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4 A Dream Disrupted
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23 4 A Dre a m Disrupted The new pharmacy in Békéscsaba did quite well, although not as well as it could have, not as well as my parents had hoped. “What can I do?” my father asked my mother once. They thought I was outside, but I was hiding under the table. His face was pale, his eyes glistened with tears, but he knew that there was no answer to the question. “The truth of the matter is that this pharmacy I love so much is recommended to their patients in the area neither by the Christian private doctors nor by the hospital doctors,” he said. There were reasons, of course, for such expressions of hatred, which took me years to understand. My father was charming, caring, and very intelligent, not only adored by us but by everybody else who met him. In addition, he was an excellent businessman and a highly gifted chemist who undertook major research experiments, inventing and producing several potent medications. Yet despite his personal charm, brilliance, and professional excellence, he could not fight the growing boycotts unleashed against the Jews in the mid-1930s in Hungary. Indeed, finding its roots in age-old religious hatred, anti-Semitism still had enormous energy and resources in Hungary—as the Blood Libel trial at Tiszaeszlár at the end of the nineteenth century, accusing the Jews of drinking the blood of a Christian maiden, had demonstrated. This powerful, myth-based emotion did not disappear completely during the years of the country’s rapid modernization. And after World War I, during the time of “new troubles” created by a Communist takeover and Trianon, it was ripe for explosion. In fact, as my parents observed, When the Danube R an Red 24 under the pressure of the lost war and the collapsing economy, anti-Jewish feelings intensified and intermingled with the radical Right’s racist propaganda, blaming the Jews for the lost war as well as the Bolshevik Revolution and the Hungarian Communist government, while simultaneously advancing rumors about Jewish “profit” from the war and the growth of Jewish “financial capital.” While becoming more restrained during the relatively stable years of 1922–28, anti-Jewish sentiments flamed up again in Hungary during the Depression. “It was, in fact, under the impact of this new, catastrophic pressure ,” said my father, and as often as he spoke of this his face expressed shame and anguish, “that the old anti-Jewish sentiments were reincarnated in Hungary. “Yes,” he said, trying to be “objective,” but even then I saw his anguish. “There was hunger, uncertainty, fear, and hatred. People were desperate. The food and coal lines multiplied in the streets; and with them arose the hostility against the ‘foreigners’ who ‘caused the war’ and ‘brought Communism to Hungary.’ The infamous Numerus Clausus law came again into effect,” he added, “restricting to 5 percent the number of Jewish students at the country’s universities.” Many years were to pass before he could tell me what this “rising hostility ” had meant for our life. Reading books about it later, I understood that, indeed, accused of participation in the Communist rule in Hungary, masses of Jews had been killed by the Horthy-led army of the Right during the counterrevolution in 1919. In addition to this bloodshed, hundreds of Jewish students in Hungarian universities had been beaten up and crippled by blows. One of these students who had been attacked was my father, who had just returned from the war in the fall of 1918 after suffering on the front a head wound, from which he had almost died. Matriculating a year later at Budapest University, he was targeted after a chemistry lab session, beaten by a mob of “Awakening Hungarians”—an ultra-Right, anti-Semitic organization—and hurled down several flights of steep stone stairs leading from the doors of the university to the street, hitting his head again and again during the fall, till he hit the pavement. [3.94.150.98] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:18 GMT) A Dream Disrupted 25 Left lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood, he was picked up by some of his friends, who saved his life by taking him to a nearby hospital. These attacks subsided after a while, and the country started to recover from the war. But then came the Depression, and Hungary, like several other European countries of the time, had arrived at the brink of an economic...