Index – Culture – Being Hungarian is a collective neurosis
A kind of travel guide within the city, the recently published book The Jewish Face of Budapest by Péter Rózsa, a well-known radio and former television journalist. It guides us from street to street like a kind of old-fashioned umbrella with a high-rise tour guide who has a definite route plan but lingers at his liblings. It is up to us to follow the route so that we can pass through the 19th century. Jewish and Hungarian city history beginning in the second half of the 19th century.
But the travel guide is really just a drawn-on form of the very diverse urban and cultural history that still defines our everyday life in Budapest, be it
a stumbling block in Újpipótváros, a kosher restaurant, the largest synagogue in Europe, a mini-theater in the Jewish Quarter,
where you can’t get a ticket months in advance, or a patisserie that sells not only flódnit, but always what traditional Jewish holidays require.
The book devotes a separate chapter to the cinema, the close connection between our Hungarian greats of Jewish origin and Hollywood, from George Cukor to Tony Curtis to Sándor Korda and Zsazsa, to the Jewish Óbuda and the Hungarian scientists, Ede Teller, Jenő Wigner, Leo Szilárd and János Neumann, about whom no street or public space was named in an incomprehensible and outrageous way in Budapest, or until the Nobel Prize or world fame for their intellectual performance.
A separate chapter is given to Újlipótváros, the “village” of assimilated Jews,
where everyone knows each other, the Orthodox Jewish Quarter around Dob Street and the Synagogue, the world of Broadway, cabaret, nightclubs and theaters and a separate chapter on the Jewish architecture of Budapest.
The special Békekker also provides historical and political backgrounds and explanations in appropriate places, such as the creation of the Jewish state of Israel and the first founder of the idea, Herzl Tivadar, the founder of the Zionist movement, who tried to persuade his cousin Jenő Heltai to Distribute it in Hungary until it was too late, but he refused, later admitting that it was too late.
In the Secrets, Legends and World Hits chapter, the author even uses myths such as Kalvin Klein, whose father, Leo Klein, was born in Hungary into an Orthodox Jewish family, or Estée Lauder, whose parents still lived in Sátoraljaújhely and his son in Vienna, Prague, Bratislava and Budapest. founded a popular Jewish school called Lauder. He talks about the Zwack family, who are hiding the secret of Unicum before the socialist factory, handing over a fake recipe, and about the world-famous Herz salami, which is due to the fact that
Herz Ármin, who previously operated a profitable shipping company, went to Italy, where he learned about salami, and then made his own version of Hungarian pork at home.
And he talks about Weiss Works, one of the most advanced factories in Europe, from which every family still has a much-seen Csepel bike to this day, and which, after the German occupation, was in the possession of the SS, leaving the members of the Weiss family alive.
In addition to the oeuvre of many great talents, Hungarian and international success, almost all of them are inevitable with a terrible tragedy, forced into the ghetto, deportation to concentration camps or labor service, of which even the best, including the heroic István Szabó Olympic champion fencer Attila Petschauer could not escape either, because even the Royal Medal of Merit, founded by Signum Laudis and Franz Joseph, did not save him from torture.
And then we didn’t talk about architecture, the world-famous Otto Wagner, whose only domestic work is the Rumbach Sebestyén Street Synagogue,
about the also world-famous Marcell Breuer, whose work can be seen in Hungary, but was flooded with orders in New York and all over the world,
or Lipót Baumhorn, for whom no one has received more orders for a type of building, namely a synagogue, or Marcell Komor, a follower of the Lechner Art Nouveau school, whose OTI headquarters on Fiumei Road still shines out of the misery of the Nyócker area around Orczy Square.
As we delve deeper into the stories and oeuvres, we realize that Jewish culture is inseparable from non-Jewish, but also from non-Jewish Hungarians and internationals, embracing it as much as blending with it as a sea with the mainland. The many talents, be they mathematical, physical, fine arts, architecture or performing and music, can be explained in many places. Arthur Koestler, also of Jewish descent, gave this answer.
“It happened in exotic Hungary, among the small people of seven million, Europe alone has no racial and linguistic relatives, which is thus the loneliest on this continent. This exceptional loneliness is perhaps the special intensity of its mega existence and the explanation by which this people produce such wild geniuses. As projectiles, the geniuses explode on the narrow horizon of this people and then collect their shards.
The hopeless loneliness of the nation greatly enhances their talent, will to enforce and hysteria. Being Hungarian is a collective neurosis. ”
Amazing creations, amazing lives, defined by the ambition of the desire to do, create and survive. Thus, the work of Róbert Berény, Tamás Peter Falk, Tamás Kieselbach, Imre Kálmán, Jenő Rejtő, Ferenc Molnár, Hugó Scheiber, Alfonzó, Rodolfó, Gedeon Richter, Alfréd Hajós and Iván Bächer is intertwined in space and time, for decades and centuries.
In the Jewish Budapest of Péter Rózsa, we travel not only in the various branches of art, in the history of science and industry, but also in ourselves, as we all somehow relate to their achievements and beauty.
Péter Rózsa: The Jewish Face of Budapest
Published by the Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association (Mazsike), 2021
(Cover image: The Moorish-style building of the Dohány Street Synagogue is located in the VII. district. Photo: Csaba Jászai / MTVA / Commission / MTI)