Before going further, I should say a word about my Jewish background – the kind of education I had and the surroundings I grew up in.
Jews come in different sorts and sizes. Most actively religious are the Hasids, who even wear different clothing from other Jews and tend to regard everybody else as insufficiently observant, even the Orthodox. Orthodox Jews are not all the same: there is a difference between those of the East, called Ashkenazi, and those of the West, the Sephardic Jews. Then of course there are the Reform Jews, and freethinkers, and converts. In any community where the principal uniting factor is religion, there are also various other distinctions among groups, such as comparative wealth, profession, education, family background, and so on.
I must have been no more than four or five years old, when neighbors invited me to a pig roast. I accepted the invitation, though I was not sure what the words actually meant. Along with the other village children, I took part in the ceremony of butchering the pig. Everyone laughed a lot and had a good time. In fact, I had the impression that my presence added to the level of hilarity, though I didn’t understand why. I didn’t realize that observant Jews are forbidden to eat pork.
There was a Catholic church in our neighborhood. Some six or seven steps led up to the main door. I liked to jump off these steps and was very proud when I was at last brave enough to jump off the top step. The Christian children seemed envious of this feat, because I heard them shouting, ‘Hep! Hep!’ as they ran by. I had no idea what this word meant; in fact, I had no idea it meant anything in particular. It was only many years later that I learned its meaning. The letters HEP stand for ‘Hierosolyma est perdita’, Latin for ‘Jerusalem is lost’. The Romans occupied Jerusalem seventy years after the birth of Christ. Some 1,800 years later these initials were still being used in a little Hungarian village, to make fun of the Jews.
In addition to this word, I remember a mocking song from my childhood. A notorious trial held the people of Hungary in suspense towards the end of the nineteenth century, the so-called blood libel of Tiszaeszlár. The Jews of that town were accused of murdering a Christian girl and using her blood for religious rituals. This song stemmed from those days:
Hundred Jews in a row
March on to Hell below,
Nathan is the leader,
A sack on his shoulder,
Hundred Jews in a row . . .
I understood every word of the song, but not why were they marching to Hell. What was the point of the song?
I remember my grandfather, a village shopkeeper, very clearly. One day – I couldn’t have been more than about nine years old – he showed me his accounts. He kept a special set of books, not because he cheated on his taxes but so that he could calculate his exact income and reserve 10 percent for charity as prescribed by Jewish law.
Every Friday at synagogue, he looked around for unfamiliar faces in the congregation and invited two poor Jews back to his house as guests. He was especially pleased if it turned out that the guests could sing. They would sing Jewish melodies together at lunch or dinner and tell one another fantastic stories.
There were seven daughters in my grandfather’s family and there seemed to be a wedding every year. Grandfather took out one high-interest loan after another to pay for the dowries and wedding expenses. He hired the best entertainers to enchant the guests with their songs and their witty interpretations of the Talmud. Guests came from far and wide and sometimes stayed for weeks.
I sinned against my grandfather, and my conscience has bothered me ever since. We used to play chess. Sometimes I stole one of the chess pieces from him to increase my chances of winning.
My father was not a particularly religious man, but, preferring to avoid conflicts in the village, he followed the religious formalities. He insisted that I learn the Hebrew prayers, but pretended not to notice if I failed to recite them.
In 1919, as I have already mentioned, a communist regime took over in Hungary for a period of four months. Quite a number of its leaders were Jewish, with the result that a wave of anti-Semitism swept the country when the regime fell. Then the following year the government put legal provisions in place to limit the number of Jews entering the university. The law, named numerus clausus, permitted only six Jews in every hundred students.
I returned from military captivity in 1921, by which time this wave of hatred had died down, but savage anti-Jewish posters were still very much in evidence.
On various occasions in my life, I have found myself in a group of people in which someone has suddenly started vilifying Jews. How does one respond? When I was young, I often dealt with such situations by reminding people that there was really no need to use terms like ‘dirty Jew’. As a result, I sometimes ended up in a fight, in which I was not always the winner. On the other hand, if I pretended not to hear the remark, or to assume that it didn’t relate to me, I always felt bad about it afterwards and reproached myself for my unwillingness to stand up and be counted.
I took solace from a Jewish story that helped me deal with these internal conflicts. The story goes like this.
A poor Jew goes to a rabbi. ‘I have a complaint. I was going along the road with a loaded wagon. A nobleman was coming from the other direction in a coach-and-four. “Get out of the way, Jew!” he cried from some distance away. “Go round me, excellency. You can see that my wagon is loaded.” So he went round me, but as he went past he suddenly cracked his whip in my face. Was I right when I asked him to go round me?’
‘You were right,’ replies the rabbi, ‘but it’s not enough for a Jew to be right: he has to be smart, too.’
I am very fond of Jewish humor. There’s a lot of truth in such jokes: they are often witty, circumspect, profound. Sometimes they make fun of human shortcomings, but they always give pleasure. Consider the following.
A Jew stands in court. The judge asks, ‘Do you have any final words?’
‘Yes, I want an old-fashioned judge.’
‘I don’t understand. What’s an old-fashioned judge?’
‘In the old days, when the judges got together they used to say, “He’s a Jew, but he’s right.” Now they say, “He’s right, but he’s a Jew.”’
Then there’s the story about the rumor that Jews who converted would receive special treatment. Two brothers decide to get baptized. The older brother goes in first. The younger brother stays outside. After a long time the older brother reappears.
‘How was it?’ asks the younger brother.
The older brother eyes him from head to foot and says with disgust, ‘None of your business. I don’t talk to dirty Jews.’
Hitler has conquered the world. He comes to Tokyo, the capital of Japan. All across the world Jews have been exterminated. There are only two left, disguised as Japanese and taking part in the celebration. There’s a big party. Fireworks. A beautiful little girl presents a bouquet to the Führer. One Jew says to the other, ‘Just you wait. This is where he’ll finally fall and break his neck.’
Literature was a big influence on me in my youth. Naturally, those heroes appealed to me most who clung to their ideals to the very end – heroes like Jules Verne’s Keraban the Inflexible, who crosses continents to avoid having to pay an unjust toll on the Bosphorus, or Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas who causes all Germany to rebel and takes over the government, all because he was treated unfairly by a court in a relatively minor matter, or like Tolstoy’s Prince Nekhlyudov in Resurrection, who sacrifices his title and his fortune to atone for a sin committed in his youth, the seduction of a peasant girl.
Such were my ideal heroes. Like them, I reacted vehemently to the smallest injustice, or to the slightest bureaucratic arrogance. By rights, I should have spent half my life in jail – if I hadn’t learned the lesson that it isn’t enough for a Jew to be right, he has to be smart, too.
As a young lawyer, I ran into a situation in which the Finance Ministry refused to return to a client a sum of money that the finance officials had collected without authority. All my efforts were in vain: they promised to return the money but did nothing. I got angrier and angrier. Eventually I sent them a registered letter requesting, politely but firmly, that they settle the matter immediately, otherwise I would have to take the necessary legal steps. Of course I knew perfectly well that there were no ‘legal steps’, since there was no redress against the upper reaches of the Hungarian bureaucracy. All I could do was go to the Salt Office, as we Hungarians laughingly recommend to constant complainers.
But my letter brought results. It stirred the bureaucracy into action, but not exactly in the direction I intended. The ministry reported me to the Bar Association for ‘using threats’ in an attempt to force them to settle the matter. They asked for disciplinary action. The chairman of the disciplinary committee saw immediately that I had threatened no one, but he tried to persuade me to express ‘regret’ that I had written the letter. Good relations between the Bar Association and the ministry required it, he said. (Lawyers had special tax advantages.) I refused to budge, because I felt that my client had suffered real damage and I was disinclined to pander to the hurt feelings of a collection of bureaucrats.
An incident of a different kind took place in 1939. A group of Jewish merchants from my home town called on me to complain that their taxes had been raised without explanation and that they had been hit with all kinds of penalties. If they appealed, the higher authority in question, instead of giving them relief, would simply double the penalties. They begged me to go to the Ministry of Finance to try to solve the problem.
The young government clerk I was referred to was a desiccated, fair-haired fellow, with a rather bigger Adam’s apple than most. He received me with great courtesy. This didn’t surprise me: politeness was a requirement at the ministry.
After listening to my story, the young man suggested that I approach a certain Mr Tóth, head of the finance office in Nyíregyháza.
‘Finance Director Tóth?’ I repeated, ‘But he’s the conveyor belt that delivers these injustices against the Jews.’
To my surprise, my response had a stunning effect. The young man made an effort to reply: his mouth moved but no sound came out. Finally, he was reduced to stuttering. I must confess that I always get embarrassed when someone stutters: I feel almost apologetic for the other person’s handicap. This was my response on this occasion: I kept going as though I had not noticed his stuttering, in an attempt to save him from an awkward situation. I changed the subject, saying something non-controversial about his work. After a while he began to talk normally again, and I couldn’t believe my ears at what he said.
‘Counsel, I plan to put your last remark on the official record.’
So this miserable stutterer, whose embarrassment I had attempted to ease, was about to make an official complaint about me!
‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘Right now I’m too busy for reports.’
Without waiting for a reply, I grabbed my briefcase and headed for the door.
‘Goodbye,’ I cried as I left, with a friendly wave of the hand.
In those days such a report could easily result in a year or two in prison.
So occasionally I was forced to use unconventional methods to avoid the consequences of my behavior and conform to what was an increasingly reactionary atmosphere. In short, my philosophy of life was formed in the households of my father and grandfather, with the suggestive influence of an occasional teacher, and most of all by the books I read.
There were periods in my youth, when the problems of God and religion, and of mankind and the universe, were foremost in my mind. This preoccupation was strongest around the age of thirteen, but returned periodically later in life. I was interested not only in the supernatural, but also in ordinary everyday phenomena: the changing of seasons, the coming of spring, the strength of a growing seed, the dew on the grass, the mystery of the human body. I tried to understand the strange forces that keep the earth and other planets in balance. I was particularly interested in the problem of death and the afterlife. It was only later, after I had read the Bible and the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, and other books, like Papini’s Life of Jesus and Martin Buber’s Jewish Legends, that I formed any definite opinion on religion.
I came to the conclusion that not only did God make man in his own image, but also man imagines God in his own human way. The anthropomorphic nature of the deity frightened me away from organized religion. Instead of going to services, I was happier worrying about human lives. Understanding, a love of people, tolerance – these were the virtues I cultivated. Such tolerance came in handy quite early: my wife was an enthusiast for all kinds of religious mysticism.