Category Archives: Hungarian Jewry

March 21, 2022 · 7:30 am

What My American Grandmother Said

by Herbert J. Levine (Sarasota, FL)

That she had come to this country from the Austro-Hungarian empire at age two,

that her mother ‘s Viennese relatives were cousins of Theodor Herzl,

that her step-mother felt jealous of her good looks,

that she had become a Suffragette at age sixteen and raised money for the cause selling flowers on the Boston Common,

that the grandson of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had been smitten with her appearance as Isaiah’s wife at a play at the West End YMHA,

that he had asked her to marry him on the spot, saying “my grandfather the poet loved your people,”

that she had replied, “Well my father doesn’t love yours,” 

that she married an American-born man twelve years her senior,

that she and her husband embraced whenever they met one another in whatever room of the house it was,

that it took her seven years after she married at nineteen to realize that she could get on top,

that she had gone every Sunday night to the Ford Hall Forum to hear visiting intellectuals who lectured on every topic under the sun,

that she had practiced saying, “every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better,” as one of them had advised,

that her sister who lived upstairs once said, “Rosie, what are you constipating to do?”

that there was nothing more beautiful than the sunset seen through her kitchen window,

that she lived as a widow forty-two years after Hyman‘s death, half of those working for the Federal government,

that the buses she took to work were designed for making friends with her neighbors,

that if you don’t own a car, it’s very important to befriend people who do,

that rush tickets at Symphony Hall were half-price for Friday afternoon rehearsals,

that there was nothing better for the spirit when visiting historic sites than saying “I love America!”

that it was important for young people to cultivate a sense of intimacy – she had been reading Erik Erikson at the time –

that she would never live long enough to use that bottle of one thousand buffered aspirin that I bought her,

that she left to her children and grandchildren her love of the sun and the moon and the stars and the sky

that she would spend her money before she died, which she did not, 

that I should say at her funeral that every morning she recited the Twenty-Third Psalm, but not until after she had eaten her bagel.

Herbert Levine is the author of two books of bi-lingual poetry, Words for Blessing the World (2017) and An Added Soul: Poems for a New Old Religion (2020). He is currently working on a humanist and earth-based prayer book: Blessed Are You, World: A Siddur for our Time. This is the fifth of his family portraits shared on the Jewish Writing Project. To learn more about Herb and his work, visit:https://benyehudapress.com/books/words-blessing-world/

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Filed under American Jewry, Boston Jewry, Family history, Hungarian Jewry, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

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May 31, 2016 · 6:31 am

Great-Uncle Moishe: L’dor v’dor

by Ellen Sue Spicer-Jacobson (Bala Cynwyd, PA)

My first conscious memory of my grandmother’s youngest brother, Moishe (Morris in English), is from 1945. My older brother and sister and I were visiting Great-Uncle Moishe Spicer and his wife Rose in Coney Island. My grandmother and her sister Molly were there as well, and, when the declaration of the end of WWII came over the radio, I found myself outside with one of the kitchen pots and a spoon, hammering on the pot to celebrate. It was a very noisy night and I can still remember that celebration.

For some reason, Uncle Moishe favored me more than my four siblings. I never asked him why, but I liked the attention, especially because my mother was always too busy to pay much attention to me and my father was always working. So I basked in my great-uncle’s attention whenever I saw him. He made me smile and feel special.

Uncle Moishe became a widower, and eventually retired to Florida where I visited him in the mid-1980s. He moved near my aunt, actually living in the same building, so when I occasionally visited Aunt Gladys, I could also visit my great-uncle. One sunny day, after visiting my aunt, Uncle Moishe and I took a walk in a nearby park and I began asking him questions about our family background. Where were we from? What was life like in Austria-Hungary? How did he come to America? I asked him so many questions, he began to lose his voice from talking, but I persisted, and being his favorite, he could not say “no” to me.

What I learned fascinated me. Uncle Moishe told me that his family had lived in a shtetl in Russia on the border of what was then Austria-Hungary, very close to the Tibor River. The family had no last name because in the 1860s last names in Russia were still in the future. (A child was identified as “the son of” or “daughter of” his or her father, using his or her father’s first name as part of their names.) Because the Russian Army at this time conscripted young Jewish boys into the army when they were very young, Uncle Moishe’s grandfather and great-uncle were sent across the river to avoid being drafted and converted to Christianity. The parents never saw their children again!

The boys fled to a small town called Tarpiluvka in Austria-Hungary where they were adopted by a family with the name Speiser (which means food store). Mrs. Speiser was unable to bear children and thought the boys’ appearance was a miracle from God. Moishe and his older siblings grew up in Tarpiluvka, and eventually half of them came to America to start new lives, never to return to their place of birth. Half of the siblings kept the name Speiser and the other half, including my grandmother and Great-Uncle Moishe, anglicized it to Spicer.

The sacrifice that my great-great-great grandmother Sorah (Sarah in English) made to send her sons away went straight to my heart. I cannot imagine anyone today making such a sacrifice out of a desire to have her children remain Jewish. Inadvertently, I think, her sacrifice led me to become more aware of my Jewishness. We joined a Reconstructionist congregation of mostly seniors and I have found a renewed interest in Jewish history and Jewish holidays. I feel if I abandon my Jewish upbringing, then I am somehow abandoning Sorah’s wishes to have her children remain Jewish. Her desire has been handed down to her children’s children and eventually to my generation. It’s a perfect example of l’dor v’dor.

While I consider myself a Jew, I am not ultra-religious, although I do attend synagogue and belong to a small congregation. But I realize that learning about the sacrifice that Sorah made also made my life possible. If Sorah had not made this sacrifice, I may have never been born! My sense of being Jewish became heightened as a result of her heroic act. (And I believe the second part of my Hebrew name, Sarah, is from this ancestor, which pleases me even more.)

I will always be grateful for the time Uncle Moishe spent with me. He helped me learn so much about my ancestors. I feel fortunate that he agreed to answer all my questions. Otherwise, my family’s history might have remained a mystery. Instead, it has become a legacy.

Ellen Sue Spicer-Jacobson is a freelance writer and author of four cookbooks, a children’s coloring book, a computer manual, and a children’s (fiction) book based on her ancestors’ trek from Russia to Austria-Hungary (and eventually to America.) She lives in Bala Cynwyd, PA, and has a health-oriented website, www.menupause.info  for older women.

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June 1, 2015 · 8:18 pm

A Tribute to My Father, Merkler Andras (6 Jan 1933 – 30 April 2015)

By David Merkler (Barcelona, Spain)

When I was 14 years old, I wrote my O-level English language project entitled: “My father’s experiences during the war.” At that time, I was extremely unsure about what had happened. I knew my grandfather and uncle had died in the war, but little else. I sat down in my father’s study, asked him some questions, and he told me a few sketchy details. Either he didn’t want to remember or simply had drawn a veil over everything. Either way I can remember the opening lines of my project: “My father was born in Budapest on the 6th January 1933 and twenty-four days later Hitler came to power (on the 30th January 1933).” Call it bad timing. Born Jewish at the wrong time in the wrong place.

The suffering of Hungarian Jewry was the longest and, in some ways, the cruelest of all of European Jewry. Hungary beat even Nazi Germany in passing the first anti-Semitic law in 20th century Europe in 1920. The Numerus Clausus limited the number of university places available to Hungarian Jewish students. In the 1930s neo-Nazi politicians in countries allied to Nazi Germany, including Hungary and Rumania, passed anti-Semitic legislation mirroring what had been passed in Germany limiting their individual rights to work, circulate, own property etc. More significantly, they collaborated with the Nazis, deporting Jews to lands controlled directly by the Germans where they were exterminated and their armies participated in the massacre of Jews. In their madness these countries sent poorly equipped troops to fight alongside Nazi Germany against the Soviets who killed and imprisoned them in massive numbers. Exploiting their weakness to encircle the German troops besieging Stalingrad in 1942, the Soviets broke out of Stalingrad, inflicted the first defeat on the Nazis, and initiated the beginning of the end of the murderous Nazi machine.

My father’s parents, Valeria and Istvan, were working in Germany in the early 1930’s. Valeria, like anybody who had any sense, knew that things were only going to get worse. They returned to Hungary, and Valeria did what any normal person would do—she had her children baptized, converted to Catholicism, and sent to Catholic boarding schools. The war started. The war raged on. And until 19th March 1944 most of Hungary’s Jews—more than 600,000—were still alive.

Finally, as Hungary tried to change sides in 1944 knowing that the Nazis were going to be defeated, a contingent of the German Army and SS led by Adolf Eichmann entered Hungary, took control, established their headquarters in Budapest’s largest synagogue, installed an even more extreme neo-Nazi anti-Semitic government, and initiated the deportation of Hungary’s provincial Jewry, mostly to Auschwitz. The deportation of the capital’s Jewish population began but was not completed.

My father’s childhood memories in that last year were, amongst others, of peeking through a hole in a wall to watch a film where Jews were not allowed to go, of the guilt he felt later at stealing bread from a woman at night in the ghetto, and the shame he felt when boys who he had gone to school with saw him wearing the Star of David, which marked him out as a pariah. He would suffer starving conditions (many died of hunger and thirst in the ghetto), tuberculosis, and would finally be liberated by Soviet forces in January 1945 after the city had been besieged and bombarded for weeks. His father, Istvan, and brother, Peter, were deported and later murdered in the last few weeks of the war. We know that Istvan’s remains lie in a mass grave in Brück-an-der-Leite. We don’t know where Peter fell or was murdered. He was marched to a sub-camp of Mauthausen called Gunskirchen He has no grave. My grandmother Valeria told me he had been liberated by the Americans at Gunskirchen, but was too weak to survive. My father said we simply don’t know. He retraced the route of the final march with a Hungarian Jewish survivor. I think my grandmother wanted to believe that her son had tasted freedom, if only briefly, at the age of 15 before his murderous end. Valeria’s sister, Elsa, was amongst the first to be deported from Budapest. We know nothing of her fate. My father always believed she had been deported to Ravensbruck.

At the end of the war my father was placed in an orphanage. My grandmother, Valeria, who had made her way to England in 1938, enlisted in the American army where she worked translating correspondence from German to English to help the Americans capture Nazi war criminals. (I hope her work contributed to the capture of some.) She was based in Germany and travelled to Hungary (which was under the control of the Soviets), found András, and bribed Soviet border guards with American cigarettes so she could take him out of Hungary, first to Germany and later England. So now you see why my father wanted to be buried with his mother in England, where we laid him to rest a month ago.

We are only here as Jews because of those who came before us and made the decision to be Jews, sometimes against all odds. That was my father’s case. He decided to be Jewish against all the odds, to venerate those who were murdered, and pay respect to past generations who had lived peacefully as non-religious Jews.

The day of death is the marker of who we actually became. My father chose to be Jewish. He chose to bring up a Jewish family. And he chose to remember and venerate the past when he wrote his book on the history of his family. His last words to me were “G-d bless.” When I saw him on his deathbed, I told him that he should go to heaven and say hello to Istvan, Valeria, and Peter, and not worry. The Merklers and our Jewish identity would continue here on Earth. I asked him to squeeze my hand if he understood. He squeezed my hand.

I make the same decision as my father to be Jewish and venerate those past generations.

David Merkler was born and grew up in London, England  and now lives in Gelida, outside Barcelona, Spain. You can reach him at davidmerkler@languagesbarcelona.com

If you’d like to learn more about David’s father, you can read ”My Father Is Dying” (https://jewishwritingproject.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/my-father-is-dying/) which he shared on The Jewish Writing Project in 2011.

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