By Marietta Pritchard
My book, Among Strangers, is a personal history covering several generations of my family beginning with their origins in Central Europe, and focusing especially on my grandfather, Ernst Fürth.
Ernst was a wealthy industrialist who left Austria after the Nazi takeover, mistakenly thinking he could find safety in France. But he was caught in the Nazi net and eventually imprisoned at Drancy, a camp near Paris. During his time of exile, he wrote to his daughters in the U.S. -- my mother and aunt -- as often as he could.
When my mother made me a gift of two of his letters, I had no idea what kind of a journey I was about to embark on. The gift opened the door to several years of work, during which my mother and I explored the contents of about 200 pieces of correspondence — some of which had never reached their destination. They describe an ever-narrowing existence, beginning in confident hope and ending in sorrow and desperation.
Ernst Fürth’s story is central to Among Strangers, but intertwined with it are other narratives. A grandmother’s ring and the vexed tale of a building in Vienna introduce the subject of inheritance. Fundamental questions of identity are raised as my immigrant parents make the transition from a high bourgeois life in Budapest to a newly “Americanized” one; and I discover my Jewish roots after a Catholic upbringing.
The book tells of inheritance and loss, of war and peace, of exile and rootedness, of the grief of separation and the resilience of the human spirit.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Excerpts from Among Strangers
from Chapter One, "Moving Beyond Endings"
There are people who are, from an early age, by nature and inclination, attached to the past — anthropologists, historians, archivists, novelists and poets of their own lives, keeping meticulous or quirky records, looking back methodically or nostalgically or satirically. They go back to their hometowns, sniff the air for change or continuity. They keep in touch with their earlier selves. My husband and youngest son are among this tribe. I never was until I was well into middle age. I was simply too busy, too engaged, too willfully intent on the here and now to do much meditating on where I had been. I must have had a sense, too, absorbed from my father’s spoken and unspoken injunctions, that the past might be a painful place, better avoided than confronted. It was better to keep looking forward for fear of seeing something terrible — what was it? something dangerous, forbidden. If I looked back, I or someone else might be destroyed. Remember the fate of Lot’s wife, of Eurydice.
Still, after 50, it seems, almost everyone becomes a memoirist. Is the impulse simply hormonal, physiological, the flagging of desire, a weariness of the flesh that makes what has happened seem more exciting than what is to come? Or is it the acknowledgment, finally, of one’s own inevitable death that brings the wish to set the record straight?
I had been interested enough in my family’s past to encourage my father to write a memoir in his later years. But it was not until after his death in 1988 that I felt that interest turn to a mandate. I traveled a number of times to family homes and workplaces in Central Europe. I started learning Hungarian. I read and reread letters and other family documents. I bothered people, especially my mother, with questions. I took notes and photographs, kept journals and wrote essays. I haunted certain sections of the library. I was, it is true, a little obsessed. I needed to know more about my family’s lives in a world that had been destroyed by war.
It was relatively easy to ask questions and guess and speculate about my parents, whom I thought I already knew pretty well. But my grandparents’ generation was truly a lost continent to me, a place that I had never seen and would never reach. The lives of those people, their voices, their rages, their charms, their joys, their habits, their gestures — these are as remote to me as the time in which they lived. Yet, mysteriously, as surely as if they had instructed me, I have learned from them.
“You act as though you grew up with a lot of servants,” a neighbor with a wicked tongue once said to me many years ago. I was probably out in the yard in my jeans and workshirt, raking leaves or replacing a bicycle chain, trying to keep track of three small boys, trying to keep my sanity. But she had picked up something in my tone, in my bearing, an attitude of entitlement — not evident to me — that gave her an inkling of a life I had not even lived. It’s true that my parents had been comfortable in their suburban New York existence, that we had a solid middle-class life, even some hired help. That was between 1941 and 1954, when a not-so-wealthy, one-paycheck family could easily afford a maid. But by the time of my neighbor’s comment, my husband and I were living on his assistant professor’s salary, plus what I could earn as a part-time schoolteacher. Still there was, evidently, something osmotically remembered, something in my manner that rubbed this woman the wrong way, and that something had been transmitted — as I now guess — from my magnificent grandmother through my mother to me. Call it a form of inheritance. But since my grandmother’s virtues are not admired in a democracy, except in celebrities or movie stars, my neighbor’s assessment confirmed the earlier opinion of my schoolyard days, where the consensus had often been, to my sorrow, that I was conceited, stuck-up. It was this grandmother, Elza Roheim Fürth, who became the subject of one of my first efforts to write about my family. Elza’s suicide was in 1931, when she was 54, five years before I was born. Because there are so few stories about her, I cherish the ones I have.
Sometimes, when I wear her big ring, I try to imagine Elza Fürth, even though my mother’s hand was the one I saw wearing it nearly every day during my childhood. My mother, Eva Fürth Perl, had a hand a lot like mine, square and functional with roundish fingernails. I can see the ring on her neatly manicured hand or on the kitchen windowsill where she used to put it when she was scrubbing potatoes or mixing up a meatloaf, or on the glass-topped, chintz-skirted dressing table where she left it at night.
The story of the ring goes like this: Grandmother bought it — an index-fingernail-sized sapphire encircled by diamonds — after winning at baccarat in the casino at Monte Carlo. She was there with her husband on holiday and had already spotted the big blue chunk in a jeweler’s window. She went straight from the gaming tables to make her purchase. That was like her, the family commentators say, perfectly in character — impulsive, vain, beautiful, showy, extravagant.
There are people who are, from an early age, by nature and inclination, attached to the past — anthropologists, historians, archivists, novelists and poets of their own lives, keeping meticulous or quirky records, looking back methodically or nostalgically or satirically. They go back to their hometowns, sniff the air for change or continuity. They keep in touch with their earlier selves. My husband and youngest son are among this tribe. I never was until I was well into middle age. I was simply too busy, too engaged, too willfully intent on the here and now to do much meditating on where I had been. I must have had a sense, too, absorbed from my father’s spoken and unspoken injunctions, that the past might be a painful place, better avoided than confronted. It was better to keep looking forward for fear of seeing something terrible — what was it? something dangerous, forbidden. If I looked back, I or someone else might be destroyed. Remember the fate of Lot’s wife, of Eurydice.
Still, after 50, it seems, almost everyone becomes a memoirist. Is the impulse simply hormonal, physiological, the flagging of desire, a weariness of the flesh that makes what has happened seem more exciting than what is to come? Or is it the acknowledgment, finally, of one’s own inevitable death that brings the wish to set the record straight?
I had been interested enough in my family’s past to encourage my father to write a memoir in his later years. But it was not until after his death in 1988 that I felt that interest turn to a mandate. I traveled a number of times to family homes and workplaces in Central Europe. I started learning Hungarian. I read and reread letters and other family documents. I bothered people, especially my mother, with questions. I took notes and photographs, kept journals and wrote essays. I haunted certain sections of the library. I was, it is true, a little obsessed. I needed to know more about my family’s lives in a world that had been destroyed by war.
It was relatively easy to ask questions and guess and speculate about my parents, whom I thought I already knew pretty well. But my grandparents’ generation was truly a lost continent to me, a place that I had never seen and would never reach. The lives of those people, their voices, their rages, their charms, their joys, their habits, their gestures — these are as remote to me as the time in which they lived. Yet, mysteriously, as surely as if they had instructed me, I have learned from them.
“You act as though you grew up with a lot of servants,” a neighbor with a wicked tongue once said to me many years ago. I was probably out in the yard in my jeans and workshirt, raking leaves or replacing a bicycle chain, trying to keep track of three small boys, trying to keep my sanity. But she had picked up something in my tone, in my bearing, an attitude of entitlement — not evident to me — that gave her an inkling of a life I had not even lived. It’s true that my parents had been comfortable in their suburban New York existence, that we had a solid middle-class life, even some hired help. That was between 1941 and 1954, when a not-so-wealthy, one-paycheck family could easily afford a maid. But by the time of my neighbor’s comment, my husband and I were living on his assistant professor’s salary, plus what I could earn as a part-time schoolteacher. Still there was, evidently, something osmotically remembered, something in my manner that rubbed this woman the wrong way, and that something had been transmitted — as I now guess — from my magnificent grandmother through my mother to me. Call it a form of inheritance. But since my grandmother’s virtues are not admired in a democracy, except in celebrities or movie stars, my neighbor’s assessment confirmed the earlier opinion of my schoolyard days, where the consensus had often been, to my sorrow, that I was conceited, stuck-up. It was this grandmother, Elza Roheim Fürth, who became the subject of one of my first efforts to write about my family. Elza’s suicide was in 1931, when she was 54, five years before I was born. Because there are so few stories about her, I cherish the ones I have.
Sometimes, when I wear her big ring, I try to imagine Elza Fürth, even though my mother’s hand was the one I saw wearing it nearly every day during my childhood. My mother, Eva Fürth Perl, had a hand a lot like mine, square and functional with roundish fingernails. I can see the ring on her neatly manicured hand or on the kitchen windowsill where she used to put it when she was scrubbing potatoes or mixing up a meatloaf, or on the glass-topped, chintz-skirted dressing table where she left it at night.
The story of the ring goes like this: Grandmother bought it — an index-fingernail-sized sapphire encircled by diamonds — after winning at baccarat in the casino at Monte Carlo. She was there with her husband on holiday and had already spotted the big blue chunk in a jeweler’s window. She went straight from the gaming tables to make her purchase. That was like her, the family commentators say, perfectly in character — impulsive, vain, beautiful, showy, extravagant.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
from Chapter Four, "Homesickness: Meeting a Grandfather"
Although I was born in Budapest, I had not been back to Hungary until 1989, the year after my father died. And although I had lived most of my childhood in the same suburban house, there always remained that residual sense of being a bit of a foreigner. I could not say that I ever felt fully at home in Scarsdale, New York.
But my first trip to Hungary had hooked me; I kept being drawn back. I loved Budapest — still war scarred and a little shabby in 1989, but dressed, like Scarlett, in a ball gown made of the old parlor curtains. Budapest was a vibrant stage set, hospitable, stylish, the place my father had grown up, the place my parents had launched their marriage, and where my sister and I had been born. I also felt a kind of elemental attraction to the Great Plain. The attraction surely was, in part, the romantic lure of tracking ancestral footprints in the land, where there were fewer signposts.
In 1991, I had headed out this way with my husband. As I exclaimed over the beauties of the landscape, Bill hunched further down behind the steering wheel, resisting my efforts to include him in my quest for family footprints. He was not moved by the red-tile-roofed villages or the acres of vineyards, nor the rows of poplars lining the small country roads. He was not enjoying the hot sun and the flatness. He was not amused when we had to wait most of an hour on a dusty riverbank to put our rented car on a rickety raftlike ferry to take us across the Tisza River.
Unlike me, Bill has had all the roots he has ever needed or wanted. When I first visited his family in a small city in upstate New York, I was amazed to discover in what proximity they lived to each other. Amazed and, I’ll have to admit, appalled. From the backyard of his parents’ house, you could yell down two houses to where his three aunts and grandmother lived. “I see you’re hanging out your sheets today,” his Aunt Romayne would call from her back porch. “Yes,” Bill’s mother would shout back. “I thought the wind would dry them nice and fast.”
“What are you fixing for supper?” Aunt Romayne would call out next.
“I’m planning to bake a ham. Then we can have it cold and for sandwiches for the rest of the week. I got some apples and corn on the cob over at Portz’s farm stand, and I’m fixing an apple crisp.”
The concept of privacy, the none-of-your-business attitude that so pervaded my continental/ suburban upbringing, seemed utterly foreign here in Johnson City, N.Y. But it also meant a kind of clarity about who you were and where you took your place in the world. The people in this family had continued to live within a 20-mile radius for several generations. In a half-hour’s drive, you could visit the graves of all of my husband’s known ancestors. He had no need to go looking for his past. It was right there in plain sight. And although from time to time he liked to revisit it nostalgically, he had always intended to move beyond its provincial flatness. He couldn’t fathom why I had suddenly become mesmerized by my past.
What I was suffering from, it seems to me now, is a long-term case of homesickness, that dangerously weighted longing for unattainable completion. All immigrants suffer from homesickness as they look back to the familiar world they’ve left behind. And although the sense of loss in a child raised by immigrant parents is less immediately apparent, yet it is no less compelling. For me, there were no coherent memories of the old world, no deep roots in the new one. Like a climber queasily suspended over a ravine, I found, past the middle of my life’s journey, that I needed to struggle to find my footing.
Although I was born in Budapest, I had not been back to Hungary until 1989, the year after my father died. And although I had lived most of my childhood in the same suburban house, there always remained that residual sense of being a bit of a foreigner. I could not say that I ever felt fully at home in Scarsdale, New York.
But my first trip to Hungary had hooked me; I kept being drawn back. I loved Budapest — still war scarred and a little shabby in 1989, but dressed, like Scarlett, in a ball gown made of the old parlor curtains. Budapest was a vibrant stage set, hospitable, stylish, the place my father had grown up, the place my parents had launched their marriage, and where my sister and I had been born. I also felt a kind of elemental attraction to the Great Plain. The attraction surely was, in part, the romantic lure of tracking ancestral footprints in the land, where there were fewer signposts.
In 1991, I had headed out this way with my husband. As I exclaimed over the beauties of the landscape, Bill hunched further down behind the steering wheel, resisting my efforts to include him in my quest for family footprints. He was not moved by the red-tile-roofed villages or the acres of vineyards, nor the rows of poplars lining the small country roads. He was not enjoying the hot sun and the flatness. He was not amused when we had to wait most of an hour on a dusty riverbank to put our rented car on a rickety raftlike ferry to take us across the Tisza River.
Unlike me, Bill has had all the roots he has ever needed or wanted. When I first visited his family in a small city in upstate New York, I was amazed to discover in what proximity they lived to each other. Amazed and, I’ll have to admit, appalled. From the backyard of his parents’ house, you could yell down two houses to where his three aunts and grandmother lived. “I see you’re hanging out your sheets today,” his Aunt Romayne would call from her back porch. “Yes,” Bill’s mother would shout back. “I thought the wind would dry them nice and fast.”
“What are you fixing for supper?” Aunt Romayne would call out next.
“I’m planning to bake a ham. Then we can have it cold and for sandwiches for the rest of the week. I got some apples and corn on the cob over at Portz’s farm stand, and I’m fixing an apple crisp.”
The concept of privacy, the none-of-your-business attitude that so pervaded my continental/ suburban upbringing, seemed utterly foreign here in Johnson City, N.Y. But it also meant a kind of clarity about who you were and where you took your place in the world. The people in this family had continued to live within a 20-mile radius for several generations. In a half-hour’s drive, you could visit the graves of all of my husband’s known ancestors. He had no need to go looking for his past. It was right there in plain sight. And although from time to time he liked to revisit it nostalgically, he had always intended to move beyond its provincial flatness. He couldn’t fathom why I had suddenly become mesmerized by my past.
What I was suffering from, it seems to me now, is a long-term case of homesickness, that dangerously weighted longing for unattainable completion. All immigrants suffer from homesickness as they look back to the familiar world they’ve left behind. And although the sense of loss in a child raised by immigrant parents is less immediately apparent, yet it is no less compelling. For me, there were no coherent memories of the old world, no deep roots in the new one. Like a climber queasily suspended over a ravine, I found, past the middle of my life’s journey, that I needed to struggle to find my footing.
Monday, July 26, 2010
from Chapter Five, "Catching Up with the Past"
On Christmas Eve of 1938, Grandfather wrote from a hotel in Paris to my parents, who were still in Budapest. After Ernst and his second wife, Ella, left Vienna in the spring, they had gone first to the family homestead in Sušice, and from there to Switzerland, a place that might have provided sanctuary during the war. But it wounded my grandfather’s dignity to have to report to the Swiss police every week, and so he left for Paris, where, he was convinced, foreigners were treated better. His Christmas letter from there shows that he has every intention of staying. That letter, the earliest in our collection, is an energetic introduction to a man determined to continue enjoying a life — albeit a diminished one — over which he expects to retain a considerable degree of control.
My parents were only three weeks away from leaving their own apartment in Budapest forever. On January 13, 1939, they packed their suitcases and left for Switzerland with my sister, me, and our nursemaid, Nene. Mother — who impulsively packed the Christmas tree ornaments in the suitcases, the only household objects she carried — remembers that the mistletoe was still hanging over the doorway of the apartment.
Before they left, Grandfather wrote again from Paris, outlining what he knew about one of the very good reasons for our departure: Hungary’s new Jewish Laws. My parents, though thoroughly assimilated and secularized through several generations (note the Christmas ornaments), and more recently converts to Catholicism, might nevertheless be powerfully affected by these laws. Of course my father, who had already made up his mind to leave, was all too well aware of the gathering clouds. Indeed it was he who had urged my grandfather to leave Europe. Here is my grandfather from Paris:
By spring of 1939, Ernst and Ella had moved from Paris to Nice, seeking a better climate and better company for their bridge game. By now they had been joined by Ernst’s widowed sister-in-law, Cecile Fürth. Ernst was no doubt also looking for a place where they could live more economically than in Paris. As he says, he had been able to rescue only a small fraction of his wealth. Despite his initial confidence, these funds eventually ran out. As long as he could, my father saw to it — until it became illegal — that my grandfather was supplied with money.
On Christmas Eve of 1938, Grandfather wrote from a hotel in Paris to my parents, who were still in Budapest. After Ernst and his second wife, Ella, left Vienna in the spring, they had gone first to the family homestead in Sušice, and from there to Switzerland, a place that might have provided sanctuary during the war. But it wounded my grandfather’s dignity to have to report to the Swiss police every week, and so he left for Paris, where, he was convinced, foreigners were treated better. His Christmas letter from there shows that he has every intention of staying. That letter, the earliest in our collection, is an energetic introduction to a man determined to continue enjoying a life — albeit a diminished one — over which he expects to retain a considerable degree of control.
Dec. 24, 1938
My dear children!
Hearing your voices [they must have phoned] and the chirping of the children again after such a long time was a very nice Christmas surprise and gave me great pleasure. Also I thank you in both our names for the greeting from Budapest in the form of an excellent and perfectly fresh nussbeugel [a nut-filled pastry].
On the other hand I miss your answer to my last very extensive letter, which I hope you received. You now know that I intend to stay here for some time. When we get our cartes d’identité about January 10th, we plan to rent a furnished apartment, spacious enough for not-too-demanding houseguests. Ella and I would be delighted if all four of you would be our guests. After such a long separation, it would be refreshing and raise our spirits to be together again.
Tonight, after many weeks at home, we will have dinner at Little Hungary, perhaps we can get a halászlé [a Hungarian fish soup]. Thanks for the subscription to the Neue Züricher Zeitung, but please inform the newspaper office of our correct address, which they botched up.
A thousand hugs for big and small
from your faithful
Father
My parents were only three weeks away from leaving their own apartment in Budapest forever. On January 13, 1939, they packed their suitcases and left for Switzerland with my sister, me, and our nursemaid, Nene. Mother — who impulsively packed the Christmas tree ornaments in the suitcases, the only household objects she carried — remembers that the mistletoe was still hanging over the doorway of the apartment.
Before they left, Grandfather wrote again from Paris, outlining what he knew about one of the very good reasons for our departure: Hungary’s new Jewish Laws. My parents, though thoroughly assimilated and secularized through several generations (note the Christmas ornaments), and more recently converts to Catholicism, might nevertheless be powerfully affected by these laws. Of course my father, who had already made up his mind to leave, was all too well aware of the gathering clouds. Indeed it was he who had urged my grandfather to leave Europe. Here is my grandfather from Paris:
Dec. 30, 1938
My dear children!
Today I read a very thorough report about the new Jewish laws in Hungary and I have come to the conclusion that from now on for Jews, not only will social and political life be restricted, but also economic progress — the aim of honorable work — will be made impossible. But why should I make your hearts heavier than they already are by lamenting and complaining? Rather, I am all for your making the energetic decision to emigrate as soon as possible and to start a new existence over there. In the provisional bill I read a passage that intends to facilitate emigration for Jews. That, hopefully, means that they will be permitted to take with them a certain percentage of their property in one form or another. As clearly as the rest of the bill is written, this portion is left unclear, and I put little hope in the law’s mercy.
But even in the most unfavorable case, you should stick to your decision. You know that when I left Vienna I could only rescue a small, modest fraction of my possessions. Still you can count on me over there. Even if I have to reduce my own needs, I’ll help you out until you manage to earn your own living.
Find out whether Gretl has a small wish and put it on her birthday table in my name.
By spring of 1939, Ernst and Ella had moved from Paris to Nice, seeking a better climate and better company for their bridge game. By now they had been joined by Ernst’s widowed sister-in-law, Cecile Fürth. Ernst was no doubt also looking for a place where they could live more economically than in Paris. As he says, he had been able to rescue only a small fraction of his wealth. Despite his initial confidence, these funds eventually ran out. As long as he could, my father saw to it — until it became illegal — that my grandfather was supplied with money.
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