Hungarian Rhapsody - Three Books

The Good Master, by Kate Seredy

World Wars I and II redrew world maps, broke apart empires, and wiped out tens of millions of people.   During the three decades spanning the assassination of Grand Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, by a Yugoslavian nationalist, to the surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945 the human condition – for most Europeans, and Jews in particular – was about survival, one day at a time.  Many factors led to the conflicts which snowballed into the hellish battles that determined territorial boundaries, but  it was the collision of imperialistic empires vying for global domination that caused the chain reactions which devastated the entire world.  In all, 80 million human beings perished, roughly four per cent of the total population of 1945, some in conflict, some by hate, and others by chance.  The survivors suffered physical and emotional wounds, and many left behind ancestral homes and beloved traditions in order to escape death.

Hungary found herself in the middle of the World Wars by virtue of geography.  Long before artificial boundaries defined it as a separate country, nomadic “Magyar” people from the Ural Mountains began migrating eastward;  and around 865 AD a group under the leadership of the legendary Árpád split off and conquered the Carpathian Basin, north and east  of the Black Sea.  Over time, the Magyars developed a unique cultural identity which gave rise to a rich tradition of folklore, artistry, music, and horsemanship.  As western civilization arose with vast industrialized cities, territorial battles evolved into centuries of wars of aggression across much of Europe.  During all this turmoil, the Magyars held onto their way of life and Hungary retained its cultural identity. 

Three books – The Good Master, Between the Woods and the Water, and The Invisible Bridge  –  taken together, describe Hungary’s cultural , geographic, human, and political losses during the World Wars.  The Good Master,  by Kate Seredy, was a Newbury Honor Book in 1936.  In it, the author tells the story of her childhood when her father sent her to live with his brother’s family out in the vast Hungarian plains in the early 20^th century.  My fifth grade teacher read this book out loud to our class and to me it was magical in a way that Harry Potter can never be.  Kate was a skinny, spoiled little girl whose widowed father couldn’t handle by himself, so he sent her to the country hoping she might stay out of trouble.  From the moment of her arrival, announced by her “tin whistle scream”, she created a stir wherever she went.  Her Uncle Martón, the “Good Master”, being an expert horse trainer, knew exactly how to bring out the best in young Kate.  This book is a love story about him as well as her aunt and cousin plus the people and traditions unique to Magyar culture.  Kate Seredy immigrated to the United States in 1922, and eventually became a prize-winning illustrator and author of children’s books. 

During the World Wars Hungary was caught in the middle of the European power struggles.  Under the terms of Treaty of Trianon, at the end of World War I, Hungary gained sovereign status, at the price of 72 per cent of its historical territory.  The treaty gave vast tracts of land to Romania and the newly formed Czechoslovakia, as well as the combined kingdom of Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia.  Three point five million ethnic Hungarians thus found themselves living in exile even though they hadn’t moved an inch. 

During the interwar period, Hungarian right-wing nationalists fought with those wishing to revert to the aristocracy over who should be king.  While the nation struggled to form a new government, interim regent Miklós Horthy appointed Count István Bethlen Prime Minister.  Bethlen proved to be a master politician who succeeded in bringing order to the country by engineering a series of compromises and payoffs to calm the anti-Semitic and right-wing radicals.  Under Bethlen’s leadership, Hungary joined the League of Nations and signed a peace treaty with Italy.  The Great Depression exacerbated Bethlen’s economic policy weaknesses, leading to devastating shortages and unemployment; anti-Semitism and fascism once again became popular movements.  Being tribal people, the Magyars had no love for the tribe of Israel;  even so, Hungary resisted Hitler’s policy of annihilation.  In the wake of economic devastation, Horthy replaced Prime Minister Bethlen with Gyula Gömbös, a right-wing nationalist who aligned himself with Hitler’s Germany, gambling that Hitler would prevail in any future conflict between nations.  Thus, anti-Semitism became the law of the land and Hungarian Jews suddenly found themselves stripped of their civil rights.

Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor, is based on a diary he kept as he traveled on foot, and the occasional bummed ride, from “the hook of Holland to Constantinople” – at the age of 18 – shortly after Hitler had come to power in Germany.  This book begins where his first book in the series, A Time of Gifts, leaves off:  at the Danube River as he crosses the Mária Valéria bridge from Slovakia to Hungary.  With the eyes, mind, and heart of a young man, Fermor recorded the details of every person, place, and thing he encountered on his trek.  While in Hungary, he traveled with Magyars and Gypsies on a borrowed horse and, like Kate Seredy, recognized the intrinsic value of these cultures as something precious and irreplaceable.  During his travels Fermor misplaced his diary which contained rich and detailed descriptions of a world that was on the brink of vanishing, although he didn’t know it at the time.  Decades later, workers in a Romanian monastery found the diary and tracked down its author. 

During World War II, Fermor worked undercover for the Grecian Nazi resistance movement.  His war experience coupled with his knowledge of classical cultures, gave him great insight and perspective about human history.  Many years later, when he read his own journal about traveling through Europe when the “old world” still existed, he decided to reinterpret it through the lens of a seasoned war veteran and scholar.  Between the Woods and the Water paints a poignant portrait of the aristocracy, city dwellers, peasantry, and gypsies whose ways of life were sacrificed along with millions of Jews in service to Hitler’s ugly hatred and megalomania, and then later to Josef Stalin’s Soviet style Communism. 

The Invisible Bridge – a work of fiction by Julie Orringer – is set during the second World War in Budapest and Paris, and is loosely based on the story of author’s Hungarian Jewish grandparents who immigrated to New York at the end of World War II.  Andras is the second of three brothers whose ancestral home is in a rural village called Konyár.  Andras and Tibor, the eldest, are living in Budapest while waiting to emigrate for their college educations, Andras to architecture school in Paris and Tibor to medical school in Italy.  Their younger brother, Mátyás, is still in secondary school at the time.  On the eve of Andras’ departure for Paris, Elza Hász, an upper-class Jewish woman of his family’s acquaintance asks him to take a package to her son who is already living in Paris.  Andras agrees and while he is picking up the package, Elza’s mother slips him a letter in secret to be mailed once he reaches Paris. 

The mysterious letter eventually leads Andras into a new and exciting world full of romance and mystery, as well as jealousy and misunderstanding.  Meanwhile, the winds of war grow stronger, and life in Europe for educated Jews during World War II underwent a rapid sea change.  Almost everyone in Europe suffered food and fuel shortages, but Jews also suffered discrimination and persecution at the hands of their former friends and neighbors.  Conditions in the Hungarian labor camps where Jewish men worked as de facto slaves were only somewhat less abusive than in Germany’s death camps.  Survivors returned home looking like skeletons and covered with lice, only to be recalled as soon as they were healthy again.  That anyone survived is a testament to the strength and durability of the human spirit.

Those Hungarians who opposed the Nazis suffered the loss of their communities in silence, because to voice opposition was suicide.  They watched the gradual fraying of their social fabric as did their counterparts in other countries which fell under Germany’s power.   Prime Minister Bethlen held Hitler at bay and promoted tolerance of Hungarian Jews, but his successor, Gyula Gömbös, aligned Hungary with Germany and pandered to Hitler in the hope of retaining some degree of autonomy when the wars ended.    

A common saying during times of war is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, and in World War II the Allies needed socialist Russia in order to defeat Hitler.  The Soviet Union under Josef Stalin had entered into a mutual non-aggression pact with Germany, but Hitler reneged and this proved his undoing.  After Hitler’s defeat, Soviet troops maintained their occupation of much of eastern Europe including, Hungary.  The Warsaw Pact of 1955 codified the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe as a response to West Germany’s joining NATO.  Russia, having been invaded by Napolean and Hitler, viewed western Europe and the United States as a clear threat; an occupied eastern Europe provided a strategic buffer against any future invasion attempts.

While we cannot know what might have happened had Hungary continued to resist Hitler, by aligning herself with Nazi Germany  the nation was trapped in the Soviet bloc at the end of World War II.  Under Communism, tradition and religion had no place and so, what little remained of Hungary’s cultural heritage following the wars, went deep underground.  During the Communist Era (1947-1999) several hundred thousand Hungarian intellectuals and free-thinking individuals “disappeared”; and yet, some independent spirit remained and in 1990, the opposition was strong enough and organized enough to force the USSR to loosen its grip.  Today, Hungary is a member of the European Union and NATO and enjoys hard won autonomy as a sovereign state.

As a metaphor, the “invisible bridge” works on many levels.  First it refers to the bombed out Chain Bridge in Budapest:  the pillars remained standing, but the spans and road bed were under water.  The metaphor also describes connections between people across time and distance.  Many such “invisible bridges” exist when worlds are torn apart by war and devastation.  These three books featuring Hungary paint a devastatingly beautiful portrait of a people and a place – a world – that has mostly disappeared, but can still be reached over the invisible bridges of memory, culture,  and history.  If The Good Master  and Between the Woods and the Water are what was, then  The Invisible Bridge takes us to what is:  a world shaped by triumph and tragedy, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, war and peace.

Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

The Great Gatzby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and their literary contemporaries belonged to the “lost generation” of Americans who came of age in the late 1910s. When young American men should have been going to university, beginning careers, and getting married they went instead overseas to fight in the Great War, leaving behind young women who waited anxiously for their return. Entire industries sprang up overnight to supply the war effort, fueling a period of economic growth which abruptly ended with the Treaty at Versailles in 1919. A brief recession occurred in the United States largely due to the lack of a plan for a post war economy on the part of President Woodrow Wilson (term, 1913-1921). The laissez-faire policies of President Warren Harding, elected in 1920, spurred a heady period of economic growth as munitions factories retooled to make consumer goods. Suddenly, America found itself in a hyperactive state of flux, a period which came to be called “The Jazz Age”, when social mores and women’s fashions finally broke free from Victorian era strangulation, and money seemed to grow on trees. Harding’s policies in service to an unregulated economy set the stage for the stock market crash 1929, but only a handful of “Chicken Littles” could see that the sky was going to fall.

Jazz, a fusion of African rhythm, Ragtime, classical music, Negro spirituals, and other influences, provided the soundtrack for the social and economic evolution taking place in the United States in the 1920s. With freedom and full citizenship a birthright, Blacks began migrating en masse to big cities such as New York and Chicago to work in factories, bringing their musical traditions and creative energy with them. Automobiles completely replaced horses for transportation, widening horizons for movement and spawning new industries and career opportunities. Prohibition drove liquor sales underground adding an element of danger and exclusiveness to the increasingly hedonistic party scene, while enriching the so-called “rum runners”. The stock market soared, leading to speculation and a sense that the party would go on forever.

New York – Wall Street – was the center of the universe and the sons of old money families flocked there to learn the stock and bond businesses. Their summers were spent on Long Island in grand homes facing the water, attending lavish parties where contraband liquor flowed freely and women danced to the new music with abandon. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) found himself a part of this milieu when his success as a writer catapulted him into New York society. He was simultaneously enamored of and disgusted by his new friends, who were beautiful and charming as well as deceitful and shallow.

The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is a searing portrait of elite society during the Jazz Age, with echoes from Fitzgerald’s own life. An upper class Catholic, Fitzgerald attended but did not graduate from Princeton University. Despite his literary gifts he was a mediocre student, and dropped out to enlist in World War I. As a youth, he had met and fallen obsessively in love with a southern belle named Zelda Sayre who refused to marry him until she was confident in his ability to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed. This Side of Paradise, published in 1920 made Fitzgerald wealthy enough for Zelda and the two were married in New York city. The marriage was stormy due to heavy drinking and Zelda’s latent schizophrenia as well as her insatiable material needs. Fitzgerald “prostituted” himself by writing for magazines and Hollywood producers so as to stay two steps ahead of his creditors. While he, himself, did not resort to criminal activity in order to keep his wife happy, he understood the temptation and toyed with the idea in the person of Jay Gatzby.

Fitzgerald struggled to understand the nature of love in his own life and recognized the corrupting influence of money and social position. Nick Carraway narrates the story of Jay Gatzby, a mysterious man who throws parties worthy of Bacchus in his waterfront mansion in West Egg, Long Island. East Egg was the realm of the old money aristocracy and while Nick belonged there, he chose to live in a bungalow next door to Jay Gatzby. Prohibition notwithstanding, Gatzby never seemed to run out of liquor for the constant stream of party guests who came through his door. Nick was too well bred to invite himself and so he waited for an invitation from his mysterious neighbor whom he had only observed at a distance, staring across the bay at East Egg.

Another important theme in The Great Gatzby is the uniquely American phenomenon of the overnight success. Like or not, established old money aristocrats found themselves in the company of vulgar new money people and had to devise ways of being civil while keeping a distance, even when friendships would have been financially advantageous. East Egg rarely ventured into West Egg, but Gatzby’s parties were reputedly so awash in liquor that the temptation was too great to resist. Eventually Nick receives an invitation to Gatzby’s home and discovers that none of the guests know their host; they don’t even know what he looks like. In a telling bit of social commentary, a guest referred to as “Owl Eyes” observes that the books in the library are real, indicating that Mr. Gatzby might in fact be an educated man, unlike most “new money”. The source of his wealth is the subject of much gossip and when the truth comes out it reveals how love can devolve into obsession and madness.

Women in the 1920s liberated themselves from corsets and heavy garments and began revealing their legs, arms, and décolletage. Dresses were cut to exaggerate dance movement and the lively young women wearing them were dubbed “flappers”. This was all very scandalous to the older generation and marked the beginning of profound social changes which eventually led to working mothers and the freedom to divorce. Men had always been able to indulge in sexual affairs with little consequence; keeping mistresses was not uncommon in the highest echelons of society, and wives had no choice but to tolerate their husbands’ infidelities. Inspired by the likes of Isadora Duncan, Georgia O’Keefe, Martha Graham, and Imogene Cunningham, women began appreciating their natural bodies and pushing the limits of sexual mores by taking lovers and posing in the nude for artists.

Daisy Buchanan, the object of Jay Gatzby’s obsession, is an unflattering example of a young society woman during this time. Driven by narcissism and materialism, Daisy married a rich man with a good pedigree, Tom Buchanan, rather than the poor but ambitious man with whom she had been passionately in love. Gatzby, refusing to accept Daisy’s rejection, spent several years reinventing himself in order to be worthy of her. The fact that Daisy is married and has a child is of little consequence to Gatzby; he knows they are meant to be together. Daisy’s husband, Tom, keeps a mistress in town but that doesn’t stop him from being jealous of the romance between his wife and her mysterious lover. Nick, in his narration, makes the point that while aristocrats look beautiful, they often do not act that way, leaving others to clean up after them. The Buchanans did not concern themselves with the feelings of others, all that mattered was getting what they wanted, when they wanted it. Their false sense of entitlement and superiority was a birthright.

Jay Gatzby, despite his efforts to become worthy of Daisy, ends up a tragic figure who makes the ultimate sacrifice for the woman he loves. The narcissistic Daisy coldly accepts this as if she deserves it, leading one to ask at what point did Gatzby’s love become madness? F. Scott Fitzgerald was likewise tragic: his marriage to Zelda was a torture chamber of codependence and he died young from alcoholism, believing himself to be a sell-out and a failure. Zelda had always suffered from delusions that she was a great writer, dancer, and artist; in truth she was a beautiful but overindulged dilettante with an enviable pedigree. Her behavior was erratic but the smitten Fitzgerald blamed himself for her unhappiness until, at some point, he realized that his wife was mentally ill and had her committed to a mental institution. For the rest of her life, Zelda cycled in and out of psychiatric hospitals, publishing a single novel which was poorly received by both the public and her husband, who accused her of plagiarism and character assassination. Whatever sympathy Fitzgerald once had for Zelda’s fragile mental health was obliterated by his scathing critique of her talents in the wake of her “tell all” book. The failure of Save Me the Waltz devastated Zelda; however, the book was resuscitated after her death when literary scholars recognized how underappreciated Fitzgerald’s work was, and provides a valuable counterpoint to his version of their life together.

The Great Gatzby is an enduring classic which is required reading of most high school students. It is important both as a historical document and as a great work of literature because of how it brings us into a time and place that was uniquely American, a window into our national character. F. Scott Fitzgerald, captured the essence of human nature within the world he was describing: the delusions, hypocrisies, and character defects which prevent all of us from transcending ourselves. By the time Jay Gatzby saw the truth about himself and Daisy it was too late, but he took a bullet for her just the same. Disillusioned and dispirited, Nick did what Fitzgerald wished he could have done: returned to the middle west of his youth to search for lost innocence.

Copyright 2011 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved