ious woman, short-tempered and frequently sharp with her son. “She had quick hands,” my mother said, describing her mother-in- law’s willingness to dispense a slap to ex- press her disapproval. There’s a story my mother has often re- lated about this particular habit. Klara enrolled my father in dance classes when he was in his early teens. One of Klara’s friends sent her daughter to the same class and seemed distressed that no one was asking the girl to dance. As my moth- er recounts, “The friend complained to Klara. She said, `I’m going to talk to Janci [my father], and you will see, he’ll ask her to dance.’ So he went to dance class and [still] nobody asked her. Klara kept saying to him, `Go ask her to dance.’” But my fath- er, who had a willful streak that is apparent in his expression as a child, refused. So Klara smacked him across the face, right there in front of the class. The emotional sting of his mother’s slap—the humiliation of being dressed down in that way in front of a room full of teens—did not fade. By that point, my father had become an angry and rebellious teen. His marks plum- meted and he fought so much that Klara and Joska moved him several times to new schools. “He wasn’t a good scholar and he was always in physical fights with the other boys,” my mother recalls. “They just hit each other in the schoolyard. And Klara was al- ways called in.” What were the fights about? The provo- cations and the dynamics are lost. But the schoolyard problems surfaced in the early 1940s. Maybe the careworn, distracted looks on the faces of Joska and Klara, in that photo taken on the ship’s deck, reflect a preoccupying anxiousness about their son. Or maybe something else was at play in those confrontations. One clue survives. My father had been fre- quently taunted about his surname, includ- ing by one of his teachers: “Lusztig, Lusztig,” this man would say, “why are you so lustig?” In the original German, “lustig” means happy, funny, or jolly. But in Hungarian, the word attaches a pejorative connotation to an identifiably Jewish surname: lazy. It was a badge of shame, anticipating the literal badges that were yet to come. Adapted excerpt from No Jews Live Here by John Lorinc (October 2024), pub- lished with permission of Coach House Books.
Joszef and Klara Lusztig (centre and right), my paternal grandparents, circa the early 1940s.
a father, he grew stouter and fleshier, but the jovial expression didn’t fade with time, at least for a while. There are shots of him and Klara as newlyweds, posing amidst the pigeons in St. Mark’s Square in Venice, and leaning up against one another affection- ately. Yet the photos Klara kept also include a few undated shots, probably later, that of- fer a grimmer version of Joska. In one, taken on a cruise boat, he sits next to Klara and stares unsmilingly into the camera. Wearing shirt sleeves with suspenders, his hair now much thinner, he hunches slightly forward as Klara looks out past him, her chin raised with a hint of defiance. When I found this image, which has none of the bonhomie of Joska’s earlier years, I wondered about the moment when the photo was taken. There’s no date, but he looks to be in his forties, worn down by a job he disliked but also a moment—this would be the early 1940s—in which it had become increasingly perilous to be Jewish. N o first-hand accounts of Joska survive. My mother never met him, and her recollections of what my father said about him are sparse. He apparently liked to take my father for long walks when he was a boy, but otherwise left the parenting duties to his wife. There are more stories about Klara. She knew, for example, how to wring a live chicken’s neck, a detail that struck me as exotically old-world. Yet Klara was an anx-
Joska, who wore rimless wire spectacles, appears self-assured and open. He had dark, curly hair, receding by his mid-twen- ties away from a broad forehead, with full checks and a prominent chin. There are many images of him posing with friends, young men full of brio, smoking, drinking coffee, and mugging for the camera. In one picture taken in 1926, the year my father was born, Joska stands jauntily in front of a lush garden. He wears a well-tailored suit, with a puff and a high-collared dress shirt. A cigarette dangles from one hand. There was a term in Budapest for young men like Joska: kávéház zsidó, meaning “coffee house Jew.” A thriving coffee house culture had taken root in Pest around the turn of the century, and these businesses were heavily patron- ized by Jews. Almost half of Budapest’s journalists were Jewish, and coffee hous- es, many of them owned by Jews, provid- ed co-working spaces, as well as a social milieu conducive to writing, arguing, net- working, and the reading of local and inter- national newspapers. These places also provided a respite from small or overcrowd- ed apartments with inadequate amenities. “Every intelligent person had spent part of his youth in a coffee house,” recounted a prominent theatre director in 1926. “With- out it, the education of a young person would be incomplete.” As Joska matured, married, and became
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