Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Zalatna
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According to his death certificate, his father’s name was József
Antschel. This is how it happened that the last names of his brothers
were Ábrahám, József, and Ancsel, respectively.
He married Róza Mandel (1855-1935), a petite but strong girl
in Kápolnokmonostor (now Copalnik Manastur) on February 3, 1874.
Her parents were Hirsch Mandel and Berta Péterffi (judging from the
name, her mother was not Jewish) but as we see from the two
attached domicile registration forms, her mother could also be Hani
Mózes. Who knows?
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One of József’s nephews, József Ancsel became a textile
wholesaler. His daughter was Éva Ancsel, the famous and wonderful
philosopher and psychologist. Her writings are full of wisdom.
The family rented a “regale” (tavern) from the local landowner.
As József was occupied with his prayers and studies almost 24 hours
a day, the tavern was run by his wife. She managed to keep order in
the tavern. When the big drunken Romanian lads started to kick up a
row, she threw them out and they obeyed her.
The family later moved to Sarkad (Bihar County, at today’s
border with Romania), then to Budapest where József worked as a
luggage porter, then as a doorman at Mátyás Square 9. He smoked
pipes and developed lip cancer that killed him on March 2, 1917. The
holy man was happily smoking his pipe, praying and studying until his
last day. (According to the Jewish religion, studying is appreciated by
God as much as praying.) His grave is in the Budapest Jewish
cemetery. It is surrounded by an iron fence.
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5
In Budapest Róza lived in the 8th District (Kálvária Square 19
until 1921, Práter Street 68 from 1921 to 1929), then in Mátyásföld
with Rezső’s family. She worked at one of
the big markets (Garay Piac) selling geese.
She lived to be 80 and died in 1935.
They had seven children.
Szeréna was the oldest. She was a
very beautiful girl. When a cabinet minister
visited Gyulafehérvár and a ball was
organized in his honor, he would only
dance with Szeréna. She married a very
strange man by the name of Igyártó. He
made his living as an agent of big wine
merchants and publishing houses. He had
his own carriage and visited rich
landowners and merchants, trying to sell Ábrahám Józsefné
them wine and books. It happened Mandel Róza
sometimes that he lost his carriage at
cards and came home by train. He also invented a liver paste that
became quite popular and brought him some wealth. He was a
despot. At dinner he himself distributed the meal among his wife and
children. He was extremely stingy. If he noticed that a waiter had
cheated him by several pennies, he went back to the restaurant and
raised a scandal. He was diabetic and suffered a terrible death: his
legs were amputated in pieces before he died.
They had many children. One of them, Sára, married an illegal
communist, Nándor Lichtmann, with whom they emigrated to France,
then to the island of Guadeloupe (a French colony) where Nándor
became the leader of the local Communist Party.
Rudolf (Rezső in Hungarian) was born on December 18, 1882.
He was the most important person in my life. He played a crucial,
definitive role during my childhood, adolescence, and then all the
time up to this moment (I am 70 years old when I write this). His first
name was the same as that of the popular Crown Prince of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. Emperor Franz-Joseph married his own
cousin, the exceptionally beautiful Bavarian Duchess Elizabeth
(Erzsébet) in 1853 when she was only 15 years old. (He originally
courted her older sister but fell in love with the younger one.)
Erzsébet (nicknamed Sissy) was very much liked in Hungary. Their
son, Crown Prince Rudolf killed himself and his mistress, Baroness
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Maria Vetsera in Mayerling in 1889. Erzsébet was assassinated in
1898. These deaths were the beginning of the end of the Austro-
Hungarian Monarchy.
Ida
married
young and
soon
became a
widow.
Then she
married
again and
went to
Rio de
Janeiro
with her
husband.
She wrote
some
letters to
her family,
then the
letters
stopped,
and she
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Mountains. He was a shrewd businessman who helped to develop a
successful goose trade for the family. Józsi became a technician.
Emilia (Mili) married a shoemaker, Béla Friedman, who was a
very religious man. He did not want to go to war in 1914. To avoid
this, he pretended that his legs were paralyzed. He was so successful
that after a while he really could not stand up from his wheelchair. Mili
worked diligently in the Garay Market as another goose trader. They
had four children: Zoltán (Zoli, 1905), László (Laci, June 30, 1908),
Rózsa (1910), and Erzsébet. This was the most religious part of the
family.
Zoli became a technician. He married a girl who forgot to tell
him until after the wedding that she already had a child. They
divorced and Zoli married again. His wife, Ibi, was a quiet and rather
full-figured woman.
Laci wanted to become a doctor but he was not admitted to the
university because of Numerus Clausus, the law that severely limited
the number of Jews to be admitted to Hungarian universities. His
parents sent him to Bologna. Interestingly, a Jew could be a student
in Fascist Italy but not in Horthy’s Hungary! After his first year he
came home for vacation. He was helping his mother to sell geese
when a woman fainted in the market. There was no doctor available,
so they asked him to help. He looked at the woman and declared:
“Corpse!” The corpse soon regained consciousness and walked
home. In spite of this, five years later Laci graduated from the
University of Bologna as a doctor.
Cecilia (Cili) was born in Rákoskeresztur (a suburb of
Budapest where the Jewish cemetery is situated) on September 12,
1886. She married Márton Glantz. They settled down in
Rákosszentmihály (now in the 16th District of Budapest). They had
two children: Klára and Jenő. Klára was a very beautiful, sensual and
playful girl. Jenő was mentally retarded. On the other hand, he played
chess against himself and could multiply five-digit numbers
instantaneously in his head. When he was asked about his plans for
the future, he said: “I’ll make my living from my parents.”
Izidor (Izsó) was the youngest (he was born in Sarkad in
1892). He was a wild boy. He and his friends sometimes got into
trouble with the police. They spoke to each other in a strange slang.
Once Izsó noticed a policeman approaching. He shouted to his friend:
“Valack, strüy,” which meant: “get away.” He became a feather and
down merchant.
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One of their cousins was a breathtakingly beautiful illiterate girl.
Her family lived up in the snow-covered mountains where there was
no school. She married a sergeant of the Austro-Hungarian Army.
They moved to Kolozsvár (now Cluj) where she went to school. She
loved learning so much that she received fellowships to continue her
studies in Budapest, Vienna, and Paris. Thirty years later she was a
full professor at the Sorbonne.
There were other relatives living up in the high mountains.
Rezső once went to visit one of them. It took him two days to get
there with the help of the mountain shepherds. These people spent
many months alone with their herds of sheep. When they felt a need
for communication, they went up to the peak and yelled out “ha-ho-
ho!” Other “ha-ho-ho” cries echoed from the nearby mountains. That
was the conversation. Their vocabulary was limited to no more than
200 Romanian words anyway, so the communication was quite
meaningful.
Two cousins, Cecilia and Bella emigrated to America. Bella
married a rich furniture merchant in Detroit. Her sister lived in
California and also married a wealthy man.
When Rezső was born, there was no electricity yet in Zalatna.
He heard the first Hungarian word at the age of five (at home they
spoke Yiddish and in the village they spoke Romanian). He attended
a Jewish elementary school in Sarkad. He was a good student but his
grades were not the best. There were two reasons for that. His
teacher, Salamon Steiner, believed that a Jewish boy had to work
twice as hard as a gentile to achieve the same success. Mr. Steiner
was also a perfectionist who once said: “Nobody deserves an A. If
you know the material as well as I do, then you get a B. If not, your
best grade is a C.” For a reason unknown to me, Rezső was exempt
from physical education in this school.
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Rezső‘s certificate from the second grade of the Sarkad Elementary
School (1890). His religion is stated as “the religion of Moses.”
10
Rezső‘s certificate from the fifth grade of the Nagyszalonta Middle
School (1893). His written tests are “untidy.”
11
Rezső‘s certificate from the seventh grade of the Budapest
8th District Middle School (1896).This is the first official
document where his first name is mentioned as Rezső.
12
During the last two years of his studies he was tutoring younger
students. According to the affidavit signed by the director of the
school, his efforts were quite successful. Therefore, the director
highly recommended “this diligent, well-behaved, modest youth as a
private tutor.”
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application asked him: “Have you tried other things?“ “Yes,“ he
replied. “And nothing turned out well?“ “Nothing.“ “Have you tried to
drown yourself in the Danube?“ “Not yet.“ “Well, try that and if you
don’t succeed even there, then become a customs officer.“
From September 1, 1901 to June 19, 1904 he worked as a
teacher at the Jewish Community of Csákvár (a village near
Székesfehérvár). He also worked as a private tutor of rich people’s
children in Sárosd, Györőcsike, Bogya, Bana, etc. I am in possession
of several letters of recommendation from the parents of his students.
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A letter from some devoted and satisfied students (1905)
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His grades (especially singing and music) were not very good,
but he graduated as a certified elementary school teacher on
December 22, 1906.
16
He was drafted the same year but was found unfit for military
service. He continued to work as a private tutor for another year.
17
From September 1, 1907 to June 23, 1908 he taught at the
Jewish Community School in Őcsény (Tolna County). His record of
service was signed by a certain Ignátz Deutsch.
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Rezső is the teacher in Simontornya
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So help me God!
20
Everything seemed to be all right. The mighty Austro-Hungarian
Empire was one of the pillars of stability in Europe. Even the Balkans
were behaving appropriately. Nikita, King of Montenegro, received a
regular monthly allowance from Franz Joseph. Ferenc Kossuth
(1841-1914), son of Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the Hungarian
Revolution of 1848, was back in Hungary.
Newspapers appeared one after the other: Pesti Hírlap,
Budapesti Hírlap, Kis Újság, Magyarország, Pesti Napló, Budapesti
Napló, Világ, Friss Újság, Esti Újság, Kis Újság, Vasárnapi Újság,
Pester Lloyd, Az Est, A Nap, etc.
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have disappeared together with the Box). I still remember some of
the anecdotes and advertisements (see the illustrations below
showing Anna Csillag with her 185 centimeter long Loreley hair and
the Lada bosom holder protected by 14 “world patents”). The frontal-
view drawings of full-figured naked women like the female orchestra
in the Bodega are very vivid in my memory. There was also a picture
of a couple watching a painting of a naked plump woman in a fur coat
in a museum. “See?” says the wife, “I would like such a fur coat!”
“And I would like such a wife!” answers the husband with a sigh.
Women had wide hips and big buttocks in those days. Those
who did not pretended that they did by padding their long dresses
with pillows. The bony supermodels of today would have been
considered sick then.
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Fashion for full-figured women
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Choose one for your wife
Bathroom
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On the beach
It is interesting that all these magazines were published at the
time of Victorian morals when even the legs of a table were
considered obscene. Yes, but Siegmund Freud also worked at this
time and Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing published his Psychopathia
Sexualis, let alone Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s famous Venus in
Furs. A poet under the pseudonym of Árpád Lőwy spread his
pornographic poems copied by hand. He was also slightly anti-
Semitic. He claimed that his pseudonym was the result of the fact that
although a substantial part of Hungary’s population was Árpád (i.e.
Hungarian) but many others were Lőwy (i. e. Jewish):
Irodalmunkban, - büszkén mondom -
Nincs több olyan tipikus költő,
Mint Lőwy Árpád, akit ismer,
Immár egy egész emberöltő.
Nincs, ki a magyar géniusznak
Hívebb tolmácsa volna, mint ő,
Bár meglehet, hogy van nálánál
Nem egy kiválóbb magyar költő.
De ő nevében egyesíti
A fajt, amelyre néz a Kárpát,
Hiszen fajunknak fele Lőwy,
A másik fele pedig Árpád.
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He ignored the fact that Hungary was a multinational country. Half of
her population was not Hungarian but Slovak, Serb, Croatian,
Romanian, etc. (This was the justification for the country’s
dismemberment by the Trianon Treaty.)
Jews fared relatively well in those days. They were integral
parts of Hungarian society and culture.
Tivadar (Theodor) Herzl (1860-1904), the founder of the
worldwide Zionist movement, was born in Pest. (Budapest was
formed only in 1873 by the union of three cities: Buda, Pest, and
Óbuda.)
József Kiss (1843-1921), the great Jewish poet, wrote sad
poems like this:
Simon zsidóéknál minden esztendőbe’
Kis deszkakoporsót tesznek le a földbe,
Kis deszkakoporsó – alig-alig rőfnyi,
Szegény kicsi féreg, nem tudott megnőni!
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Fenyő, and Ignotus (Hugó Veigelsberg) in 1908. The great writers
and poets of this era, Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, Frigyes Karinthy,
Gyula Juhász, Margit Kaffka, Dezső Kosztolányi, Árpád Tóth,
Zsigmond Móricz, Gyula Krúdy, Jenő Heltai, Milán Füst, and many
others published in this magazine. It was at the forefront of Hungarian
culture for 34 years.
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Theaters flourished. They
presented plays from all over the
world. In 1900, Sári Fedák (1879-
1955) burst into the Hungarian
operetta as its unquestioned prima
donna. And what operetta! Ferenc
Lehár, Imre Kálmán, Jenő Huszka,
Viktor Jakobi, Béla Zerkovitz
composed operettas that millions of
people enjoy even now, a century Fedák Sári
later.
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Park and played there with his wife, Berta Türk (1875-1960).
Rezső was somewhat romantic. He liked sad songs like this:
Én vagyok a falu rossza egyedül,
engem ugat minden kutya messzirül.
Sem az apám, sem az anyám nem volt rossz,
csak egyedül, csak egyedül magam vagyok a gonosz.
(this used to be the favorite song of Crown Prince Rudolf), and this:
Ki tanyája ez a nyárfás?
Behallik-e a kurjantás?
Vagy alusznak, vagy nem hallják,
vagy talán nem is akarják.
This was also the time when Pista Dankó (1858-1903)
composed hundreds of melancholic songs so that Hungarians could
have a good time crying.
Endre Nagy started the famous Hungarian cabaret in 1907. The
entertainers were mostly Jewish. Here are some popular songs from
the Orfeum Cabaret:
Jaj, kígyó van a szobában, nagy a feje, nincsen lába.
-Ez anyátok hamis copfja.
Furcsa az én őrültségem,
szörnyű módon tetszik nékem
a néger tánc, s a néger dalok.
Veszek egyszer néger nótát,
fújok minden Johnson strófát,
valóságos néger smok vagyok.
Néger vagyok kétszeresen,
hisz az apám két szerecsen
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utcában vagy húsz évig lakott.
Édesanyám is fekete
himlőkórságban szenvedett,
mikor engem világra hozott.
Hogyha látok fekete szerecsen néger táncost én,
lábam rögtön kopogó-ropogós tánclépésbe mén.
Mért születtem hébernek,
mért nem inkább négernek?
Micsoda csillag lehettem volna én a tánc egén!
Orfeumba, ős Budába
hogyha fellép néger dáma,
én azonnal beleszeretek.
Multkor cudarul megjártam,
kis feketére találtam,
drága nő volt, fene egye meg.
Ostromozott, átkarolott,
össze-vissza csókolgatott,
jaj micsoda rettentő blamázs!
Hát nem fehér volt a pofája?
Csak suviksz volt kenve rája,
óriási kiábrándulás!
Hogyha látok fekete szerecsen néger táncost én,
lábam rögtön kopogó-ropogós tánclépésbe mén.
Mért születtem hébernek,
mért nem inkább négernek?
Micsoda csillag lehettem volna én a tánc egén!
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Hungary celebrated its Millennium (the thousandth anniversary
of the country’s founding) in 1896. For the occasion, Budapest was
rebuilt by Baron Frigyes Podmaniczky (1824-1907). The largest
Parliament building on the Continent, one of the most beautiful opera
houses, and one of the finest synagogues in the world were built
there.
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Sugár út in 1896. On the left is the Opera House. Soon thereafter the
avenue was renamed Andrássy út, to commemorate Count Gyula
Andrássy (1823-1890), the first prime minister of Hungary after the
Compromise with Austria in 1867. During Communism it was first
called Sztálin út, then Népköztársaság útja (Avenue of the People’s
Republic). Now it is Andrássy út again.
32
The main staircase of the Inside the Budapest Opera
House
Budapest Opera House
33
The new Erzsébet Bridge in 1903. Like all the other bridges on the
Danube in Budapest, it was blown up by the Nazis in 1945. It is a pity
that the Communists rebuilt it as a boring modernist edifice.
34
A railway schedule from 1904
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Esteemed Gentleman) or simply telling them that “it can be seen that
you belong to the cream of society; therefore, I will give you a 10%
discount.”
On the other hand, some merchants were quite picky. There
was a very rich aristocrat (I do not remember his name) who owned
most of the land around Lake Balaton (the largest lake in Central
Europe, with an area of about 600 km2). He liked to dress casually.
Once he entered a very fashionable restaurant and ordered a cup of
coffee. The waiter told him that they do not serve anybody who is not
dressed formally. The count left and came back dressed in a tuxedo
and carrying another tuxedo. He was greeted with reverence. Then
he ordered a cauldron of coffee. When they brought it to him, he
threw the tuxedo into the coffee, saying: “Here you are, my tuxedo,
drink your coffee!”
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A 50-korona banknote from 1902
37
Life on Lake Balaton
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Less fortunate ladies
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Good times
We have seen in the previous section that some people, like the
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Szilágyi family, were very poor. Many people emigrated to America.
As Attila József wrote later: "Kitántorgott Amerikába másfél millió
emberünk."
Revolutionary students chanted slogans like this, denouncing
and endorsing various politicians:
Vesszen Tisza,
Vesszen Csányi,
Vesszen Báró Fejérváry,
Éljen doktor Takács Zoltán!
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Ha ez igy tart még soká,
szökik magyar, tót, oláh,
mind Amerikába vándorol.
A bankoknál nincs hitel,
nagy a szegénység, hidd el,
ember ilyen snasszot még nem ért.
No de kérem, sebaj, itt az éj!
Nézze csak meg Budapestet éjjel,
tele van az nótával, zenével.
Csattan a csók, pezsgősüveg durran,
pénz van elég, sose kérdik, honnan.
Mindenfelé szép lány, virágillat,
még az éj tart, s ragyog fenn egy csillag.
Találkozhatsz akárhány gyökérrel,
egész mást lát, egész mást lát,
aki nézi Budapestet éjjel.
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