parts unkown 2

Szeged, where Bourdain's guide to Budapest, the amazing, famed cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, and my grandmother, Lili, both were born, made me recall the many stories she would tell about a wonderful, cultured town full of excitement and adventure. She was born in 1910, exactly 20 years before Zsigmond, but they both wistfully spoke of this small town as a magical land where it seemed like it was always summer and kids just had the time of their lives. Often, the memory of something great experienced for the first time stays more vivid and wonderful than the reality of a lovely thing experienced for the hundredth time, right now. That is true of some things only; not, for example, sex. But I am still convinced that the the pizza I had at the Tilleul restaurant in Marseille in 1983 was the best slice I will ever have. 

My grandmother had a nice life in Szeged. Her father,  Bentian Eidus, who (as I just discovered!) has a Wikipedia page in Hungarian, was a dentist, a revolutionary, a poet, and a translator (into Yiddish) of many famous Hungarian poets and writers. In my grandmother's telling, poets I learned about in school, including Kosztolanyi, Ady, Radnoti (none of whose names mean much to non-Hungarians),  hung out in their comfortable apartment drinking coffee and cognac, eating delicious food prepared by the cook, served by maids, while she, a little blonde girl who wasn't as pretty as her younger brother, was sneaking around trying to catch scenes and conversations she wasn't supposed to see or hear. I tried to imagine the scene many times and in my child's eyes, Lili was the coolest, most romantic girl I was never going to be.

Lili talked a lot about her father's intellect, style, generosity and "just" strictness. As a kid, I never understood why she thought that the time her father hit her with a leather belt because she went out to meet a boy in secret one night was ok. It was for the best, she learned a lesson, she said. She also claimed not to mind that she was not allowed to become a doctor like she was planning to be and had to study dentistry to follow in the footsteps of her father.

Bentian died in 1944 in Auschwitz. The details of this death we cannot imagine and Lili would not dwell on them, ever. Instead, I suppose, she wanted to celebrate the memories of his life and maybe the details become more beautiful, more intimate, more amazing than they perhaps were. But thanks to her, I still think of the man. I want to tell the story of him. Because the only way for me, heathen that I am, to fathom immortality is to believe in the power of human memory.

“The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero