“De-Fiddler-on-the-Roof-ization”

Abstract

Rummaging through my expansive plastic file folder of study notes and materials from my Habsburg field exams with István at the turn of the millennium, I came across an emphatic free-write I had released in green ink on the blank reverse side of a printer copy of his New York Review of Books (NYRB) essay “Strangers at Home,” about the then recent film Sunshine by the award-winning Hungarian director István Szabó. It was a revelatory moment. As I read over my younger self’s comments, I understood that the flip-side positioning of his essay and my writing was a fitting metaphor for how I grapple with István’s work and ideas. Always burning with fiery intensity, his writing charged with lived experience, determination, and earnest questioning; it inspires within me a special sort of passionate thinking, a drive to respond in kind, in my voice. That free-write, that moment of sunshine illumination, revealed a turning point that is indeed supposed to be part of the oral exam process. I mean, you students out there, don’t throw anything away!

I had been consumed with pondering why the film couldn’t be about regular Hungarian Jews rather than this magnificently wealthy, assimilated family, living in their “grand bourgeois apartment in Budapest.”¹ If the film had centered the former, the story likely would have ended in 1944. Sunshine, however, was meant to chronicle four generations of the Sonnenschein (German: “sunshine”) family, later known as the Sors (Hungarian: “fate”) family after the second generation changed their names for career advancement before the First World War. It tells the story of this fictional family from their origins in the Habsburg monarchy’s provinces to their brilliant successes in Budapest to their concomitant, spiraling, tragic decline alongside Hungary’s. It was not a Jewish, but a Hungarian film, I concluded, intended to make sense of the Hungarian twentieth century. The family represented the aspirational liberal Hungarian dream dashed against the twentieth-century rocks.

István argued in his NYRB article, however, that the main theme of Szabó’s film is the failure of Jewish assimilation.² “What does it mean to live in a country where one finds oneself both at home and still a stranger?,” he asked in the essay’s final paragraph.³ His question placed the film squarely within a vast scholarly literature that interrogates Jews’ simultaneous insider and outsider status. So, in his consideration, Sunshine is a Jewish film. István’s essay, a roundtable event at Columbia, and accompanying ongoing discussions of Sunshine convinced me that, above all, one should, as Shakespeare’s Polonius advises Hamlet in Act 1, Scene III, “To thine own self be true.” And so, I sought out my “Klein” voice, one that I had inherited from my family of regular, traditional Jews who immigrated to New York in the great pre-World War I wave from the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe. The Klein branch emigrated from a place my great-grandfather recorded as Hungary on the 1910 United States census, but then as Czechoslovakia in 1920.

By pursuing that voice, however, I approach a paradox in István’s work and the ways that his work has influenced East Central European Jewish historiography. On the one hand, he elevates a deeply human approach to history writing that centers individual people and their choices, and how they move through a broader geopolitics from which they cannot escape. He shows us how unpredictable events and contingencies, combined with long-held patterns of behavior shape and constrain our range of action. István has taught us to center how regular people navigate improbable histories as they seek to be true to themselves.

This, for example, is how István introduces the story of a Hungarian you will recognize, who was born in the center of the Great Hungarian Plain in 1868. Not a place, István cunningly points out, likely to produce sailors. Yet Miklós Horthy did indeed become a sailor. Why? István explains: “Because he happened to be one of seven sons; because his elder brother was killed in an accident at sea while at the naval academy; and because, in his fairly well-off gentry family, service to the state was an established tradition.”⁴ And so, he eventually became a Vice-Admiral in Austria-Hungary’s navy, and regent of land-locked interwar Hungary with a record that, in István’s words, “might merit a little sympathy, but . . . does not deserve admiration.”⁵ Horthy’s improbable path to his curious and tragic regency in this way becomes a stepping stone to our understanding of the man as a person constrained by contingency and tradition but ultimately responsible for his own decisions and actions, which historians should not be shy to judge.

On the other hand, István preoccupied his career with the study of what holds states together, rather than what pulls them apart. For Austria-Hungary, this meant above all the aristocracy, the Catholic Church, and the civil service, the elites of institutions that glued the disparate state together.⁶ It also arguably meant the Jewish population. Jews become important for cohesion as “state people,”—“a preeminent Staatsvolk”—for state-building and state-maintenance, for an assimilation to “usefulness,” as defined by the dominant state power, that ultimately failed.⁷

Let us turn to another Hungarian born on the Great Hungarian Plain, the puszta, circa 1880, this time a hypothetical one. He is a regular Magyar without a gentry background. He has no shoes. What possible benefit, István asked, did this poor Magyar peasant obtain from belonging to the dominant national group? In the strictly hierarchical imperial-royal state he barely had enough to eat, he did not vote, he was subject to all kinds of humiliations at the hands of the nobility. I can hear him escalating these points in my mind as I write. István pointedly reminded us of this person on numerous occasions to bring home his argument that rather than dominant nationalities in Austria-Hungary, “there were only dominant classes, estates, institutions, interest groups, and professions.”⁸

Yet, before we get away from ourselves, let us remember how István also noted that social and economic issues exacerbated existing tensions between the nationalities. He continued a little further down in the same now famous 1967 article in the Austrian History Yearbook to remark that it is “true, German and Magyar nationals formed the majority of these dominant strata of society, but the benefits they derived from their privileged position were not shared by the lower classes of their own nationality.”⁹ That is to say, national tensions were an everyday reality. Even when we must reject the convention that national tensions emerged from some essentialized fixed national identities, we must, too, confront the reality that they did arise from social and economic issues related to one’s status and opportunities, and that one’s status and opportunities were connected to one’s nationality. One would generally do better socially and economically as a German or Hungarian national in Austria-Hungary, than as a Czech, Slovak, Romanian, or Jew who was unwilling to forsake one’s kith and kin to assimilate linguistically and culturally into the dominant strata.

István’s work underscores the significance of Austria-Hungary’s centripetal institutions, which strove to overcome national-social tensions within the state and instill dynastic loyalty within its population. We, in turn, have been instilled with the importance of breathtaking state spectacle, rousing military music, and highly polished brass buttons on uniforms for this purpose. His study of the Habsburg officer corps demonstrates the urgency of their function beyond nationalism as highly trained imperial elites. The officer corps gleamed in its brilliant manifestation of the dynastic state and its assimilatory liberalism. Their state-sustaining professionalism, honor, and, crucially, linguistic training sustained an army of many mother-tongues, nationalities, and confessions.¹⁰ The so-called Common Army lasted through the end of the monarchy. Yet, István concludes, “It says something about the failure of the Monarchy to create a lasting sense of Central European identity and citizenship that the Common Army transmitted no tradition of friendly cooperation to the armies of the successor states.”¹¹ It had been the aspiration of the Habsburg state to cultivate the loyalty of its citizens beyond nationalism. István showed us how fateful shifts in the nature and function of state loyalty could be.

Those shifts were especially fateful for Jews. István designates Jews as “the ultimate victims of the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy.”¹² The supportive role of the Jewish population as a state people in Austria-Hungary, and the difficult-then-tragic relations Jews had with the successor states, emerges in much of the East Central European Jewish history writing influenced by István’s approach. The state looked toward how Jews, grateful for emancipation and without a homeland of their own within the monarchy, could be economically, politically, and militarily useful. For this reason, the Jews in the story tend to be those the state might refer to as “our Jews”: vested in the state, loyal to it, and, above all, advantageous to whomever dominant within it.

István has inspired largely social, political, and economic studies of East Central European Jewish history that highlight relations between the Jews and the state. It was no accident that there was a copy of the leading twentieth-century Jewish historian Jacob Katz’s (born in Magyargenc, Hungary) book Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation on Istvan’s bookshelf. Marsha Rozenblit, contributor to this forum, developed the highly influential and important explanation of Jews’ ability to have a “tri-partite identity” in Austria-Hungary comprising state, national, and religious belongings, and has traced this concept through the early twentieth century in her work.¹³ The Jewish story is intertwined with the broader history of the state in this approach rather than remaining a separate entity.

The most difficult aspect of the story of the Jews as Staatsvolk in Austria-Hungary for me has been how that role turned the Jewish population into a proxy for the Kingdom of Hungary’s repressive nationalities policies. István underscores the importance of the special relationship between the Hungarian ruling gentry and the “enlightened, educated, and patriotic segment of the Jews for a division of labor in modernizing Hungary.”¹⁴ The focus here is on the assimilated patriotic Hungarian Jewish elite, which often intermarried and converted, rose into commerce, the free professions, state service, the judiciary, and even the prestigious elite officer corps. So, the Sonnenscheins, not the Kleins. Grateful for the special relationship, and the protection from the antisemitism of the lower classes and repressed minorities, and that Austria-Hungary was not Russia, Jews with few exceptions declared Hungarian their mother-tongue on the censuses. In this way, Jews’ 5 percent of the population came to be used to enforce what István calls “[Hungary’s] intolerant minorities policy.”¹⁵

In my work, I have sought to understand how Jews from the Kingdom of Hungary became highly visible proxies of that repressive system with far-reaching implications for their position in the successor states and for their further twentieth-century history. I am concerned with how states—the monarchy and its successors—interrogated and sought proof of Jewish loyalty to the state through their own fluctuating set of markers. Intergroup relations form a focus of my work; Jews make their way within the wider society among their neighbors. I study Jewish movement and diasporic connections, the patterns and temporalities of Jews’ global migrations.

My Kleins left the Kingdom of Hungary for New York before World War I for which I am grateful. I was the first of them to return, in 1993, as an exchange student from Bard College to the state university in Budapest. My grand-father was unhappy about it, my parents nervous about antisemitism, but I was thrilled to partake in the openness of a new era of cross-border movement and real-life engagement. Budapest was my point of entry into East Central Europe. I am part of a generation of scholars that entered the region after the political changes and trained in the region with people from the region, learning the languages, and working in previously unavailable archives. We intermarried, had democracy babies, and changed the historiography. With István’s mentorship, we became disabused of ideologies, nostalgic and abstracted preconceptions, and the narrow national focus that has long influenced histories of East Central Europe. I like to call this process “De-Fiddler-on-the-Roof-ization.” István taught us to be honest, human, and true to ourselves as we bring our own improbable lived experience into all our endeavors.

Notes