George Klein
Mother
(Memoir)
[...]
When the Nobel prize-winning physicist Isidor Rabin was once asked if the rabbinical yeshiva that he attended in Poland had played an important role in his intellectual development, his answer was that it had, but only indirectly; his mama had played a much more important role. During his teenage years he had always gone home for lunch, just like all the other boys. But whereas other mothers always anxiously quizzed their sons as to whether they had been able to give the right answers in class, young Isidor's mother would enquire, "Were you able to think up any good questions to ask in school today?"
My mother's faith in me assumed proportions that provoked a degree of mirth even amongst our relatives, let alone the girls with whom I was later to form relationships. Most tickled of all were those whom my mother disliked. One of them, who was actually very fond of me, took to call me Gross instead of Klein purely for that reason. I myself paid very little attention to it: I took Mother's faith in me for granted and did not call it into question, but I was not grateful for it. On the contrary, it often infuriated me that she believed I was able to deal with everything, and she underestimated the obstacles that lay in my way. Still, that was nothing compared to the irritation with which I reacted to her imputed or real expectations. Due to Father's early death, she was left alone with me. There was barely a chink in the tightly knit fence which she erected around her own inner world, but I did at least realize that she deeply loved Father. After his death, there was every indication that some of the feelings she had nurtured for him were transferred to his most authentic representative-to me, in other words. It took decades before I began, slowly, to understand. Up to that point, I was simply incapable of grasping the reason for the bewildering incongruity between, on the one hand, the total trust and devotion that she displayed towards me and, on the other, the angry outbursts that she would lash me with, which would be followed by at least a day of mutely smouldering resentment. I usually provoked these outbursts with some thoughtless remark that she considered heartless or overly carping.
Bit by bit I learned that I had to be careful what I said if I wanted to avoid these scenes. I suppose that my ability to express myself comes, in part, from the need to defend myself constantly against accusations of being wanting in filial affection. The other lasting consequence of that was that I have always been terrified of hurting women-and it applies only to women-through anything I might say. This instinctive and, at times, well-nigh crippling fear is something that I was able to master, to some extent, only after years of conscious effort, and then after I had turned forty I began to shift to the opposite extreme. Only in my sixties did I manage to find a balance of sorts.
If Mother was very angry with me, she paid no heed to anything else, even if it put the lives of the family at jeopardy. One particular incident is engraved deep in my memory. As I have already mentioned, Mother managed to slip away from one of the death marches in November 1944. A large column of Jews, most of them elderly, women and children, were sent off on foot along the highway from Budapest towards Vienna. At that time, the Nazis had not yet been fully defeated but the railway lines to the concentration camps had been cut and they no longer had any trains on which to deport the remaining Jews, though if there had been any they would have sooner diverted them to that end than for evacuating their own troops.
I have already told the story of my mother and step-father's flight elsewhere, so I shall not repeat it here. But after they had made good their escape, they managed to get back to Budapest. By a stroke of luck, we were swiftly reunited, though by then I had been forced to go under cover. I was able to organize forged papers for them, but they had nowhere to stay.
I knew of the existence of two sisters, distant relatives of Mother's, who were living in a two-room apartment somewhere near Keleti Station. I succeeded in making contact with them by means of the bush telegraph, which, curiously enough, still functioned even in that bleakest of periods. I begged them to take in my mother and step-father. One could not call it a luxury apartment, but at least it boasted a decent bed, a bathroom and a small kitchen.
Now kitchens, in the world of my mundane demons, are the abodes of Supreme Evil. And so it proved in this case, too.
At first, all three of us were immeasurably grateful to the sisters for their generosity. With Mother, however, that lasted no more than a day, to be supplanted by her unshakeable self-belief as the perfect housewife. That is something I shall return to in a moment. My step-father was particularly grateful, even though the situation was more onerous for him than for us. The two ladies had decided that his nose was too obviously Jewish and, lest he thereby betray us all, he immediately had a curfew imposed on him and, moreover, was not even allowed to show himself in the window. As the apartment was very cold, my step-father, though in good health, was confined to bed.
Mother, however, was unhappy about the bed linen. I was given strict orders to obtain some good, warm eiderdowns. Since my forged documents meant I could move around relatively freely, that did not present too much of a problem.
By the third day I noticed that something was not right. Popping in for a visit, I could feel the tension in the air; the sisters were acting strangely. I found out from my step-father what was up. Neither the daring return from the jaws of death, nor her gratitude towards the sisters had got in Mother's way when it came to her taking command in the kitchen, almost by reflex, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She was, after all, the eldest of the women, and so she supposed that meant the cooking and general housework became her responsibility. The sisters tried to restrain themselves for a while longer, but by the fifth day they ran out of patience.
On calling in to see them that afternoon, as on previous days, I sat down on the edge of my step-father's bed whilst Mother busied herself in the kitchen. All of a sudden, the two sisters burst into the room, seemingly in total panic, and informed us that Arrow-Cross militiamen were conducting a spot-check on the house next door. "They could be here any moment! We have to get out this instant." My step-father was so alarmed that he was barely able to pull on his trousers.
Mother swiftly packed their things; she could be very decisive when necessary. For all my urging that we set off straight away, with as little luggage as possible, Mother insisted on our taking the warm eiderdowns with us. She tied them up with twine and carried them herself, whilst my step-father and I lugged the rest of the bags. We raced down the stairs and out onto the street, but there were no Arrow-Cross men to be seen. Nor did the sisters exactly hurry with their packing, and indeed we set off without them. It began to dawn on me what this was really about.
Before long we reached Thököly Avenue, where we turned to make our way towards the heavily guarded Keleti Station. The street was thronged with passers-by; armed SS soldiers, Arrow-Cross men and gendarmes could be seen wherever one looked. I was unable to choke back my exasperation: "You really might, just this once, have left the cooking pots behind!" I let fly. "What did you say?" Mother asked, growing red in the face. When I let her know, with a few more pithy, adrenaline-fed words, exactly what was on my mind, Mother dropped the eiderdowns on the pavement and began bawling her head off.
Anyone who had never seen this generally timid and quiet woman's blazes of temper would have been unable to imagine the transformation that swept over her. These outpourings were at their most incandescent when she felt that she had been treated callously by her one and only son. On this occasion she completely lost her usual composure; in a piercingly shrill tone, she proclaimed that she was the unhappiest creature alive, mother to a son of the blackest ingratitude that had ever existed. Why was she, of all people, afflicted by such a misfortune when she had given up everything for her son's sake? People were stopping to watch the scene-a state of affairs in which my step-father's Jewish nose, in my not entirely objective view, played no small part. Even two SS soldiers who were standing a little way off were casting looks in our direction, but fortunately they were unable to understand a word of what the row was about.
The valuable, warm eiderdowns were lying on the filthy ground. My stepfather was starting to panic. I yielded at once, apologized, snatched up the eiderdowns, dusted them off, and calmed Mother down, seething with anger all the while.
It was probably lucky for us that during those difficult times everybody in Budapest was on edge; people bickered more often than usual, so family spats like this were routine sights. And if anybody noticed anything suspicious about my step-father's nose, they kept it to themselves.
[...]
George Klein
is a professor and research group leader at the Microbiology and Tumorbiology Center at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, as well as member of the Nobel Assembly. Among the many books he published in Sweden, The Atheist and the Holy City, Pieta and Live Now appeared also in English translation. Volumes of his essays appeared also in Hungary.
