father, a dapper but stern-looking man, owned a department store. Jozsef, known as Joska, also had two siblings, a brother named Geza and a younger sister named Ilona. Their parents, Frida Lowinger and Ig- nacz Lusztig, a bookkeeper, originally came from market towns in western Hungary and at some point moved to Budapest. They owned a thriving manufacturing firm that produced cleaning products. But the firm collapsed amidst the economic chaos of the late 1920s, so they bought a small perfum- ery in Budapest’s suburbs, installing Joska as manager—a job he apparently hated (that kind of business, known in Hungarian as “il- latszertár,” offered a selection that would be similar to what’s on offer in present day large-scale pharmacies). Klara, in turn, set herself up as a seamstress so the family could make ends meet, a turn of fate that she also resented. The two had met as teenagers, both part of a friend group that endured after they’d finished school. Even before they began dating, Joska liked to send Klara colourful mounted postcards with reproductions of the works of Dutch masters and other Ger- man painters—images of medieval waifs, Greek myths, angels, and even one of George Washington crossing the Delaware. They were addressed to “Klarika”—a term of endearment—and signed either Lusztig Jozsef or just Joska. Their circle included Joska’s brother Geza, a rakish character who became a dentist; Geza’s future wife, Bosci; and their younger sister, Ilonka, a lively young woman with a mischievous smile and a thicket of light brown hair. Later in life, Ilonka owned and ran a small private lending library from the apartment she shared with her hus- band, a travelling salesman. My father’s love of books traced back to the shelves in their apartment. The photos that survive from this group suggest a comfortable life, with frequent outings and trips to the gentle beaches of Lake Balaton. In one postcard, dated August 1924, a twenty-four-year-old Klara poses on a beach in a flapper-style bathing suit with a flounce and low-heeled mary- janes, her hands clasped behind her back. Klara’s expression is demure and her hair— normally, and throughout her life, a dense shock of auburn—is pulled back tightly. “I wish I wouldn’t look so fat in this picture,” she’s written on the back in loopy, childlike cursive.
cient aunt of my father’s named Piri on the terrace of a cafe on Margit Island, eating pastries and drinking fizzy lemon soda from a green glass bottle. A third: a dinner party with one of my father’s closest medical school friends, a lanky man with a hang-dog face who lived with his wife and two sons in a low-ceilinged flat jammed with books and prints. My sister and I were dispatched to hang out with one son, then in full hippie mode, who knew all the lyrics to Jesus Christ Superstar (he had the album) but otherwise spoke no English. A t some point in the mid-1920s, Klara and Jozsef Lusztig, my father’s par- ents, with their first and only child, moved into a modest Budapest apartment—the same one where we stayed more than half a century later. The flat, on the third floor of a building on Szigeti Utca, was located in an emerging part of the city, on the Pest side—a district known as Újlipótváros, or New Leo- pold Town. Located outside the major ring road on a precinct of former industrial lands across from Margit Island, the area was redeveloped in the 1920s as a dense en- clave of mid-rise apartments, many built in the Bauhaus style, the modernist school of design that flared during the Weimar era in Germany between the wars. Újlipótváros was also known as the “Bauhaus Shtetl.” Besides the architecture, Újlipótváros had a full range of urban amenities that reflected planning and intentionality on the part of its designers. The neighbourhood, largely developed with capital invested by affluent Jewish professionals, had been fit- ted out with schools, community centres, parks, tennis courts, and easy access to the enormous pools on Margit Island, just across the Danube. There were fashionable restaurants and Art Deco movie houses, as well as small synagogues tucked into the ground floors of a few buildings. Nearby was the city’s transit network, one of the major railway stations, and a few important cultur- al venues, such as the national theatre. Újlipótváros also served as something of a protective enclave for Budapest’s mid- dle-class Jews, who by the 1920s had be- come increasingly alarmed by the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the country and else- where. Both Klara and Jozsef came from this world, and it is not surprising they ended up living in a flat in Újlipótváros. Klara, whose maiden name was Schwarcz, was raised in a family of three children. Her
Joska Lusztig, 1926.
mountain topped by a striving Soviet-era statue. On the east bank is parvenu Pest, with its mainly nineteenth-century buildings radiating away from Hungary’s Gothic revival parliament building, a postcard monument to the vanity of the country’s nineteenth-cen- tury political classes. Certain specific impressions of the city lin- ger. I recall noticing the half-rotten produce on offer at a small grocer not far from my grandmother’s apartment. We visited the zoo and Budapest’s incredible pools—huge outdoor facilities, jammed with people. One day, we made our way up to Castle Hill to take in the view of the city from the ram- parts and explore the warren of cobblestone streets lined with frescoed houses up on the plateau. There was a government build- ing up there with an exterior stone wall still riddled with bullet holes, damage inflicted either during the war or the revolution. The sight of that pock-marked wall stuck in my mind, graphic evidence of the violence that forced my parents to flee in 1956. We spent that visit staying with my father’s mother, Klara, in her cramped apartment. Those two weeks were a merry-go-round of visits with cheek-pinching, beaming rela- tives and those friends of my parents who’d chosen not to leave during the Hungarian Revolution. One evening was spent with Klara, watching The Flintstones dubbed into Hungarian while my parents went out. Another memory: a short visit with an an-
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