Hungary – Finding Maria

A Light Goes Out, Its Power Glows On

In Memoriam: Randolph Braham, 1922-2018

I first encountered Randolph Braham by accident. In my early thirties, I lived on West 97th Street in Manhattan, and on weekends I often went for walks down Broadway just to enjoy the sites and browse in the stores. Fall was the best time, when the low midday sun warmed my face and drew vivid shadows around the buildings, the street trees, and the people, and heightening the sense of being alive.

One Sunday, I wandered into West Side Judaica with a vague sense that they might have some books on Jewish history. A few weeks earlier, on a stroll with my grandmother through Central Park, I had learned that some thirty members of my family had been lost in the Holocaust. It was the first time she had spoken of those people and that horror. In the Judaica store, I walked over to the wall of books, located the history area, and scanned the titles. The Six Day War, biographies, the founding of Israel were all mixed together, arranged by some idiosyncratic scheme I could not decipher. I noticed an older woman in a plain skirt and a dark blouse sorting a pile of paperbacks. She looked up.

“Hungary,” I said, gesturing toward the shelves. “I am wondering whether you might have anything on the Holocaust in Hungary.”

I sensed a brief break in the chatter at the register behind me between the two men in white shirts, skull caps, and payot who had greeted me in friendly yet impersonal tones as I entered. I started to sweat and unzipped my coat and fleece.

‘What Sort of Catastrophe?’

“A few,” the woman said, without inflection. She led me to an uneven row of volumes maybe ten inches apart. As I scanned the books, my eyes settled quickly on a faded white book jacket, a little bent and torn at the top. The title on the binding read, The Hungarian Jewish Catastrophe. The choice of words intrigued me. Catastrophe. The term was large and dreadful, but also grounded and alive. It was vague, evasive even. ‘What sort of catastrophe?’ I thought wryly as I pulled the book from the shelf. On the title page I found the name of the editor, Randolph Braham. The contents told me it was a bibliography, and I flipped quickly through pages and pages filled with hundreds of sources. I vowed to read them all, then deflated at the price-sticker on the back. Though it was not a small proportion of the money I had left each month after rent and school-debt payments, I bought it anyway.

Something in me was not ready, however, and the book gathered dust in my bookcase. It was not until a few years later that the urge to know strengthened again and, with time before a lecture I was to see there, I found myself wandering into the library of the 92nd Street Y. On a shelf in the stacks, they Braham’s great work, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary. As I had learned from the jacket of the bibliography, Braham, a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, had survived the Holocaust in Hungary and had spent a lifetime chronicling its political and operational aspects in minute detail. I pulled down Volume 1, sat on a shelving stool, opened to the Preface, and so was introduced for real to Braham and his inimitable style – meticulous, erudite, direct and with a voice that was a striking combination of matter-of-factness and outrage. Here was a man so clear-minded, so steeped in the context, in the specifics, that he could distill the essentials of the Holocaust in Hungary in three sentences:

“Uninformed, unprepared, and basically disunited, Hungarian Jewry consequently became easy prey for the SS and their Hungarian accomplices after the occupation. The Final Solution program – the isolation, expropriation, ghettoization, concentration, and deportation of the Jews – was carried out at lightning speed. In late spring 1944, close to 440,000 Jews from all over Hungary, excepting Budapest, were deported to Auschwitz within less than two months.”

Fragments Set Into A Frame

Through Braham, I learned more about “from all over Hungary,” in particular, Nagykanizsa, from where treasured cousins of my grandmother’s, along with their children, had been sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. Through Braham, I delved deeply into “excepting Budapest,” and slowly pieced together our family survival story – by setting fragments of recollections from my grandmother, my father, my aunt, into the frame of Braham’s detailed and expansive history of how most of Budapest’s Jews survived. Through Braham, I learned about Labor Service, from which one great uncle returned, and another did not. Through Braham I learned about the complexity of the position of Hungary’s leaders toward the Jews – understanding finally how my grandfather, an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I who spent six years in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, was still running a wholesale denim business in downtown Pest in the spring of 1943, when he died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage. I learned about Hungary’s complicity, too. Through Braham, I learned about Eichmann’s return, ghettoization of the Jews, and the death marches west that ended for many in death at Mauthausen (which claimed a cousin’s parents when she was just a girl) or by the side of the road along the way. Through Braham, I came to understand the murderous environment my immediate family somehow survived: savage Arrow-Cross gangs, vicious and unbelievably destructive block-to-block fighting between the German and Russian armies, the chaos of the immediate aftermath of Soviet occupation.

Through Braham, I came to assemble and take hold of a large part of my identity, which, until I read and reflected on his great work, had resided, split and silenced, in darkness deep within me. This enabled me to write a memoir about my relationship with my Hungarian grandmother, and the development of my identity, Finding Maria. And yet, there was a problem. Toward the end of my book, I developed scenes where I was reading the Budapest sections of The Politics of Genocide. To do this, I included several extended quotes from Braham. As the book neared publication, my publisher, editor, and I discussed whether permission was needed from Braham to reprint the quotes. We decided that the right thing to do was to ask him for it.

I had no back-up plan for how I would revise this crucial part of the book if he refused, so it was with some trepidation that I found Braham’s email address and sent him a note with my request. He responded within a day with his permission and wishes for good luck on publication. He asked to see a copy of the book when it was published, and in the course of an email exchange soon after the book came out in the spring of 2017 – asking for his address, confirming he had received the book – he invited me to be his guest at lunch at the Graduate Center.

‘Maybe next time in Jerusalem!’

He greeted me at his office door, dressed in black, his dark eyes alight with passion. He led me to the cafeteria and over lunch we discussed how he had gone about his work, how my book had been received, the increasing difficulty he found in making his way into Manhattan, and his disappointment with the direction the government of Hungary had taken in recent years in regards to Hungary’s role in the Holocaust, and many other areas. He invited me to dine again someday. “Maybe next time in Jerusalem!” he said with a laugh. As we passed a wall that listed CUNY benefactors, he pointed proudly to his name and told me how he had donated the profits from his work to the school.

I was grateful to have met him. I was grateful for his encouragement. I remain grateful for his work, which has left the world a legacy of fine-grained truth through which we may reconcile, rework, and renew ourselves for many generations to come.

Photo credits:
(1) Randolph Braham, by The Associated Press
(2) Arrival of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau, from
https://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/HungarianJews.html
(3) Shoes-on-the-Danube meorial of the murdered, by Bild von Schuhe am Donauufer, tripAdvisor.de

Mr. Dobos’s Invention

One of my most favorite desserts growing up was the seven-layer cake we bought at Giant, the local grocery store. Yellow cake. Chocolate icing. Heaven. Along with Hostess cupcakes and Suzy Qs, was this not another of the crimes committed against the potential sophistication of the palettes of kids growing up in America the 60s and 70s? Real seven-layer cake was invented in Hungary by József Dobos in the 1880s. For those of you who, like me, don’t speak Hungarian, Dobos Torte does not translate to “seven layers”. It’s the name of the guy, and then “cake”. In any case, the fact is that in most cases it has, admittedly, five layers (where 1 layer of cake + 1 layer of icing = 1 layer). So just call it Dobos (that’s “DOH-bohsh”).

Genius In Plain Sight

In contrast to Palacsinta, the genius of Dobos is completely unhidden. Everything is in plain sight. Chocolate layer cake is what it looks like. The extra genius of Dobos may be found in four places. To start with, while the cake layers are recognizably cake, they are distinctly thin, maybe a third of an inch. What this does is facilitate a mixture of chocolate and cake in the mouth that is more unified and interesting (and chocolaty) than just a typical two-layer cake.

The second location of genius is in the icing. It is a chocolate buttercream. Many American buttercreams stray into butteryness. Not Dobos. Its buttercream (which Mr. Dobos is also reported to have invented) is light, bordering on fluffy, but unyielding in its commitment to chocolate.

The third genius is there on the sides, and you may not even notice it at first. The sides are covered with a dusting of ground nuts, maybe walnut or almond, chestnut or hazelnut. The flavor and texture of the nut makes a late entrance. If you are eating your slice of Dobos from the narrow end to the fat end, the ground nuts suddenly rejuvenate the flavor, take it to a new level of pleasure. The final genius, a particularly Hungarian genius, is the wafer-stiffened caramel top, that sits atop the top layer. (More on this later.)

I thought I recalled having Dobos once with my grandmother out at a local bakery in Queens. But the slice was square, not a wedge, and I don’t remember a proper Dobos top, so that may well have been just plain old seven-layer cake.

Layers And Mixtures

The Dobos I’ve delighted in more recently is here at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Manhattan (where I am writing this). It is a round cake cut into wedges. Capping each wedge is that special top, a triangle that crunches a bit like a wafer, but that’s really mostly caramel. What to do with this top? I have tried just treating it without prejudice, taking my fork to the cake top and all. But this usually leaves the cake mashed and the caramel top still whole. I have tried removing the top and setting it aside. But this sort of segregation does not satisfy. I either end up not getting to it, or taking a bite or two, being overwhelmed by the sugary caramel, and putting my fork down in surrender. Sometimes I remove it and cut it up with my fork, then take some with each forkful of cake. That’s probably the most enjoyable.

I read somewhere that the cake was shipped widely across Europe, and that Dobos’s caramel-wafer top functioned to seal in moisture and help keep the cake fresh through these journeys. But I wonder if this brilliant, utilitarian, caramel stroke, an extra layer atop the layers, yet a layer with its own striking identity, maybe also had something to do with the extraordinary ethnic diversity of Hungary in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. A number of other Hungarian desserts also work with layers and with mixtures (Flódni comes to mind). Consciously or not, it seems to me that the layering, and the mixtures of diverse and sometimes unexpected-yet-delicious additions, reflect and celebrate the may peoples of Hungary at the time.

I wonder what Dobos would have to say about that.

Buy the book, Finding Maria (Chickadee Prince Books, 2017), now on Amazon

Photo by author. Cake by Hungarian Pastry Shop, 1030 Amsterdam Avenue, New York.

Buy the book, Finding Maria (Bloomingdale Press – 2nd edition November 25, 2019), on Amazon

It’s What’s Inside That Counts

[The second half of my digression into Hungarian food will feature three desserts. Here’s the first!]

My father empties a small ladle-full of batter into a cast iron pan in quick circles. He adjusts the heat, picks up a long, thin spatula, and waits. He checks his watch, and then he slips the spatula under the thin pancake and flips it. In a minute or two, in one fluid motion, he scrapes the pancake out of the pan and flops it onto a growing stack of Palacsinta.

No Identity?

If there are two words I associate with Palacsinta (“pah-la CHIN-tah”), one of them is “patience.” Waiting for the pancake to cook, removing it to the stack, making the next one, beginning again, slowly building a pile. Perhaps there was no greater illustration of my father’s deep patience than his Palacsinta making.

The other word I associate with Palacsinta is, well, “limp.” On the face of it, Palacsinta is maddening. What is this thing? Spongier than a crêpe, and rolled, not folded like its French cousin, yet firmer and thinner than a blintz, Palacsinta appears to have no identity, no striking character. It could slide easily into obscurity, and often does, deservedly). I’m reminded of how the lunch special at Moca, a long-gone Hungarian restaurant on the Upper East Side, would conclude with a Palacsinta, dropped quickly on the table by the waiter, who seemed to want no responsibility for it. It was too small (they really should be six or seven inches in length) and the filling lacked personality.

While main dishes are a deserved source of pride (and calories!), in my opinion, the crown jewels of Hungarian cuisine may be found in its desserts. In some Hungarian desserts, the genius is plain and up-front, in others, it is quite literally wrapped inside. So it is with Palacsinta. The Palacsinta pancake is like an overcoat, a neutral cover that protects, and hides, the “filling,” the snazzy suit or gorgeous dress underneath. Its frumpy filling – bland, indifferent – is what made Moca’s Palacsinta so frustrating.

Chocolate And Vanilla We Get

My father made three types of Palacsinta filling: poppy seed (from his recipe: “Mak Toltelek”), walnut (“Dio Toltelek”), and cottage cheese (“Turos Toltelek”). The poppy seed was a salt-and-pepper mix of tiny black seeds and sugar. It was the oddest to me and I never ate poppy seed Palacsinta back then. I preferred the sugary, lemony, chopped walnuts. I went back and forth on the sweetened cottage cheese, unsure quite what to make of it, but eventually loving it.

A central aspect of the genius of Hungarian dessert fillings is their unusual palette. Unusual to an American, that is. When it comes to dessert, what most Americans do not understand is subtlety. Chocolate and vanilla we get, so long as they are delivered in familiar forms such as ice cream or cake. The lemony tang, crunch, and slight sweetness of chopped walnut filling, the lumpy-soft sweetness of cottage cheese filling, or flavors used in other Hungarian desserts, including chestnut or almond paste, take time for an American to come to appreciate. But once one does so, there is no turning back. These flavors open new territories of enjoyment, new levels and complexities.

For me the final frontier was poppy seed, perhaps second only to paprika as the national flavor of Hungary. How I hated poppy seed when I was growing up. And how my father loved it. Alone, it had the dark aftertaste of licorice or cigarettes. I turned up my nose even when it was sufficiently sugared. “So uncouth!” my father would shout, as I sat savoring my Hostess cupcake (remove the top, roll it into a ball and save it for later) or Suzy Q (once around the cream filling with the tongue before the first bite). My father’s admonition was partly pleasure in seeing his son enjoy a sinful treat. But he also must have felt a kind of sadness at how little could be translated to his children, from Hungarian to American. Its strange flavors contributed to a sense of distance I felt about Hungary, and to some extent about my father, when I was growing up.

Pulled From The Freezer And Warmed In The Oven

During the time that I was writing about him, and coming to understand and relate to him more subtly as I myself entered middle age, I grew a taste for poppy seed and I began to eat poppy seed desserts. The strudel was too much for me, with a ratio of poppy seed to dough of easily 10 to 1. My preference was for the poppy seed Hamentashen (not particularly Hungarian, I know), where I could cut and balance the strong, complex filling with the neutral cookie.

I had settled in New York by then, and later moved uptown near the Hungarian Pastry Shop with my young family. As we would prepare to drive down to visit my parents in Maryland, my father would ask me (and remind me multiple times) to bring along several slices of poppy seed strudel, one of which he would consume almost immediately upon our arrival.

I picture him at the kitchen table some weeks later, unwrapping the foil around the poppy seed strudel he has just pulled from the freezer and warmed in the oven. And as I see the flashes of ecstasy on his face as he savors it, I appreciate the full power of Hungarian dessert filling, and my own limitations. Even as I have come to appreciate their flavors and textures to a degree I never would have expected, there is a wide gap between the depth and breadth of pleasure an American convert to Hungarian dessert feels when he eats it, and that which a native Hungarian does.

Buy the book, Finding Maria (Bloomingdale Press – 2nd edition November 25, 2019), on Amazon

(Photo credit: https://greathungarianplain.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/sunday-brunch-makos-palacsinta/)

My Hungarian Royalty

[My series on Hungarian food continues with a final main course…]

If there was a royal dish in our home it was Chicken Paprika. It was the most elevated, the most beloved dish. It possessed its own distinct pageantry. It was rich. We over-indulged in it.

The royalty of Chicken Paprika has a special earthiness to it. Plates were sometimes licked. Leftovers were retrieved from the refrigerator at all hours, for days. I think this earthiness has to do with its Central European origins, a place where high and low culture sometimes mix with an ease not found to the same degree in Western Europe. My father used to say that chicken was rare in Budapest, considered a kind of luxury. This might be one aspect of the highness of the dish. And yet the simplicity of Chicken Paprika gives it a kind populist accessibility. Anyone can make it, and at our house, everyone did.

Nokedli – Among The Most Beautiful of Foods

My mother’s specialties were the chicken and the gravy. After lightly browning the onions, my mother would add chicken to the pot – thighs, legs, breasts – and sear it on both sides. She would shake paprika all across the large, deep, oval pot, add a splash of water, and cover it. Later, if she were visiting at the time, my grandmother would be called in to gauge progress, sticking her face almost into the pot, inhaling the tomatoey peppery aroma deeply several times. “Ah, ya,” she might conclude with a nod, a serious expression on her face (this was serious business), and her approval would energize the foot-soldiers for the rest of the preparations.

But of course chicken paprika is not Chicken Paprika without Nokedli. This was my father’s province. I picture him in old khakis and a white undershirt (occasionally there would be a nice button-down, as in the picture below), holding a metal bowl tight against his belly while beating the dough vigorously with a wooden spoon, grunting occasionally from the effort. When the dough was ready, my father would spoon a large clump onto a cutting board. Now came the tricky part, the part that required both artfulness and technical skill. My father would take a large, sharp knife and restructure the clump of dough into a log. Then with the knife, he would separate a long slice from the log, maybe a half inch or so thick. And finally, holding the end of the cutting board over a big pot of boiling water, he would, in one motion, cut an inch or so from the slice, slide it gracefully into the pot, and dip the knife in the hot water (so the dough wouldn’t stick when he cut the next piece). He would repeat the motion quickly until the slice was gone, then begin the routine again.

In a few minutes, the dumplings would rise to the surface as if calling to be removed (though they still required 5 to 7 minutes more cooking). One of the happiest sights of my youth (and still to this day) was a casserole dish filling with Nokedli as they were removed from the pot.

Nokedli are one of the most beautiful foods. When they are properly made, that is. A beautiful Nokedli has an irregular silhouette and topography. Each one is similar, yet different – the result of the length cut from the log, the degree to which some may have rubbed off as the knife slid across the cutting board, the position it was in when it hit the scalding water. Too often, Nokedli are thin, small, and scraggly. Maybe these are traditional in someone’s eyes. But a proper Nokedli, in my view, has a certain heft to it, a kind of meatiness in your mouth. It is oblong, not missile shaped. It is from the dumpling family, not the rice or pasta family, so a Nokedli that has the diameter on its narrow dimension of spaghetti is not Nokedli. The diameter of a pencil? No. Should be a half-inch, even three-quarters. And at least an inch long. Now, not too big. We’re not talking pierogi-sized here. Two or three in your mouth at a time. Not a dozen. Not just one.

They Become One

Near the end of the cooking process, when the Nokedli were finished and the chicken was done, my mother would make the gravy. Though she was not Magyar (she was from Brooklyn), she was a genius with the gravy. She knew just how much sour cream to add, just how long to simmer it, and she always managed to produce the exquisite taste, which is as much in its texture as its flavor – small squares of onion, odd bits of chicken, tiny globules of sour cream. The gravy unifies the dish. You spoon it generously over the chicken and Nokedli, and they become one.

One last thing is essential to the royalty of Chicken Paprika: Uborka Saláta, Hungarian cucumber salad. Its name is like a primal chant – “OOOborkahSALAta” – so different from the refined notes it adds to the meal. Simplicity is part of its genius – cucumber sliced paper thin, a touch of sour cream, a little vinegar, some paprika. It is a side dish, not a centerpiece, served best quite literally to the side in a small bowl. Uborka Saláta is the light and fresh complement to the rich and exuberant Chicken Paprika. Alternating them every now and then substantially increases the flavors and pleasure of a Chicken Paprika meal.

A Slap Of The Table Top

When the words “home” and “special occasion” are mentioned together, an image comes to mind. In the center is a plate, one half is filled with chicken breast meat and maybe a whole thigh, the other half with a crowded herd of Nokedli. Everything is coated with the orange-brown gravy. At the top of the plate, which could just as easily be everyday china as Limoges china, to the left, is Uborka Saláta in a small glass bowl. To the right, a cup of water, or, when I was older, a glass of wine. Perhaps it is Hungarian wine. And perhaps at the end of his usual toast my father might have chosen to conclude, on this night, “Egészségedre!” Adding, in a stage whisper to us, “That means ‘to your health.’ But be careful not to pronounce it as ‘A seggedhez’!” punctuating the laugh that followed with a slap of the table top.

You can buy the book, Finding Maria (Chickadee Prince Books, 2017), now on Amazon