In the Darkroom

The ritual was lifelong, though in Yorktown Heights confined to the weekends and the selection from American bakeries, which my father found contemptible. Even in his guise as suburban dad, my father had asserted his Old European taste. Weekends, he’d sit in his armchair in his beret and cravat, a demitasse balanced on one knee and classical music thundering on the hi-fi, and heap scorn on Reddi-wip, Cheez Whiz, and ice cubes in drinking water, along with his American children’s proclivity for pop tunes with drum tracks and sitcoms with laugh tracks. He went into a swivet once when it became clear I had never heard of one of his treasured European authors, the Austrian (and Jewish) writer Stefan Zweig. “You have no culture,” he yelled, ripping out of my hand whatever “tacky” novel I’d been reading. On a series of weekend afternoons, my father attempted to get me to master the basic waltz steps in our burnt-orange-carpeted living room, Johann Strauss on the turntable. The lessons ended badly. “You are leading again!” he would shout as I stepped on his foot, not always entirely by accident. “How many times do I have to tell you? The woman does not lead.”

In the years after my father moved back to Hungary, he made regular pilgrimages to Vienna, often with his friend Ilonka in tow, to shop for the “correct” Viennese comestibles and tour the faded palaces and hunting lodges and architectural glories of Emperor Franz Josef’s nearly seventy-year reign, photographing the last vestiges of the empire that collapsed with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. Or he’d take Ilonka to Switzerland, where they paid homage to the ancient Habsburg Castle, the dynasty’s original seat. Or to Germany, where he made a long detour so they could cruise past the Bavarian villa of the then still living Archduke Otto of Austria, last crown prince to the Austro-Hungarian throne. “The best time was under the Habsburgs,” my father told me. “Even as a young child, I could still feel its good influence. If only we could bring the monarchy back—all of Hungary would welcome it.”

My father’s latest transition, from man to woman, debuted in the Habsburg emperor’s former guesthouse. Over coffee and Esterhazy cake one afternoon, she waxed nostalgic about the scene at what was now the Parkhotel Schönbrunn, where she attended the LGBT Rainbow Ball the year before her operation.

“Everybody was beautifully dressed, very elegant,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” I said. She had shown me the video she’d made of the ball, formal dancers in white satin gowns and black tie, white gloves, and cummerbunds, stepping in stately minuet formation across a polished parquet floor while an all-female orchestra played “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” At the end of the evening, each performer received a single rose.

“They always have good taste in Vienna,” my father sighed, licking the last speck of whipped cream from her demitasse spoon. “Even Ilonka enjoyed it.” In my father’s image gallery in the attic, she kept a photograph of the two of them at the ball. In the picture, he (still pre-op) is wearing a bleach-blond wig and a midnight-blue velour evening gown with spaghetti straps; Ilonka is in a plain navy sheath. They are holding hands. My father stares straight into the camera, with a pasted-on smile. Ilonka is looking away from my father, her mouth downturned. Her eyes are sorrowful.

“She didn’t want you to have the operation,” I said, a question.

“Ilonka thought it was a game. She never thought I’d go all the way with it. Ilonka wants nothing to change. Everything has to be the same way it was in the past. She even has to sit in the same pew in the church. I’m not like that. I get used to new things in five minutes!”

She grinned and took another forkful of cake. It seemed like a good moment to press my inquiry.

“Are you used to being a woman?” I asked.

“Waaall, that was easy.”

“How so?”

She held up her arms, as if for surrender. “Look at this,” she said, waggling her arms up and down, a fledgling out of the nest. “Does this look like a man’s body? I never developed. There’s hardly any hairs on my body.” Did this mean the Ugly Duckling had been a swan all along? “Waaall, I had the organs, I did my job, as a man. But I didn’t fit the role. They didn’t approve of me.”

“Who didn’t approve of you?”

“Women didn’t approve of me. I didn’t know how to fight and get dirty. I’m not muscular, I’m not athletic, I had a miserable life as a man. And it became more miserable when I wasn’t accepted for the umpteenth time. By your mother.” My father liked to characterize her that way, your mother. “She didn’t accept me and she threw me away.”

“She didn’t—”

“I wasn’t in the proper role. They can sense that. Now, as a woman, women like me more. I fit my role now better as a woman than when I was miscast in the wrong role.”

I flashed on hostile Magyar babushkas. “Why do you have to cast yourself in any role? Why can’t—?”

“Before, I was like other men, I didn’t talk to people. Now I can communicate better, because I’m a woman. It’s that lack of communicating that causes the worst things.”

“Like what?”

“They see you as some sort of monster. Because you are not doing the things others are doing. They don’t know what you do. You’re vermin. They gas you. They—”

We had fallen through one of my father’s verbal trapdoors.

“—don’t want you around. It’s like once when I was flying to Hungary, and the stewardess heard this man sitting across from me talking and she said, ‘Oh, you’re Hungarian!’ And this man said very angrily, ‘I am not Hungarian! I’m Israeli!’ This is a provocative attitude we don’t need. It helps that I’m a woman. Because women don’t provoke.”

“Some women do,” I provoked.

“You can’t switch back and forth,” my father said. “You have to develop a habit and stick to it. Otherwise, you’re going to be a forlorn something, not a whole person. The best way is not to change someone into someone else, but to put the person back as the person he was born to be. The surgery is a complete solution. Now I am completely like a woman.”

Completely, I thought, or completely like?

“You have to get rid of the old habits. If you don’t, you’re going to be like a stranger all the time, with this”—she fished around for the right words—“this anxiety of non-belonging.”

She repeated the phrase. This anxiety of non-belonging. She polished off the remains of her cake. “That would make a good title for your book,” she said.

She got up and started collecting the dishes. “Back to the kitchen!” she trilled as she left the room. “A woman’s place!”

I didn’t budge from my chair as she washed the cups and saucers.

“Susaaan!” My father was standing at the foot of the stairs. It was early morning, and I’d hoped to sleep in. My father had other plans. “Susaaan, come down here! You’ll be interested in this.” I threw on some clothes and stumbled into the dining room. She had set out on the table the contents of a file folder marked “Stefi.”

“These are my media appearances,” she said, pointing to a fanned-out collection of articles, a cassette tape, and a book. She’d given interviews about “The Change” to a Hungarian LGBT magazine (the only one at the time), an alternative radio station called Tilos Rádió (Forbidden Radio), an academic social-sciences journal called Replika, and a freelance photojournalist who was putting together a coffee-table book titled Women in Hungary: A Portrait Gallery, in which my father was featured, described as a “feminista.” I studied the stash with some astonishment. All of Steven’s life, he’d been behind the camera; Stefi, it seemed, had decided she’d be in front.

The Stefánie who appeared in these pages and recordings was a bit of a coquette. She told her interlocutors that she was a “typical woman” who “loved gossip.” When they asked how old she was, my father answered coyly, “Now, it’s not appropriate to ask a lady her age!” In the photo spread for Mások, the Hungarian LGBT magazine, my father perches on the edge of a planter on her deck, in a floor-length floral dress with a ribbon at the waist. She is clutching two daisies. As she made clear in the accompanying article, she was 100 percent female, “a woman in complete harmony with her wishes.” She was taking dance lessons, she told the magazine, and could waltz “all the female steps,” and had attended a ball “in an elegant full dress.”

The longest account appeared in the academic journal Replika. A young PhD student studying social anthropology had come to my father’s house to interview her for two days. The resulting Q & A was nearly twenty-five thousand words. That morning and for several mornings to follow, my father translated the text for me, altering the parts she didn’t like. (“Don’t write that down! It sounds better if you have me say it this way …”) While the purpose of the interview was to discuss her change in sex, my father had been eager to expound on life in Hungary before the “catastrophe”—the catastrophe, that is, of 1920.

“The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a very peaceful world,” my father said, reading (and revising) her words from the opening pages of the interview. “Hungary grew very fast. Railroads came in, economies were growing. It was a world of plenty. One minority, the Jews, dealt especially with commerce. Many were managers of noble estates. I had an uncle who was managing a noble’s estate and also my great-grandfather was the director of some estates of the wealthy … Then came the tragedy. Trianon. The country lost its thousand-year-old borders. And the era when minorities still lived nicely together came to an end. Whatever they say, there was no persecution of minorities in that time.”

“No persecution?” I sputtered.

My father gave me one of her you-know-nothing looks. “It was the best time,” she said. “The best time for the Jews.”

Her history wasn’t so Pollyanna. From the 1867 passage of the Jewish Emancipation Act, granting Jews civic and political equality, until the 1920 signing of the Treaty of Trianon, an extraordinary set of circumstances led to the “Golden Age” of Hungarian Jewry. The era yielded a spectacular opportunity for the bourgeois Jewish population. And unprecedented acceptance. For a significant subset of the country’s Jews in that period, it seemed possible to be “100 percent Hungarian.” Our family was among them. A century before my father changed gender, her forebears had crossed another seemingly unbreachable border.

My father’s parents, Jenő and Rozália Friedman, came to Budapest out of the hinterlands of what was then northeastern Hungary (and after Trianon, part of Czechoslovakia, and now Slovakia). The members of my grandmother’s side of the family, the Grünbergers, were among the most prominent Jews in the town known in Hungarian as Szepesváralja and later, in Slovak, as Spišské Podhradie—both of which translate roughly as “The Place under the Beautiful Castle.” Overlooking the town atop a limestone cliff is a hulking twelfth-century ruin, the largest castle in central Europe and erstwhile home to Magyar nobles. (It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and perennial location for Hollywood movies, among them Dragonheart and Kull the Conqueror.)

As I later learned from my Grünberger relatives, the baron of the town’s commercial age was Rozália’s father, my great-grandfather, Leopold Grünberger, who owned the biggest lumber enterprise in the region. The train tracks into town terminated in front of his mill. He had risen from poverty in a nearby village, served in the Habsburg cavalry in World War I, and was a Hungarian patriot and avid believer in Central European culture; he reportedly abhorred Zionism. He sat on the town council and was head of the Jewish community, the latter position due less to his piety, which was pro forma Orthodox, than to his wealth and philanthropy, both of which were substantial.

The Grünbergers vacationed at spas in Baden-Baden, skied in the Tatra Mountains, and ordered their clothes, bespoke, from boutique tailors in Bratislava and Budapest. The four sons were sent to universities in Paris and Prague, the four daughters to music lessons and finishing schools. Among the family’s many emblems of privilege (along with the first running water, gaslight, refrigeration, and electricity) was the town’s first telephone—phone number “1.” The Grünberger home was a showpiece of gentility, from its fountain-adorned courtyard and gardens to its chandeliered salon with a grand piano draped in a Shiraz rug and an extensive Rosenthal and Limoges porcelain collection, from its full retinue of maids, cooks, and governesses to its stable of groomed horses. Persian rugs hushed footsteps in every room. The linens were from Paris and monogrammed.

The region’s lumber trade had become a lucrative industry, thanks to the invention of steam-powered electricity and railway construction in the late nineteenth century, which turned the virgin Slovak forests into a commercial honeypot. More than 90 percent of the lumber mill owners and wholesale suppliers in the region were Jewish. The area’s artisans, merchants, and professionals were, likewise, predominantly Jews, and had been ever since the ban on Jews in towns and cities was lifted by government edict in the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1920s, the Jews of Spišské Podhradie owned thirteen of the nineteen grocery and general stores, six of the seven taverns and restaurants, all of the liquor stores, all of the tool and iron shops and small factories, the saw mill and flour mill. They were the doctors, the lawyers, the pharmacist, and the veterinarian.

The Jews in the Hungarian countryside no longer had to live in remote primitive villages or skulk around the edges of towns, peddling their wares. They no longer had to pay a “tolerance tax” to the nobles for the privilege of renting a hovel on their estates. Some of them even owned agricultural land. My great-grandfather’s property included a working farm with cornfields and livestock. Spišské Podhradie also became a flourishing rabbinical center for Orthodox Jewry, with its own synagogue, cheder, yeshiva, beit midrash, mikveh, and charitable and community associations, and (on a patch of hillside two miles out of town, granted because it was too steep to be arable) a walled cemetery. In 1905, after the town’s first synagogue burned down, my great-grandfather marshaled the funds to build a new temple, with a Neo-Classical façade and a Moorish interior. It was installed a few doors down from the Grünberger family home—on Stefánikova Street.

When I visited Spišské Podhradie in 2015, the synagogue (which became a furniture warehouse in Communist times) had recently been restored but sat unused: the town’s last postwar Jewish resident, a dentist named Ferdinand Glück, either left or died (no one seemed to know) in the 1970s. The Grünberger manse, now shabby and painted in Day-Glo colors (with a satellite dish on the roof and curtains for doors), was subdivided and occupied by several generations of a poor and devout Christian family. The old carriage entrance displayed a dozen Madonna icons. In the courtyard, a giant plaster Jesus hung on a four-foot cross. On the outskirts of town, weeds flourished in the Jewish cemetery. Many tombstones were missing, looted over the years, or fallen. The lone Grünberger headstone, marking the grave of Moritz Grünberger, firstborn son of Leopold and Sidonia, who died at sixteen, lay on its back in the grass.

Leopold bestowed a lavish dowry upon each of his four daughters. So endowed, the eldest daughter, my grandmother Rozália, or Rozi as she was usually called, merited the attentions of my grandfather Jenő Friedman, who belonged to one of the wealthiest Jewish families in the largest city of the region, Kassa (later renamed, in Slovak, Košice). Jenő’s father, Sámuel Friedman, owned Kassa’s biggest wholesale goods business. Like Leopold Grünberger, Sámuel was head of his city’s Jewish community and held the post for his affluence, not his religiousness. Unlike Leopold, he fancied himself something of a silk-stocking socialite. “My grandfather Sámuel was a man of leisure,” my father said. “I remember my grandmother saying all the time, ‘Go get your grandfather from the casino!’ He was always in there with the other rich men, playing cards and smoking cigars.”

By the time of Jenő and Rozi’s engagement, the groom was a man of leisure, too. He had begun purchasing luxury apartment buildings in Pest—with a bonanza payout from the Friedmans’ real estate investments in Hamburg. The origins of that bonanza were hardly savory, according to accounts from my few surviving Friedman relatives. My father’s cousin Viktor Schwarcz told me the Friedmans intentionally torched their company warehouse in Kassa and used the fire insurance money to buy properties in Hamburg. “The legend from the Jews in town,” Viktor said, “is that Samu and his sons burned the shop to get the money. No one told the police because they didn’t want to turn in fellow Jews. The Friedmans got rich from it—they bought whole streets of houses in Hamburg and sold them during the great inflation. And from that came your grandfather’s buildings in Budapest.”

However ill-gotten her fiancé’s gains, Rozi had landed, at twenty, the richest catch of the four sisters. She didn’t have much to do with the landing: the marriage was arranged—based on a desire of the patriarchs of both families to meld their wealth. The bride and groom barely knew each other when they were wed in an extravagant ceremony in the Grünberger home and headed off, first by horse-drawn carriage and then by first-class coach, to a fairy-tale honeymoon in Venice. They returned to a sumptuously appointed apartment in one of Jenő’s buildings in Pest, where they spent their days at cards in the casino, their nights at the opera. Their only child was raised by a succession of nursemaids, governesses, and tutors. Rozi’s one other pregnancy, my father told me, ended in miscarriage.

Once in a while when I was young, my father would allow me a glimpse into the vanished world of his childhood, a pinprick or two of light in a landscape otherwise dark. “The parents,” he would say, opening the pasteboard family album my mother had created and pointing to a creased and curling-at-the-edges tinted picture of his progenitors, the lone representative in the album of my father’s side of the family. The photo is a formal studio portrait, vintage ’20s with its soft-focus lighting and pretensions to motion-picture glamour. A halo of light wreathes the heads of two newlyweds, a vignette effect fading into shadow at the edges. Bride and groom stare toward the camera, not smiling. My grandmother Rozi has the severe dark beauty and hooded eyes of a silent-movie star. Her eyebrows are tweezed to pencil-thin crescents and she sports a Joan Crawford hairdo, cropped and set in a tight wave, dark lipstick, and a double-stranded choker of pearls with matching pearl earrings. My grandfather Jenő looks older—which he was, by nine years—and wears an expensively tailored suit; his thinning black hair is oiled and slicked back.

As for the post-wedding life of Rozi and Jenő, their bitter separation when my father was twelve, their forced wartime reconciliation, and their miserable last years in Israel, my father had little to say. But it was clear to me whom she held responsible for her parents’ troubled marriage. Rozi, my father told me, was a “spoiled diva” and a “phony” who “put on airs,” read “lowbrow” books, and was either at the hairdresser or out chasing “rich men.” “She wasn’t interested in a relationship with her child.” Jenő, on the other hand, was “very cultured,” a “true gentleman” who delivered occasional poems at dinner parties and wrote letters in “pearly handwriting,” a man who knew how to mingle in “educated circles.” Jenő was a prominent figure in the Jewish community, an observant but modern Jew who enrolled his son in the most prestigious Jewish educational institutions for boys in Budapest: the elementary school run by the Rabbinical Seminary of Hungary and then the Zsidó Gimnázium, the elite Jewish high school in Pest celebrated for its world-class teachers. “But my father was not Orthodox,” my father stressed, a statement that perplexed me; the Friedmans belonged to the Kazinczy Street Synagogue, which was Orthodox. What she meant was that Jenő didn’t look like an Orthodox Jew, whose appearance might, as she put it, “provoke.”

My father liked to parse out the same several set pieces of this early domesticity, more interior design than life experience, decorative backdrops to a privileged and assimilated bourgeois lifestyle. “My father had all his suits tailored in London.” Or: “We were the first on our street to own a car,” a Renault with leather seats, wood paneling, “a lace curtain on the back window,” and a dashboard vase that “held one rose.” Or she’d recall their “wind-up record player, spring driven,” and the first tune young Pista had played on it, “The Fox and Goose Song”:

Fox, you have stolen the goose.

Give it back to me.

If not, the hunter will get you

With his gun.

More than anything, my father talked about the family real estate: the summer villa in the Buda Hills with its swimming pool and gardening staff, the two apartment houses in posh sections of Pest, and, most of all, the “royal apartment” at Ráday utca 9. The Friedmans’ majestic domicile featured a double balcony, soaring ceilings, French doors between every room, a “salon” to receive guests, and maid’s quarters. My grandfather’s study, which contained “first-edition collectibles” in a locked bookcase, featured heavy carved-wood furnishings with red and brown upholstery in what my father called a “Napoleonic Empire style.” The salon boasted emerald-velvet love seats and chaise longues, a vitrine stocked with Rosenthal porcelain, and a writing table in a “Louis the XVI theme.” One wall displayed three near-life-sized family portraits commissioned from the then noteworthy Hungarian artist Jakab Ödön. The paintings depicted the Friedmans in aristocratic poses: my grandfather in a smoking jacket, my grandmother in a floor-length evening gown, and my ten-year-old father in velvet cutaway coat and matching knee pants. Until, that is, my father “came of age,” at which point the artist was recalled—at the insistence of the adolescent subject—to paint on a pair of long trousers. Young István was already Photoshopping. “It wasn’t manly to be in short pants,” she explained.

In the salon presided over by these imposing regal portraits, my grandparents hosted “balls,” the name my father gave to their dinner and dance evenings. Sent to bed early, Pista would lie in the dark, a crystal radio he’d built by hand pressed to one ear “to drown out the noise.” On other nights, the parents would don their finery to make the rounds of high society and attend opening nights at the theater and the Hungarian Royal Opera House. The Golden Age had been good to Jenő and Rozi Friedman.