [4]
The prospect of mortality attending the birth of Fülöp and Elize’s children robbed them of the pleasures they should have enjoyed as the last in a line of successful Jewish merchants in the small farming town of Makó on the fringes of the Habsburg Empire. Nestled in a crook of the tranquil Maros River, the agrarian outpost was a lonely spot in the midst of the Great Alföld, a flat expanse the size of Holland running east and west across the country. Makó was like an island, surrounded in the winter by a sea of furrowed black soil stretching outward as far as the eye could see, and in the spring and summer by an undulating tapestry of green.
By the time of Joseph’s birth, the Pulitzers had been in Makó for three generations. Their ancestors were among a migration of Jews from Moravia in the 1700s, drawn by the promise of greater tolerance and a better economic life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like many other Moravians, they fit easily into a Germanic culture. Hungarian landowners, eager for the services of merchants and tradesmen, enlisted the newcomers to market the products of their estates, creating a symbiotic relationship that enriched both the Jews and the nobility. Over the years, the only connection the Pulitzers retained to their Moravian roots was their name. Since Ashkenazi Jews had no tradition of using surnames, the family adopted “Pulitzer” after the village of Pullitz they had left behind, in order to meet the legal requirement for a hereditary family name.
In Makó, the Pulitzers prospered, benefiting from the town’s growth into an important provincial market center. Joseph’s great-grandfather Baruch Simon Pulitzer, the earliest known ancestor in Makó, sold rawhide and later grain. Unusually for Jews at that time, he owned his own house, and he was one of the leaders of the Hevrah Kadisha, which helped arrange burials in Jewish congregations. His son Mihály, Joseph’s grandfather, met with even greater commercial success. He took wool and grain from Makó to market in Pest, the rapidly growing city in the north adjacent to Buda, and returned with an array of consumer goods such as spices, sugar, grapes, cloth, candles, and playing cards. Mihály was soon paying some of the highest taxes among Makó’s Jews and even lent money to members of the city council.
When Joseph’s father, Fülöp, was old enough, he joined the flourishing family business, eventually establishing his own store. Tall, bearded, with chestnut hair, blue eyes, and a pronounced hooked nose, all traits he would pass on to Joseph, Fülöp cast about for a wife. As the third in line of wealthy tradesmen, Fülöp could have easily found one among his town’s women. Instead he broke with tradition and proposed to Elize Berger, whom he had met on his frequent business trips to Pest. A sophisticated city woman, Berger complemented Fülöp’s social and financial position in Makó. The tall, dark-haired young Berger was soon “regarded an enviable woman in the society of our little town,” according to one of the Pulitzer children.
The couple made their home across the street from Makó’s marketplace in a two-story L-shaped house, considerably larger than many in town. A carriage entrance graced the front of the house, and stables extended perpendicularly from the rear. It was in this house that Joseph was born on April 10, 1847.
Following Jewish custom, Joseph received his Brit Milah, or circumcision, eight days later. The Hungarian Jewish community, into which Joseph was welcomed, was no longer that of his forebearers. Support for Orthodox Judaism was waning in Makó and in other towns that fell into the cultural orbit of Pest. In these places, Jews such as the Pulitzers were joining a reformist wing of Judaism known as Neolog. It sought to abandon many of the strictures of Orthodoxy that clashed with the growing desire among Hungarian Jews to assimilate. Neologs, for instance,