Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [6]
In the spring of 1855, Fülöp decided to follow his father’s and brother’s footsteps and move his family to Pest. Thousands were making a similar trek, leaving Hungary’s small towns for the economic opportunity and political freedom of the big city. Officials granted the Pulitzers’ application to move, and Fülöp and Elize sold their house to one of the city’s judges, closed the store, and set off to the north by wagon.
For eight-year-old Joseph, the city of Pest at the end of the two-day journey was an astonishing sight. A cityscape as imperial and as majestic as that of Paris or Vienna unfolded before him as his family joined the procession of wagons navigating the cobblestone boulevards. Instead of the monochromatic Alföld of his youth, Joseph was surrounded by stone or brick buildings reaching four, five, and sometimes six stories high, many stuccoed in pastels with intricate, curlicue plaster cornices.
Unlike Buda, which had developed around the royal court’s massive palace on a hilly perch across the Danube, low-lying Pest was the creation of merchants and artisans. As a result it was maturing into one of the most strikingly beautiful cities in Europe. Large boulevards, lined with majestic examples of Italian architecture, flowed across Pest like paved rivers from each huge square to the next, dividing the city into well-defined neighborhoods.
The Pulitzers’ wagon made its way to the Golden Stern Inn, two blocks from Joseph’s grandparents’ house at the center of the city, where Jews had been permitted to live for eighty years. At first, only a few “tolerated Jews” had been able to rent apartments and maintain shops whose doors had to remain closed and which were barren of signs or window displays. But in subsequent years the laws were liberalized. By the time the Pulitzers arrived, approximately one-fifth of the city’s population was Jewish. Not only had Pest become the center of the nation’s economy, music, literature, art, and politics; it was now the center of Hungary’s Judaism as well.
The move to Pest proved to be an economic boon for the family. Within a year, Fülöp’s business made enough money to be considered for incorporation and he was invited to become a member of the Commercial and Industrial Chamber of Pest. Increasingly wealthy, the family moved into a flat closer to the Danube, in the portion of the quarter regarded as the neighborhood of the Jewish bourgeoisie. The buildings there reached deep into the interior of each block and contained inner courtyards ringed with balconies that led to one- and two-bedroom apartments.
Because of the family’s elevated social position, the parents sought to educate their children for a city trade. The eldest boy was consigned to a school of economics in Vienna, Joseph was sent to a nearby trade school, and Albert was dispatched to a boarding school. After a while, the family turned to tutors. Joseph mastered German and learned to speak French. He was a difficult pupil, however, and displayed a volcanic temper. According to Albert, Joseph once chased a tutor out the window (one assumes on the ground floor) when the tutor made the mistake of insisting on teaching mathematics rather than entertaining the youth with war stories from history.
If Joseph didn’t take well to formal instruction, he succumbed to the pleasures of reading. The Pulitzer flat was filled with books, as the parents used their increased wealth to indulge their literary passion. Elize’s favorite novelist was the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose works had been translated into German. In particular, she loved his novel The Pilgrims of the Rhine. (He later became notorious for having penned the line “It was a dark and stormy night.”) Both Joseph and Albert adopted their parents’ habit. “As a child I used