Mexico

On an impulse, I decided to come to Mexico 2 days ago. Thanksgiving and the looming prospect of working 80-hour-weeks at a law firm for a lot of money prompted the decision...and also the inefficiency and rudeness of the human rights people who do not seem to want to make a decision. Now I got two offer letters from the two law firms that interviewed me (a 150k and a 170k offer) and I must admit that the money is very tempting. I would, without hesitation, take the 50k human rights job, if offered. But I am not banking on that (no pun intended).

So now I am in Mexico City. Internet cafes are not as omnipresent as they were in Brazil or Bolivia, but I found one. I flew in last night from New York, via Houston. My long lost relative, Jorge K, came to get me at the airport. He first found me on the internet about 10 years ago and we had been in touch on and off, but I was surprised at how helpful and enthusiastic he was when I gave him about 2 minutes' notice of my arrival. When I walked into the airport pub where we agreed to meet, I recognized him instantly. He is like an older, thinner, bearded version of my brother: he has similar blue eyes and features that all the men (including my father, grandfather and great-grandfather) in my family share. It was kind of eerie. He is a pretty distant relative, my grandfather and his grandfather were cousins. He is Argentinian, 43 years old, just had a baby with his third wife and owns a company that moves equipment around the world for rock concerts and other cultural events. He smokes but doesn't seem to drink. He is handsome and easy to talk to and totally clueless about his Hungarian-Jewish origins because his grandfather, who left Hungary in 1944 with his wife and his brother for Uruguay and then Argentina, refused to talk about anything related to his former life in Hungary. Oddly, my third-cousin, Jorge, is a Hungarian citizen. He asked for it and received it without any problem in 1992 - it made his life easier when he had to travel around Europe for work. He has never been to Hungary. When his grandfather found out about it, he refused to speak to him for 6 months.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, memories of being a Jew in nazi-occupied and Hungarian nazi-run Budapest are, to say the least, unforgettable and the perpetrators unforgivable. Most of my relatives (not including my grandmother) who lived through that era are not comfortable talking about it, as if it was something embarrassing to them. I can sort of understand that; I recently read the - very honest and informative - memoirs of 70-something Hungarian jewish man and that helped me understand even better. And, though many of them have lived outside of Hungary much of their lives - none of these relatives or acquaintances have a passionate hatred of or resentment against their birth-country or Hungarians. That makes me think that something else might have happened that made Oscar K (Jorge's grandfather) act the way he acted. I guess we will never find out, the old man died a couple of years ago at the age of 92 or so.

Jorge booked me into a very nice apartment-hotel and today I made my first new friends at the Aztec ruins in the old center of Mexico: a pair of Hungarian women one of whom is engaged to a Mexican and has been living here for a couple of months. I overheard them talking in Hungarian at the museum and though I usually run in the other direction when that happens, this time I - rightly - judged them to be intelligent and friendly based on their brief conversation and looks so I hung out with them all day.