The Not Forgotten

Exactly 20 years ago, I was a young student at Harvard Law School. Anxious, lonely, a bit miserable and...guilty for feeling that way. My mother had died a year and a half earlier and I hadn't really spoken to anyone about her death. I never told anyone that I missed her. Our family (my father, my brother and my sister) never discussed her death (or her life, for that matter) and we all just 'got on with it.'

I started having panic attacks about a year after her death. I would wake up in the middle of the night to my own screams: heart pounding, breathless and terrified. At Harvard, evidently, I was one of the many anxiety-ridden young people. When I tried to make an appointment with the law school therapist, I was told that the nearest available slot would be months later. After a visit to the emergency room in December of 1998, I decided that I would take the option to spend the short January semester working on my thesis at my father's relatives' house in New Haven.

My father's cousin, Peter, was a professor of micro-biology at Yale and his wife, Zsuzsi (or Susanna, as she was known in the United States) worked at the Yale library. They were just turning 70 that year and had lived in the US since they left Hungary after the failed 1956 revolution against the communist regime. Peter is my father's first cousin and I have known him and Zsuzsi since the 80s. In 1988, when I was 13, my father took me to New York with his newly regained passport and we visited "Peti and Zsuzsi."  Their house, a one-story family home in the middle of the woods in Woodbridge, a well-to-do suburb of New Haven, was the closest thing I had seen to "real America." I fell in love with the intensity and wonder of New York City after which their house in the woods with Zsuzsi and her körözött was homey and soothing. It was that calming effect I sought when I went over there in January 1999.

'Peti and Zsuzsi' were en entity. Peti was reserved, quiet and knowledgeable about everything from ancient Chinese ceramics to Italian opera and modern architecture. He was the kind of all around cultured renaissance man that doesn't exist anymore. Zsuzsi had a more eclectic range of knowledge and she was uniquely focused on people and their stories. She never ceased to ask questions on the most minute details of what one was doing, learning, who one was seeing and took notes on people's marriages, birthdays, vacations and lesser life events. She was also gently sarcastic and had a way of posing the question that stumped you but was the essential one.

Peti and Zsuzsi took me to Seattle in the summer of 1994 to see their daughter Carol and her kids. It was my second visit to the United States and I saw much more of the country than before. I came for a workshop on the US government to DC and made my way back to mythical and wonderful New York City thanks to their son Michael who kindly hosted me at his place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for a week. Peti always let it be known that, in his opinion, the United States was the only place for an ambitious, educated young person who wanted to make something of themselves. His understated enthusiasm was immensely appealing to me. Zsuzsi was more ambivalent. Over the years, when I asked her about immigrating to the US, she told me that she came for Peti and probably would have stayed in Budapest otherwise. She also told me that once they were here,  she would often be looking out the windows of a train that she had to take every day to go to work in the early years and wonder why she was here at all. She missed Budapest despite the painful memories associated with it. She told fantastic and hilarious stories about her elementary school teachers and the seemingly sudden change from memorizing Jewish day school texts to reciting teachings of Catechism. (In the 1930s, many Jews converted to Catholicism in Budapest to try and save themselves against the increasingly harsh anti-semitism they experienced.)

Switching to Catholicism had been in vain. Zsuzsi's father and brother were deported and killed by the Hungarians during the Holocaust as you couldn't erase Jewishness with a perfectly memorized prayer back then. She and her mother survived in Budapest, but the pain of losing her brother was especially harsh. Not that she would talk about it. Long after my 1999 stay with them, when Zsuzsi, feeling that I needed some motherly love and care without even inquiring, gave me all of that, I asked her, repeatedly to give me a life interview. She was a magical storyteller. After I moved to New York in 2005 and created a life for myself here, we visited them regularly. We stayed at the house, my son learned to love her körözött, we went for walks on the beach and in the woods around the house. We even helped her dispose of a dead mouse in the fields behind their house. (Zsuzsi and her mice - that was a a fight for the ages...). Over the years, I wanted to take her to Storycorps. I begged her to let me record the story of her life but she demurred. A few years ago, she told me that she couldn't agree to it because there was no way she could tell the full story without talking about her father, her brother and the Holocaust. But Peti would feel terrible about that - the whole 'Jewish thing' being a source of major discomfort for him - and she did not want to upset him. And Peti and Zsuzsi were an entity.

Now Zsuzsi is gone. The entity is no more. She died this January, at 89, surrounded by her family.  She was getting weak in the past couple of years or so and I felt bad about not visiting her more often. I would call her from time to time and she would make jokes about the people taking care of them being 'in her business' and bothering her all the time. She and Peti had memory troubles, but they still carried on living and loving each other from what I could tell. The last time I saw her, she seemed small and weak, not interested in the stories as much anymore. But I will always remember what she told me on one of our walks around New Haven back in 1999 when we talked about my grandmother, Lili, who had died in 1996. Zsuzsi said that my grandmother was one of those people who had touched so many lives and so many people had loved her and remembered her that she would live on and not be forgotten.

Zsuzsi is also one of The Not Forgotten.

Good Night and Good Luck (To All of Us)

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."(Vaclav Havel)

As of tomorrow, Obama will no longer be President of the United States. 

During most of Eli's life (and my time in New York) he has been the person representing us. I became one "US" during his tenure and I will always hold dear his letter welcoming me as a citizen of this country. (I shudder at the thought of Trump signing such letters...and any immigrant receiving it.) He wasn't perfect and didn't live up to his own promise but I think people put too much faith in the President. It is inevitable to feel let down when you truly believe in someone. Trump's fans will feel that too, sooner rather than later, it seems.

I am not the true believer type so I will simply miss his decency, intelligence and reflectiveness. He is a literary man with lots of interests and he tried his best. A couple of days ago,  a Hungarian friend criticized him intensely for his foreign policies and inability to really change the system. He even went as far as to say we should give Trump a chance to change. (Himself or things? Unclear.) For a moment I felt that maybe he was right, I could be wrong and it could all turn out for the better. (Or it might not matter because things are awful anyway and global warming doesn't care? Unclear.)

Who the President is may not matter for the arc of history, but it matters for our daily lives. Obama says "History doesn't move in a straight line, we zig and we zag," but people die during the zags. Watching the procession of corrupt and/or ignorant billionaires and Republican lackeys Trump put forward so far, there is no hope they will be any better than the Democratic technocrats waltzing though the revolving door an back during the Obama era. They will most certainly be worse for most of us.

What to do? I will have to march on Saturday to express my amorphous dissatisfaction and anxiety. Then I have to figure out what to hope for the Havelian sense and how to act in its name.

My (Real) Birthday

"The speed with which the Hungarian authorities cast out Jews from society, then robbed, segregated and deported them was unprecedented in the entire history of the Holocaust."

I will turn 42 tomorrow. 42 seems like a high number. I don't feel 42. I don't (I hope) look 42. I don't really want to be 42. But I must accept it so I am trying it on. Silently mouthing it to myself in the mirror as I look for gray hairs. (There are still none.) I'll still be vague about my age, as needed, but it is a fact I need to live with and perhaps embrace over the next year.

(David was 42 when we had Eli 10 years ago. When he looks at pictures of himself from those days he bemoans his youth, strength and dark hair. He misses himself at 42. That makes me feel better.)

My grandfather, Ferenc Koszeg Sr, died at 42. In that context, 42 seems like a low number.

He had the same crappy birthday I have. January 2. Unfortunately (?) for him, the year of his birth was 1900. He died of typhus or some other horrible disease; cold, abandoned and alone in a labor camp on the Russian front. He was one of the "25,000-42,000 unarmed Jewish men ordered to battlefields [who] lost their lives between 1941 and 1944 at the hands of brutal guards, due to inhuman conditions and/or military action." He was taken away to the camp where the Jews were suffering "from horrendous living and internment conditions similar to those in the concentrations camps of the SS" in 1942. At age 42.

I often thought about him on my birthday as a child. I always wondered if he had hated this January 2 business as well. The #DayNobodyWantsToCelebrateAnymore.

My father, who barely remembered him, had a picture of him hanging in his bedroom. It was of a serious-looking bald man with eyes like my brother's. He seemed old and mysterious. I knew from my grandmother that he had been a successful and well-to-do dentist, a man of great renown around Budapest as the favorite dentist of "classy ladies and gentlemen" and that she loved him so deeply that she forgave his indiscretions and occasional coldness. I later learned that he was a charming, well-educated man who spoke several languages, loved travel, good food and beautiful women as much as he hated being Jewish and all that it entailed in Hungary in the 1930s.

I also knew that he wasn't supposed to have died and left a 3-year-old child with no father, a young woman with no husband. But, until today, with 42 looming over me, I never quite fully appreciated how young he was when he was torn away from his life and everything that he knew. I never fully felt the awfulness of it all.

So on this day, I want to honor him and learn to appreciate my 42 years and my freedom and privilege to keep on living as I choose.

One woman, one vote part II (not yet...)

I just cannot yet write this post about the elections because things really did not turn out the way I (we all, people that I know and talk to) expected. Trump will be our President and I can barely bear to write it down a couple of weeks later. So I will tell about my experience working the day at the polling station, meeting some lovely (and less so) people all day, developing temporary friendships with my co-workers...but not just yet.

Today though I had an experience worthy of note. Thanksgiving at my in laws was wonderful and I admired, as always, my 90-year-old mother-in-law's stamina and ability to work and host an entire meal for 17 people (!) without complaining once and making it seem like she was someone way younger. She is still very lucid and strong and "with it" and I love hearing her stories and take on current affairs. One thing she repeatedly tells me about is that inside she feels like a woman in her late thirties with four kids, really busy and constantly concerned with the well-being of her children. This is the internal image she has of herself, she says, and then she looks at herself in the mirror in the morning and finds someone else, to her surprise: an old lady she doesn't recognize.

This is true of every human, I suppose, there is an internal awareness of identity and age you choose and feel mots comfortable with and it has nothing to do with "reality". Tonight we had dinner at a nice restaurant, Freek's Mill, with David and Zazi and I chatted to the  nice twenty-something hostess girl about her dress, the restaurant, whatever. All along I acted like we were peers and her "very cool" thrift store recommendation was something I might actually explore. Then I got home and looked at myself in the mirror and I realized I was like my mother in law. I just picked this age I feel comfortable with that has nothing to do with reality. I will never go to that thrift store and I am not her peer. And that is just fine.

One woman, one vote - Part I

When I tried to vote in the Democratic Primary this past April, I was unsuccessful. Not because I am not a registered Democrat (I am) or that I didn't vote in time, fill out my ballot correctly, or anything that would reasonably disqualify me from voting. My vote was not counted because even though I went to the voting location indicated as the correct one on the New York City Board of Elections website, it turned out that it was not, after all, the correct location. In that controversially administered primary, many people complained that they were not allowed to cast their ballot despite being properly registered voters for various reasons. I was surprised that I did not (a) get a notice to vote and (b) my voting location indicated on the website was not my regular polling location. Nonetheless, as a good (new) citizen and enthusiastic voter, I wanted to cast my ballot in a primary that, for once, mattered to some degree. I figured the primary may be held at a different site than the general election. As New Yorkers, we rarely get to enjoy the feeling of a vote cast that makes a difference one way or another. As a voter, I was sad that when I showed up at 7 am to vote, all I found was confusion, disorganization, and, ultimately, an inability to cast a vote that counted.

I was not on the list of voters so I cast my vote by affidavit. I got a letter from the New York City Board of  Elections a few weeks later that my vote was not counted because I went to the wrong polling site. I knew it would not matter the moment I filled out the affidavit, but I thought, surely, a properly registered voter, casting a vote should have her vote counted even if it was cast a few blocks away from where she was supposed to be - especially if the system itself directed her to go there!
I couldn't make sense of such a ridiculous disenfranchisement tactic. And, unlike some of the Bernie bros, I didn't think this was malicious or directed against Bernie voters. I just had the feeling that the entire New York City Board of Elections including the primary systems are run by incompetent people on archaic systems designed to make it "really hard to vote," as President Obaman had said.  

So I decided to sign up to be a NYC election worker to study the system up close. Tomorrow, I get my wish.

Being a poll worker is a paid position. If you attend the required training session (takes about 5 hours), pass the exam and work one day as a poll worker on a primary or election day you get $200. The hours on polling day are brutal: you must show up at 5 am and stay until all votes are counted (which may be 10 pm or later) with two one-hour breaks that you may or may not be able to take. You must bring your own food and snacks (nothing smelly or disgusting, as per the training manual) and they don't reimburse you for travel expenses. That comes to about $10/hour before taxes if you are lucky and everything runs smoothly (which is unlikely).

I  had my training in August. The trainers were a diverse group of friendly-but-firm middle-aged men wearing suits that had seen better days. Fifty or so people attended the session that day. Many women, mostly minorities, and generally people who didn't seem to have much in the way of reliable and secure financial resources. A couple of crazies also attended. One older lady (a Trump supporter?) periodically stood up to yell at the trainers for lying and rigging the system and unfairly shutting her up...then dramatically threatened to leave without ever actually leaving. An old man next to me fell asleep several times with his head resting on his walker and as soon as his snoring became too loud, he got reprimanded by the lady who minded the room.

The session reinforced that the system is really archaic; a lot of time and effort was spent on showing how to close plastic wires locking voting machines, how to put up signage around the room and in what order and how to find accurate election districts in a big book of addresses.  As for when to hand out affidavit ballots: "Try to avoid that because those are never counted," the trainer said, "Just don't tell anyone I told you that," he sheepishly added. So it's interesting that the media made such a big thing of the fact that a Federal Judge ordered that the "New York City Board of Elections must provide affidavit ballots to all voters who believe they are registered to vote but whose names do not appear on the registration rolls." 

Tomorrow morning, I will represent the New York City Board of Elections and I am slightly apprehensive that I might well become one of those poor employees running around like headless chickens fighting the good fight within the archaic system. Fingers crossed, my "coordinator" - the polling site chief- will be a somewhat competent and decent person and things will be more up to date than during the primary. (In any case, I got a bucket of cookies  hoping to endear myself to my fellow poll workers.) 

Getting up at 4:00 will be tough and I envision sitting there at 11 pm counting  ballots with the election having been called for Hillary hours before due to Trump getting shellacked...but that wouldn't be such a bad thing, in the end!

To be continued...

Too much radio?

This is what happens when you have NPR/WNYC and MSNBC/PBS/CNN/FOX Republican Convention coverage on constantly in the house:

Eli: I'm a Trump supporter.

Me: Why?

Eli: Because ISIS is bad and he'll get rid of them.

Me: How will he do that?

Eli: Because he is a butt and it'll be a butt-on-butt fight. He is the right butt.

Me: You know we are against him, right?

Eli: Yes, YOU are, but I am not.

Me: Why?

Eli: Because I am an uneducated white male!

Me: [laughs] Where did you get that?

Eli: I have my sources. I listen to the radio.

...

Eli: [lying in bed, tired] I'm ticked off.

Me: What do you mean?

Eli: Trump failed me, now I am a Harley supporter.

Me: How come?

Eli: He just keeps blabbering on about his winkie.

Not that Eli is totally wrong in his analysis...

The worst tragedy...

...is not that the English just voted to leave the European Union. (Although that is pretty awful). 

The worst human tragedy is, as my high school literature teacher had taught me, losing one's child.  

My teacher was an imposing woman: androgynous (not in a sexy way) with wispy short hair, a cross-eyed chain-smoker and demanding lover of books who scared us to death with her long, dramatic Snape-like pauses taken just before humiliating one student or another for not answering her questions correctly. She didn't have any children herself, only a few cats she doted on. But the passion with which she talked of Antigone and why losing a child was qualitatively worse than losing a parent or a sibling stayed with me. Lose a parent or a sibling - you lose your past. Lose a child - you lose the future, she said.

The first time I was touched by death in a real way was in 1993. My father's close friend, the amazing Ottilia had a car accident and her 15-year-old son, Mate, whom I had known all my life and was just a couple of years younger than me died. I remember my mother picked up the phone and came into my room crying, hardly able to speak, telling me what happened. I didn't cry, I couldn't truly process it. I was politically active in Fidesz then and promised to take the then German President, Richard von Weizsacker's, nephew out on the town after a fancy dinner hosted at the Gundel by a young Viktor Orban. (Viktor and I have both seen better days, clearly, especially him...).

The days and weeks after, I did cry. I kept imaging the accident over and over again and tried to undo it by way of magical thinking. Ottilia never spoke of Mate or what had happened. She was ill in the aftermath of the accident. Once, three or so years after the loss of her child, she came to our house and I remember sitting with her and my mother at the kitchen table. My mother had also become ill with cancer by then and I was witnessing something between the two women I wasn't part of; an unexpressed understanding of pain and impending death. But Ottilia's was different: more resigned, more accepting, more ready to give up. I remember wanting to ask how she managed to stay alive after her son died, but I didn't say anything.  In 1997, six months apart, they both died.

Now I am a mother. For over ten years, I've been crying much more easily at the thought of anything that would take away my child's future. When I was pregnant, I cried inconsolably (and embarrassingly) on the subway all the way to work because of an Elizabeth Kolbert article about the death of the oceans. Once he was born, every illness, accident or horror that happened to a child would send me into a (sometimes overly intense) empathy frenzy. That would keep it from happening to him (and me). More magical thinking, I suppose.

I still don't understand how you can survive the loss of a child. As the mother of an only child, I am particularly curious as to what women who lose their only child do. My father's friend whose young boy killed himself by accident medicated herself with pills, alcohol and cigarettes into near oblivion. Another friend of my parents, after losing her twenty-something daughter to a senseless and unsolved killing in Russia, engaged in the manic and unsuccessful investigation of her death (and pills and alcohol). And today, thanks to Facebook, I peered into the emotions of a woman I don't know who unexpectedly lost her 25-year-old only daughter (the girlfriend of an old friend) to a quick and random infection. As I imagine I would, she said she wouldn't stick around on this Earth after losing her "one true friend and precious love".

In the end, what do you do when you lose the future? And how long can you do it for?