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.