In your magazine work you’ve done a wide range of stories, from a profile of John McEnroe to investigative pieces such as an exposé of a murderous chief of a Brazilian Indian tribe. What is it that you look for in a story?
That’s tough to answer. I remember when I was working as a sportswriter, it sounded strange to me when people would refer to me as a sportswriter because it wasn’t really sports per se that I was interested in. Then, because of some of my more recent work, including this book, I’ve sometimes been called a crime writer, even though I’d never thought of any of my stories as crime stories. I’m probably first drawn to people and dramas that have the ability to illuminate something about human nature. Identity and national character are particularly fascinating to me, which is probably why the story I did on New York Yankees pitcher El Duque Hernandez is one of my favorites. He’d recently escaped from Cuba and yet, in his mind, he just couldn’t get away from the place. I can still picture him in that Denny’s in suburban Ohio, ordering an All-American Slam and talking about Castro when a waitress came by and, as he put it, “ruined” his coffee by filling it up just when he’d gotten the right mixture of sugar and milk. It said so much about the struggle between where he was and where he’d been. Those are the moments I live for when reporting.
Do you prefer to write stories people know something about or more obscure ones?
It’s interesting because there is a very real divide. I probably tend toward liking the obscure ones better, toward writing about the people who inhabit the edges of the world or at least what can be seen as the edges these days, which is basically anywhere the mainstream media haven’t visited. But put it this way: If you’re doing a story about someone obscure, it’s because he or she is interesting. If you’re doing a story about someone famous, it’s often because he or she is famous. Which isn’t to say that famous people aren’t interesting; McEnroe was a dream subject. But obscure people don’t have handlers and all that crap to deal with. They may have other crap, but it usually isn’t cliché crap.
Ballad of the Whiskey Robber is your first book, and as the New York Times said, it’s “a story of the sort that would make even the most dry-mouthed journalist slobber.” How did you find it?
It was the summer of 1999, and I was working as a magazine writer for a number of publications, which entails doing a lot of reading and keeping up with contacts in order to find good story ideas. I was flipping through Sports Illustrated magazine when I came across a small item in the Scorecard section, about three paragraphs long. It basically said that a professional hockey goalie had just escaped on a bedsheet from the Budapest jail. He’d been arrested for pulling off twenty-six outrageous bank heists over the past seven years and was being hailed as a modern-day Robin Hood. He was then at the center of an international man-hunt. I probably almost sprained a hamstring leaping for the telephone. I was sure I’d be in a stampede of journalists trying to do a magazine piece on this story, which was what I first set out to do.
What happened—and when did you realize you wanted to do a book?
Whether the others were put off by the obstacles to getting the story—a faraway place, a fugitive and later imprisoned subject, etc.—or whether they simply missed it, I don’t know. But when I got to Budapest, two things quickly became clear: The story was mine if I could manage to get the access I needed. And, second, this was way bigger than just a magazine story. The characters who populated this tale could’ve walked right out of an Elmore Leonard novel—from the police chief, Lajos Varju, who’d taught himself to be a cop by watching Columbo reruns, to his forensic expert “Dance Instructor,” who showed up to work in a top hat and tails and taught ballet on the side, to the small-time crooks of the hockey team, to the lawyer who demanded from me in exchange for an interview with his celebrity client a “Hollywood movie deal.” Then there was the so-called Whiskey Robber himself, whose real name was Attila, who’d come from Transylvania, and whose first job with the hockey team was driving the Zamboni. It was unreal. But perhaps best of all, the story was clearly so symbolic of this incredibly colorful and chaotic era, the post-Communist 1990s. I just completely fell in love with the story.
As you mention, this story takes place in another country, involves a foreign language, etc. Yet you were able to capture Hungary in the 1990s so vividly and accurately that even Hungary’s most respected literary magazine called Ballad of the Whiskey Robber “arguably the best piece of serious literature ever written about the Hungarian experience in the 1990s.” Did you have any connection to Eastern Europe before you started? How did you go about reporting the story?
I’d never lived in Eastern Europe nor did I speak Hungarian, but my mania for the story helped fuel me through the long process. In general, my approach to reporting can be summed up probably in one word: exhaustive (or, perhaps additionally, exhausting). In any piece I do, I typically use about 1 percent of the information I’ve gathered, and in this case it’s probably even less than that. The reason is simple: In nonfiction, if you don’t have the reporting, when it comes time to write it’s like trying to paint using only primary colors. And you can’t really know what’s worth using until you know everything.
So what did your research entail?
I spent more than three years working on the book, including about nine months on the ground in Hungary, with a side trip lasting a few weeks in Transylvania. I talked to everyone I could, including people who had nothing to do with the case, and our conversations might be about their lives, politics, history, memories, really anything. I also read everything I could, including literally hundreds of translated Hungarian newspapers stories, not only about this case. I wanted everything to be authentic and I wanted the city of Budapest to be so alive that it would be like another character.
Then, in order to build the narrative, I used everything from news clips to TV archive footage to court and police records to material from my own interviews. At one point I spent five weeks in the Hungarian Supreme Court building with an interpreter on each side of me, digging through tens of thousands of court and police files related to the Whiskey Robber case. And I interviewed virtually all of the characters who appear in the story not once or twice but numerous times, which is key because at a certain point you just start feeling yourself falling into their shoes. After each interview, I discussed with my interpreter the idioms and speech patterns the subject had used to ensure that I wasn’t losing anything in translation. You can learn a lot about someone by the way he speaks, and ironically, the language barrier forced me to focus on that perhaps even more than I might have if I hadn’t been using a translator.
What about your relationship with Attila? Your book is clearly a sympathetic portrait. How did you find him?
To me Attila is a fascinating mix of both someone completely defined by the times in which he lived and also a man who, in the most unlikely ways, came to define those times. Eventually I got to know him better than some of my closest friends, which may sound strange, but I dug through his life with flashlights and trowels. In the end, I did come to like him and even respect him.
It certainly helped that he never lied to me, which was easy to check because there were other sources for virtually everything we talked about. In fact, he’s a pretty humble person. He’s also, despite having almost no formal education, a very bright guy who loves nothing more than to talk about history and current events. I remember the day I walked in to see him and all he wanted to talk about was the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times. He knew everything about it.
But, as a person, he’s someone who I think was driven by two things. First, an incredible determination to prove he could be somebody, to prove that his father, who told him he would “die a gray nobody,” was wrong. Second, an intense desire to belong somewhere, which came from growing up with virtually no family and in Transylvania, under Nicolae Ceausescu, where you always had to be looking over your shoulder even if you were Romanian. Being Hungarian was that much worse. The legal line for Attila was always fuzzy. There were times when he had to steal just to eat. He was a survivor.
In the book you really put this story in a world context, with lots of references to America and the role the West played in reshaping Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. What made you look at it this way?
One thing I loved about the story was that it seemed clear to me that, like John Dillinger in the 1930s or perhaps Jesse James in the Wild West, the story of the Whiskey Robber simply couldn’t have happened at any other time or place in history. And it’s not really possible to talk about Eastern Europe in the 1990s without talking about the influence of the West, and particularly America, which poured billions of dollars into the region and was also to a large degree the standard for what these nascent democracies hoped to become.
As it happens, I began reporting this story just before 9/11 and continued working on it for the next few years. In addition, after Attila’s trial in December of 2000, he had become a polarizing figure in Hungary. While about half the country continued to support him, the rest became angry and ashamed that a bank robber had become one of their first exportable products in the new age of capitalism. Because I was there to write about the story for the American media, many people disdained my very presence. To them, I was the stereotypical American: opportunistic, selfish, and unable to understand nuance or truly empathize with another people.
At first the judgments stung, but ultimately I think they pushed me to understand the context of the story on a deeper level. As I was journeying through this sort of absurd, outsize Hall of Mirrors–type tour of the Wild Wild East, I came to realize that the reflection I was seeing was in many ways my own. I took pains to make sure this wasn’t a “political” book, but I think the perspective it provides is a unique window onto the influence America and the West had on reshaping Eastern Europe after the fall of communism—something quite timely, given what is going on in other parts of the world.
A lot of novelists really took to the book, and even critics commented that it reads like fiction. Once you had gathered all this information, how did you go about writing Ballad of the Whiskey Robber?
I rented a studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where the only thing allowed past the door was Whiskey Robber book material. It was difficult because I’d just spent almost two years getting inside my characters’ skins, and now I had to pull all the way out and look at the story from a wide angle. I storyboarded the whole thing on notecards and a dry-erase board because I wanted to get the structure down first. Then I went into this almost meditative state where I just submerged myself in the story.
One of the toughest things for me to get a handle on was tone because, to me, the story was at once a comedy and a tragedy, and I was having a hard time figuring out how to reconcile that in the writing. Two things that helped were Gary Shteyngart’s tremendous novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, which has this comic absurdity that masks the sadness and which also fit with the way my characters saw and dealt with things. I also remember thinking about the film Life Is Beautiful because what I loved about that was that it took such tragic material and presented what was in many ways a comedy. That was the same tightrope I tried to walk with this story.
A collection of Julian Rubinstein’s journalism can be found online at julianrubinstein.com.