The Maccabiah’s Ripple EffectBy Talia Carner
Susan Horvath was surrounded. Hundreds of thousands faces of murdered children flushed out her family’s buried secret. She could have been one of them. Her light brown hair coiffed, her flowery blouse pressed, Susan could not control her sobbing as she stood rooted to the floor in the Children’s Memorial in Yad Vashem. All her life, her mother had protected her from this knowledge by denying her Judaism; her mother had broken the curse that was the Jews’ lot in Hungary. How could Susan have ever imagined that her own son, whom she had raised with no knowledge of the family’s Jewish past, would lead her here, to the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem to confront the hushed memories?
When this son, Josef Horvath, a non-Jewish member of the first basketball league in Hungary, was twenty-four, someone asked him whether he wanted to play in the 1993 Maccabiah games. “It would be two weeks of fun,” that someone said.
“I did not possess a Jewish soul,” explains the two-meter tall (6 ft.6½ in.) Josef, whose open face with high cheekbones is quick to offer a disarming smile during our interview at a Budapest café. Nevertheless, something rambled at the back of his mind. A dormant feeling of some connection to Jews flitted in his heart.
He began to probe his roots. He had heard that his maternal grandmother, Aranka Lowinger, had been born Jewish and that all her eight siblings married Jews. But now he also learned that as World War II raged, the “lucky ones” were first crowded into the Budapest ghetto, the less lucky were sent directly to Baden Baden concentration camp. The only one in her family married to a gentile and totally isolated from the rest of them, Aranka hid in a cellar throughout the war and in 1942 gave birth to her daughter, Susan. By the time Aranka crawled out of the cellar, forever claustrophobic of small spaces and caves, and fearful of being herself, a Jew, she discovered that all but one sibling had been murdered.
She wished to forget it all, to disassociate herself from anything that would ever again make her a victim of such hatred, from anything that would threaten her infant daughter with the fate of the Jews. She wished for a new, better world that offered salvation and justice. Enter the Communists, the allies who fought the Nazis, her family’s persecutors. The Communists offered a vision of a wonderfully just world, one which she was grateful to embrace. In the coming years, Aranka raised Susan to share her faithful belief in the Communist ideology and secularism. Years later, when Susan decided to marry a non-Jew, Aranka supported her choice that would obliterate any track-marks which might one day surface and bring disaster.
Until Josef was eighteen years old, there had never been a discussion of anything Jewish in his household. A chance visit to the Jewish cemetery in Budapest made him wonder for the first time about the Jews of his city—past and present—and about his grandmother’s dead family. He was sickened by the notion of the dozen of cousins he could have had; Aranka’s only sister to survive the war in hiding, was now deceased. A rumor that one sister, once believed dead, was now living in Israel could not be verified from behind the iron curtain that isolated Hungary under Communist rule.
A couple of years later, as a student at the university at Budapest, Josef found himself drawn to fellow students who identified themselves as Jews and he began to read about Jewish history. Once, he ventured to the synagogue, but the strange, foreign language left him perplexed, only emphasizing the divide between himself and the Jews.
In 1992, when asked to play in the Maccabiah Games the following year, that stirring of awakening mixed with his sense of coming short on the single important qualification, the “possession of a Jewish soul.” Even as he learned that technically, according to the Halacha, he was a Jew, he felt different from these people who walked around “with a Jewish soul.” Finally, his sense of adventure and youthful curiosity won, and he decided to go.
Nothing had prepared him for the experience of marching into the Ramat-Gan stadium in a sea of Jews. And here he was, a part of a historical turning point, as 1993 was the first time Hungary participated in the Maccabiah Games after the fall of Communism. Seventy athletes marched under the Hungarian flag—all Jewish, all proud. Within days, competing against Jews of all nations, Josef was seized by a transformative sensation of coming home. While he dribbled, an important piece of himself clicked into place. While every muscle and sinew in his perspiring body strained taut, his spirit soared higher than any scored ball.
Back home after the Games, the basketball team decided to stay together as a third official Hungarian League. Indeed, since 1995, the League participated in more than one hundred games and enjoyed a series of winnings—including the 1995 European Maccabi Games.
More importantly, as Josef played with his teammates, some of whom practiced traditional Judaism, he found himself soaking up knowledge. Bonded to his new friends by the Maccabiah experience, he no longer felt awkward returning to the synagogue with them for Shabbat services.
Soon, the then-chairman of the Maccabi Hungary, Andras Bleyer, recognized Josef’s leadership skills and began assigning him official roles, one of which included attending the yearly Maccabi World Union Plenum in Israel. Finally, in 1998, Josef was elected as the chairman of the one-hundred-year old Maccabi Hungary, an organization that not only had been insular under Communism, “but it was called Maccabi Fencing and Athletic Club although it had neither fencing nor athletic programs,” Josef quips, his brown eyes twinkling. But it was this assignment that made him feel he was finally reclaiming his “Jewish soul.”
His powerful emotional and spiritual transformation had to be matched by the final act of accepting the covenant with his new-found people. In 2000, at age thirty-two, Josef had the brit. “In one week, I was all better,” he comforts those who wince at the idea of later-life circumcision. “And I was so much more complete.”
For a while, building a career as a civil construction engineer and a consultant to Israeli investors in Budapest, Josef searched for a soul-mate, a wife who was either Jewish or would embrace Judaism through conversion. There was no question that his children must be raised Jewish, be told Henriette, a lovely woman he met and whose inner strength and commitment to start a Jewish home matched his own. Their first son, Aron, born in October 2004, had his brit on the traditional eighth day. “A the right age,” Josef remarks.
But the family’s tale of lost-and-found Judaism did not end here.
Josef’s sister, Judith, eighteen months older and a runner, had no interest in her brother’s process of reclaiming his Jewish soul, when, in 2001 she was diagnosed with advanced thyroid cancer. The disfiguring surgery removed glands and tissues from chin to collar bone. Six months later, at remission from cancer, Judith accepted Josef’s suggestion to begin training as a long-distance runner for the 2005 Maccabiah Games.
As she started practicing for 5 to 15K races, she started asking questions, and soon joined Josef for Friday night services at the synagogue. Before long, Shabbat dinner at the Horvath family had become a happy event that also included Josef’s father, the non-Jew who watched with amusement and respect as his children sang and prayed over a feast of Jewish delicacies.
The Jewish Community Center in Budapest held Passover Seders. In 2003, for the first time in her life, Susan attended one with her family. Yet, she could not shake her apprehensions. A sensitive, caring mother, she was frightened of this new path her children followed, subjecting themselves to becoming victims of persecution, unimagined suffering, and possibly death that had always been the lot of the Jews. The following year she objected when Josef decided to mark Aron—and possibly doom him—with circumcism.
She was therefore unprepared when, in 2005, her phone rang. The young woman from Israel identified herself as Julie, the daughter of Aranka’s sister whose whereabouts had fizzled in the miasma of the family’s tragic demise. Unable to resist meeting her only cousin, the following year Susan braced herself for emotions she had always kept under wraps and joined Josef and Henriette for the Maccabi yearly Congress in Israel. She met Julie and her Argentina-born husband and three Sabra children, and although neither spoke Hungarian, the bond was instantaneous and clear. Susan and they belong to the same clan.
She watched one evening at a Kfar Hamaccabiah party, as her son Josef strutted with little Aron perching on his shoulders, the boy’s wide, grayish-blue eyes full of wonder of a world in which he would grow walking tall as his father did at that moment, a confident and secure athletic Jew.
It was on the following day, on Susan’s visit to Yad Vashem, that she journeyed deep into a dark tunnel of buried history and to a world lost to her in more ways than she could count. For the first time she faced the horrors of her mother’s life—and her mother’s choices.
The tears were still lodged in Susan’s throat as, on the bus ride back to Tel-Aviv, she stared out the window at the strange land of rocks and low shrubs, of bluish mountains framed by pine groves, at a land where her ancestors’ presence forced itself back into her life. Ignoring her family history had ceased to be an option; her daughter Judith wore her 2005 Maccabiah T-shirts to work as a kindergarten teacher, with her large Magen David necklace resting against her neck scar where it belonged, representing the faith that had saved her life.
Two years later, as Josef prepares to bring the Hungarian team to Israel for the 18th Maccabiah in 2009, Susan watches with trepidation the rise in anti-Semitism in Hungary, an alarming prelude to what she and her mother always feared. But having been to Israel, Susan’s fear for the fate of her Jewish grandchildren has abated. She doesn’t know “Hatikvah” song but shares its hope. Should history repeats itself, her family is assured a place of peace, freedom—and life.
Talia Carner is a novelist living in New York.
www.TaliaCarner.com
Orsolya, who just finished the secondary school and started high school this year, won the title, not only because of her achievements in sports, but also because of her beautiful personality.
