Is Anything Illuminated?

My family is from Hungary, or thereabouts—my great-grandfather served as a chaplain in the Hungarian army during the first World War—and last April, my wife and I took a trip across the old Hapsburg Empire through Prague, Vienna, and Budapest. We didn’t stop by my ancestors’ old villages (one of them is buried in what’s now western Ukraine), but I was excited to wander through Budapest, visit the shuls, eat the food, and think over an odd description of Hungarian Jews from Judd L. Teller’s 1968 Strangers and Natives:

Coming from a bountiful country and from among a sensuous peoples, the Hungarian Jews were more fleshed than any other Jewish immigrant group. Their walk was languorous, their footsteps heavy. Their men barbered themselves frequently and were heavy gamblers. . . . Their womenfolk had a Gypsy quality about them which even the clothes they copied from Viennese fashion magazines could not subdue. . . . They were notoriously unpredictable, reputedly produced more apostates from Judaism per capita than any other Jewish community, and also Hassidim unmatched in fanaticism.

Well, my downstairs neighbors will attest to the heavy footfall. Other than that, I’ll have to poll my family and do more research (my sisters don’t have much of the Gypsy quality about them). There’s always something a little desperate in the search for family origins, way back in the Old Country. It’s a desperation captured nicely in Adam Sobsey’s interesting memoir, A Jewish Appendix.

Sobsey was raised as a secular Jew. As he notes, his parents “were raised Jewish and I wasn’t.” That gap didn’t bother Sobsey for most of his life, but Judaism eventually finds its way to the surface in a trip he and his wife decide to take to Romania, where some of Sobsey’s family originated. It’s a common story in memoir and fiction, memorably told in books like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, and movies like Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain. But what I found uniquely intriguing about Sobsey’s book was his honest reflection on how unsatisfying these attempted trips to the past can be. He repeatedly insists he wants to “stand where my ancestors stood.” But when he finally does, after trekking across European cities, it’s a bit of a let down. There’s an old man from his family’s village who speaks no English yet is excited to see Sobsey’s picture of an ancestor. Does the man have secret knowledge? In the end, no. He’s just a nice old Jew. There is no Foerian illumination. There’s only vaguely disconcerted feelings at the number of memorials to dead Jews, and towns that once had many Jews, but no longer do.

“My number one feeling is just that I’m really glad my family left Europe,” I told my wife after our own trip. And despite Sobsey’s own desire to return to his roots, to live in 1900 and “plant myself here among the Jews,” I think he, too, is glad he’s from the New World. The book culminates in a trip to Pittsburgh, where he unearths a more satisfying story of his family—Sobsey still wants to close with a happy ending of finding himself in his heritage. It’s a fine ending, but what lingers, really, is the ambivalence. The unsatisfying knowledge that the past is gone, lost to the heavy footfall of time. Whatever we may return there for, it isn’t really for satisfaction.