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.