more than Vienna, had become a thriving hub of commerce, art, and liberal politics, a place that fully embraced the modern era and served as a magnet for upwardly mobile Jews. (The city acquired the obviously prob- lematic sobriquet “Judapest.”) Rural areas and small towns, by contrast, remained stuck in the feudal era, ruled by land-owning gentry whose members clung to the archaic customs of the Hungarian aristocracy (which included a deep disdain of commerce), employed and taxed the peasants, and re- mained aloof from the sophistication of the big city. Even at that relatively late date, a shockingly small percentage of Hungary’s population had the right to vote. Those who owned land could. The urban Jewish middle and upper class- es, meantime, thrived, especially in Buda- pest. The wealthiest families established intimate social and business connections with Hungary’s ruling elites and aligned themselves politically with the country’s small-l liberal government. In its architecture, cultural institutions, and mannerisms, turn-of-the-century Buda- pest saw itself as an up-and-coming rival to Vienna. Historian Péter Hának, who has compared the two cities, describes them as the “garden and the workshop,” the latter a reference to the fact that Budapest, unlike Vienna, attracted entrepreneurs, brokers, lenders, and hustlers. Its port had grown to become the largest along the entire stretch of the Danube, serving freight-laden barges from the Balkans and processing enormous shipments of wheat from the Great Plains. The Pest side in particular boomed, and came to be surrounded by a ring of indus- trial precincts filled with overcrowded tene- ments, warehouses, and small manufactur- ers employing people streaming in to the city from points east. Pest’s major arterials radiated out from the Danube in concen- tric semi-circles, with each segment named for a member of the Habsburg family. The Orient Express, which connected Vienna and Istanbul, made a stop at the Keleti train station, Budapest’s largest. Tourists flocked to the city in large numbers. Yet like many thriving metropolises, Budapest— Europe’s fastest growing city between 1867 and 1914—had plenty of poverty and income inequality. Pest’s buzzy nineteenth-century growth coincided with, and was greatly influenced by, the influx of Jews from rural Hungary as well as more distant parts of central and
Jozsef (Joska) Lusztig in front of his store, circa the late 1930s.
ism,” Budapest’s first Jewish mayor, Ferenc Heltai, who happened to be the uncle of Theodor Herzl, predicted as early as 1912. “But the Jews of Hungary will also be over- taken by their doom, which will be all the more brutal and merciless as time passes, and wilder, too, the stronger they get in the meantime. There is no escaping it.” I first visited Budapest at age twelve, with my parents and my sister, in July 1975, during a family trip to Europe. We arrived on a flat-bottomed tour boat that departed from Vienna and navigated down a languid stretch of the Danube as it flowed east out of Austria into (then) Czechoslovakia, banking south toward Hungary. The boat had a glass top, with lots of windows, and carried several dozen American tourists, talking noisily. Arriving by boat to Budapest is to encoun- ter the city in a state of romantic equipoise. Like many great river metropolises, Buda- pest is both defined and divided by this half- kilometre-wide expanse of moving water. The Danube runs past and around Margit Island, an almond-shaped park fitted out with paths and outdoor pools, and flows beneath Budapest’s seven bridges, five of which were blown up during the siege of the city in early 1945. On the western bank sits l’ancien Buda, its rolling, terraced sky- line encompassing the garrison (Castle Hill, with the Royal Palace) and, a few hundred metres downstream, Gellert Hegy, a craggy
eastern Europe. The city’s earliest Jewish quarter grew up well away from the Danube, in a district known as Erzsébetváros (Eliza- beth Town). Anchored by the majestic Moor- ish-style Dohany Street synagogue, built in 1859, the Jewish quarter’s narrow streets were lined with small businesses, such as kosher butchers, dry-goods merchants, fur- riers, and fabric stores. A bustling outdoor flea market operated nearby. One could buy and bargain for anything, including kosher salami and every type of second-hand item, from mattresses to clocks. While the area was still home to the city’s Hasidim and a few Yiddish signs remained over the store- fronts, many of its residents had embraced a more assimilated lifestyle. Some shops even displayed the Hungarian double-cross and shield to demonstrate the merchant’s patriotism. Besides the street retailers and profes- sional offices, the quarter offered a full complement of leisure activities, includ- ing well-known brothels, night clubs, and music halls. The programming in the revue theatres included plenty of satirical and self-parodying comedy, with actors poking fun at the traditionalism of their Orthodox brethren. Yet some voices cautioned Hungary’s Jews from mistaking their prosperity and connections for security. “I would gladly re- sign my claim to the Hungarian Jews if only I were certain that their patriotism would save them from the misery of anti-Semit-
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