The Restless Hungarian by Tom Weidlinger

Author:Tom Weidlinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SparkPress
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Márta Szenes and Michèle.

Your mum fed me, along with your sister, with mother’s milk, and it saved my life. She seems very beautiful outside and from inside. I say thanks to her for the rest of my life.

Márta wept, missing the mother she never knew, and I wept, missing my mother, whom I lost in the labyrinth of schizophrenia.

It seems part of the Hungarian ethos, call it pride or protectiveness, never to speak of the past, especially when it is painful. Márta and I have in common the fact that our fathers withheld from us essential facts about our origins. Until she was an adult Márta did not find out that the woman who raised her (her father took a Bolivian wife) was not her birth mother. I did not know my father and his family were Jews.

As Madeleine took responsibility for the lives of Michèle and Márta, she came back into her own. In her short autobiographical statement she wrote:

In 1939 I followed my husband to South America. I had along with me a solid set of democratic principles, a profound respect for human beings, a fierce need for freedom of thought and freedom to inquire, and that indispensable womanly endowment: compassion.

In October 1940 two of the bachelors in the Gang of Thirteen needed lodging. Madeleine gave Imre Erdős and István Haász rooms in the apartment at El Atelier. Alfa’s carpenters made the furniture. My mother made sure that meals were thoughtfully prepared and served at regular hours. She also helped with Alfa’s bookkeeping and found time to teach French at the Progressive School in La Paz. In an effort to bring culture to the Gang of Thirteen, she organized weekly musical evenings featuring recordings of classical music, which she borrowed from the La Paz Columbia Record Player Company. Erdős recalls: “That’s how I actually got to like classical music.”

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