About Jews

Dark-faced foreigners have flooded the city. They go about rushing through the boulevards, but in the suburbs they already stop to congregate, talk in a strong and loud voice, heavily gesticulating. I have not seen any one of them smile, but they have no reason to do so: they are refugees. They came from the northernmost counties and Galicia—not only out of necessity but also driven by eternal wanderlust and an instinct to sniff out new business; and here they stood up and took root very quickly. They are Jews, and I, a descendant of this perpetually beaten up but eternally unbeatable race, observe them with averse curiosity. [ . . . ]

The practical significance of all this? None that we can detect at the moment. For now, let’s just say this: a foreign race with all their abilities and excellent international relations melted into [the Hungarian nation]. The symbol is charming, too: a little Jewish boy from Pest and a peasant boy from Andornak speak the same language, and only one language. This will lead to something, something good and grand!

If someone were to ask us to offer testimony to our unbreakable Hungarianness I would walk away from them with conceit. Now, however, all I can think about is what else we could do to prove our complete harmonization. Everyone has to sacrifice everything now. And I want the Jews to do even more than what is possible. I am thinking about some monumental, almost biblical sacrifice, and I can’t stop racking my brain about what other solemn act of generosity we could offer in order to strengthen this wonderful country even more. I often come up with fantastic ideas during the night, but by noon I sober up and think to myself: Why should Jews do more than others?

I am afraid and uncomfortable to confess this, but I can’t stop myself from writing it down here: it even crossed my mind that it would greatly benefit the Hungarian people if local Jews were to change their old faith en masse, if the Jewish people would convert to Christianity. This would serve the ideal of a completely homogeneous Hungarian nation, and would be the best testimony we could offer to the world.

This idea excites me, it virtually arouses me, but I don’t even dare think it through completely, and I could most certainly not go on preaching it. One thing is sure, though: whereas just yesterday I viewed anyone who abandoned their faith, their parents’ native religion for any reason—except if they were madly in love—with surprised contempt, today I am no longer surprised and I don’t scorn them. I myself could hardly do it, but I am not young and I have some strong emotional reasons that present respectable and serious obstacles.

Additionally, I sold them my funeral.

This is not a simple matter, not some trifle, not a heartrending anecdote. This really happened, it’s a fact. It is not an old story, either—it happened only ten years ago, although to me it seems as if it happened just last night.

I was tossing and turning sleeplessly in my bed at the sanatorium in Mariagrün. I have wallowed here for three months; I have not been able to get back onto my feet, cannot return to the life from which I stepped away for a little excursion at the time. Any sense of joy was extinguished; I was waiting for the end hopelessly, numbly. I had very little money back then. (I never had much to begin with.) I viewed my poor little room as the entranceway to death, but I got used to it and I was afraid that exactly because of the aforementioned state of affairs I would have to leave it shortly. I had only one week’s worth of rent left, so in this last hour my equally meager life-instinct forced me to come up with a financial plan. When I was healthy no one earned money more easily than me, although in the end I always had to work very hard for it. But now this ease had become the problem—all sources of advances had been exhausted; I even received advance payment for a textbook I was to write later. Thus, publishing houses were out of the question. The idea of contacting places where other people normally turn for loans, such as lending institutions, brought only a smile to my face. Asking rich people for a loan is shameful, asking the poor is futile. I had no assets and no one owed me anything. Besides, taking this road would have been very hard for me, anyway. I was still searching for an option, where to find something, just enough to be able to stay here for another month or two to see which way I was going.

In my deliberations I involved my friend and colleague, the journalist László Fényes, who came to be near me to help whether or not I needed it. (I quarreled with him a lot in those days because he wanted to force his joy of life and determination upon me.) He could not think of any solution, either, and I was just about to reproach myself for not saving up some capital from the 250-forint honorarium for my novel when I suddenly remembered something. It occurred to me that I do still have one form of benefit that I can take advantage of. Only one, one that has an ideal value only. I am to receive an honorable burial free of charge from the ḥevra kadisha [burial society] of the Jewish community of Pest, of which I am an honorary member. (To this day I don’t know to whom I am indebted for this honor.) So I do have an actual asset: a funeral.

And that’s not something cheap, either—it is worth at least 2,000 korona, if not more. First, they have to redeem me from the neighboring ḥevra kadisha of Graz—that costs money. Next, László Fényes can’t carry my body home on his back. Transportation by train also costs money, and it is not cheap. Then there is the proper coffin—an honorary member like me will need two or maybe even three of those. Back home—the honorary cemetery plot is not cheap, either. The ḥevra kadisha itself will be charged a couple of hundred forints for it. From my point of view all these expenses are neither useful nor desirable, for if they are really going to bury me, I will not be able to enjoy my funeral.

This chain of thought serves as proof that the mediocre but fundamental freshness of my mind has not suffered during those difficult times. My thinking was logical and bold, and I acted energetically. I immediately wrote a letter to the burial society stating that in return for a certain sum that I would receive now, while I am still alive, I forgo my expensive funeral. To them it makes no difference, so I, however, can stay here in Mariagrün for another month or two and wait to see my fate. László Fényes took this beautiful and not-at-all-sad letter, written in an entirely professional tone, to Budapest, and three days later he brought me the sum designated for my funeral. He also brought a letter from the solemn Jews in which they let me know that they were sending the money but that I should not worry, when the time comes, they will dispose of my remains properly and respectably.

How could I leave them? Those who can . . . My sons, maybe . . . Why not? Peculiarly, they can’t, either. Even though they were raised like pagans, without faith and strictly as Hungarians, now that I offered them this step they just smiled. Why? Why should we do it? Why didn’t you do it? It is so interesting that there are Jews, and you and we are one of them.

Jews don’t like death too much. (Who does?) Sadly, I don’t know our religion very well, but it seems to me that Judaism, just like the religion of the Greeks, has a strong and healthy orientation to this world; its main foundation is in this life and not in another life in the world to come. Life after death, heaven, hell, and other such beautiful and useful fantasies are completely absent from it. Here and only here, in this adorable muddy world is there pleasure and suffering, truth, sin, virtue, punishment, and attainment. My mother, who was a faithful Jew, said to me on the day before she died, “Stay with me, we won’t see each other for long!”

She was one year short of ninety; she could feel that death was near; in fact, she knew it. She was looking at her nails on both hands to see when the purple color of demise would appear.

If there is anyone who deserved a nicer, better world—my mother did. She didn’t believe in it. She prayed, but she said quietly, with a deep conviction, “When we die, we are dead.”

The most enthusiastic, most solid faith has, somehow, an element of faithlessness in it, and this confused me even back when I was a child. In my childhood years, back home in Eger, Jews buried their dead in the ancient way. I often watched, trembling with curiosity, as they lay the dead, wrapped in his white prayer shawl, into [a coffin made of] four barely attached pine boards. It seemed to me that they didn’t even nail them together so that the person can resurrect comfortably and easily when we hear the Messiah calling people back to a new life on earth. What is more, they put a piece of wood that looked like a fork into one hand of my deceased coreligionists so that when the time comes he would have something to lean on . . . They also put a piece of broken pottery shaped like money onto his eyes, I don’t know why. This must be some sign, some symbol. My obviously not-benevolent Christian surroundings explained that the purpose of this was so that when the deceased comes back to the flea market that is our world, he should have a little beginning capital. . . .

As I said, I wasn’t familiar with the ancient and medieval laws of my faith, but I know that for them, life is an especially important and unique value that they part with more reluctantly than others. This may be a very smart thing, but it is not very heroic, and, especially these days, it is not very virtuous and desirable. Nevertheless, now, in our age of monumental mass deaths, Jews die along with everyone else and you cannot hear their complaints and moans in the clamor any louder than others’. They die without a word, groaning, just like everyone else, in very nice and proportionate numbers.

I can’t not say it here that I, who have never lived in the framework of any religion, I, who don’t belong to any community and no longer feel my race inside me, I am glad that Jews behave decently in the face of death. They don’t cry, don’t run away from it. And every time I look at the list of our perished soldiers and find a name of one who’s obviously a coreligionist of mine, I practically rejoice. All of these deaths constitute testimonies that we are Hungarian, and that our belonging to this land is stronger than our faith, stronger than death.