A few years ago, at a symposium in Negev on
the Holocaust (or the Shoah, as it is called
in Hebrew), I met the writer Imre Kertész,
who lives in Budapest. I immediately felt a
kinship with him, for he is not only Jewish
but German-speaking, as I had once been. For
more than fifty years, I hadn’t spoken the language,
and yet German sentences welled up in me. Kertész
and I talked about the great European authors—Primo
Levi, Paul Célan, Jean Améry—who
wrote about their experiences in the death camps
and who killed themselves. We wondered what
had caused them to commit suicide—a rare phenomenon
among Shoah survivors. And he talked about Budapest,
a city that I had first visited with my parents
in 1937, when I was five years old.
I come from an assimilated home. For my mother
and father, the German language and literature,
and the culture of the Hapsburg Empire, its
music and visual art, were their true religion.
During the First World War, my father, like
many Jews, served in the Austrian Army. As a
patriot, he was confident that his loyalty would
not go unnoticed. It’s hard for a man to shake
off the beliefs of his youth, even when they
betray him. And it’s not surprising that, as
Hitler rose to power, my parents refused to
recognize that Germany was bent on destroying
Jews, wherever they might be. My parents clung
to the belief that the Germans’ and the Austrians’
hostility toward Jews was a misunderstanding
that would be cleared up, that eventually the
Jews would be seen as the loyal, upright citizens
they were, and that everything would return
to how it had been. Vienna, Prague, and Budapest
were the large planets surrounding the town
of my birth, Czernowitz, and every summer my
parents took me to one of these cities.
For a long time, Jews have forged close links
with the great, international languages, but
the Jews of Budapest developed a special affection
for the Hungarian language, and it is no wonder
that so many creative people there have been
of Jewish descent. I was eager to discover how
many of them were still there, nearly fifty
years after the war, and how they had survived.
And so last year I made plans to visit this
city of my youth.
