Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [5]
Nonetheless, as Jews the Pulitzers remained decidedly in the minority in Makó. Only 6 percent of the population was Jewish. Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and Calvinists dominated the city. Members of each faith lived in distinct neighborhoods that divided the town like wedges of a pie, each piece anchored by a place of worship. The tall steeples of the Calvinist and Catholic churches soared high above the flat landscape, and the pealing of their bells carried for miles. It took only a glance to know if one had wandered from the Christian neighborhoods. They were well laid out, with large houses erected by prosperous farmers who could afford to live away from their fields. The Jewish neighborhood, on the other hand, had evolved more haphazardly, with crooked streets and dead-end alleys. The synagogues were small and humble. Joseph would not be more than a few years old before he would have learned his place in the social order of the town.
In 1848, the year following Joseph’s birth, a political tsunami of revolutionary fervor swept across Europe, disturbing the order of life even in isolated Makó. Its epicenter was Paris, where a mob chased King Louis-Philippe from his throne and established the fragile but democratic Second Republic. From France the revolution spread to Italy, Germany, and all corners of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Hungarians saw this moment as a chance to establish their own state. A new government led by the nationalist Lajos Kossuth took power in Pest and established a free press, taxed the nobility, and unshackled peasants from centuries-old feudalistic practices. Jews supported the revolution in large numbers. In return, the government granted them legal emancipation. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. By the summer of 1849, what little was left of the rebellion was in retreat. Kossuth himself spent a night in Makó, just a few days before Austrian troops entered the city, and then he fled to the United States.
Despite the revolution’s ignoble end, the Pulitzers clung to their ideals. Two of Joseph’s uncles had served in the revolution’s national guard, and his father’s store had supplied the troops. (Wisely, his father also supplied the Austrian occupiers, avoiding retribution.) The uprising cemented the Pulitzers’ identification with nationalism. Although they were Jewish in religion, they regarded themselves as Hungarians in nationality and sentiment. Like most Jews, they came to view their social and economic fate as inextricably linked to that of the nation. In his diary, Joseph’s younger brother Albert neatly inscribed a poem by Sándor Petöfi, the revolution’s poet laureate, who perished in one of its battles. “Rise Magyar, your country calls!” it began. “The time for now or never falls! Are we to live as slaves or free? Choose one! This is our destiny.”
The end of the revolution had personal consequences for the Pulitzer children. “The Hungarian language, Hungarian manners, Hungarian traditions, were all under a ban. People would hardly dare to speak Hungarian in the lowest whispers,” recalled Albert. “And thus it came that the native babble of my childhood was soon a stranger to me.” School life was also altered. The new government-funded Jewish grammar school in Makó that Joseph briefly attended was tinged with secularism and less Orthodox than older schools, diminishing even farther the importance of Judaic traditions.
There was nothing modern, however, about discipline in the Pulitzer household. The children learned early that “the Hungarian child never answers his father back,” Albert said. When disciplining his three boys, their father terrified them by recounting the Roman historian Livy’s tale of Titus Manlius