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Her main aim is to examine the lives and times of nine extraordinary men from the heart of Central Europe-three physicists (Leó Szilárd, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller), two filmmakers (Alexander Korda, Michael Curtiz), two photographers (André Kertész, Robert Capa), one mathematician (John von Neumann), and one writer (Arthur Koestler)-who in their own way, in their chosen fields did change the world. But what Marton really wants to do is probe the secret of their success, discover the links between these men, and show what besides native gifts is behind their achievements, their drive, their ability to undergo change and yet remain singular, one of a kind. Marton has much to say about the importance of early twentieth-century Budapest, a brash and bustling city where most of the nine men came of age, and where most of them attended excellent secondary schools. She also dwells on what Weimar Germany had to offer later to the scientists (von Neumann, Wigner, Teller and Szilárd) and what Paris of the nineteentwenties and thirties meant to the artists (Kertész and Capa). But she returns again and again to the notion that what these men did and how they lived can also be related to their Jewish background. On the one hand, Marton stresses that the subjects of her narrative grew up in a secular world, led secular lives, and that their beloved Budapest, in the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, was itself a secular city. As for their feelings about being Jewish, she implies that these were at best neutral. At the same time, she sees her subjects' flamboyance and bravado and overarching ambition as stemming from the insecurity and insatiability of people whose forbears had been oppressed and marginalized and who, for a brief moment early in the twentieth century, in a couple of friendly European cities, revelled in their freedom. Their life strategies-their preoccupation with outward appearance, for instance, with looking like a million dollars even when their pockets were empty- remind Marton of devices her own family resorted to at critical moments in their lives. She suggests that her famous Hungarians' choice of "modern", "international" professions also bespeaks the practicality and foresight of eternal, rootless wanderers. (The one writer among them, Arthur Koestler, disproved the widely held belief that devotees of the literary muses are bound to a native soil by their mother tongue-Koestler, as a writer, switched from Hungarian to German and then to English with apparent ease.)
What the portraits eventually reveal, however, is that underneath superficial similarities the nine men were very different. And this goes even for such things as the attention paid to physical appearance. John von Neumann did always look like an executive in his three-piece suits, and Alexander Korda, from Túrkeve, Hungary, dressed like a peer of the realm long before he became Sir Alexander in 1942; but someone like Leó Szilárd cared not a whit about his appearance and was noted for his crumpled coats and jackets. | It is also not quite true that these men were essentially secular and had no understanding or appreciation of tradition. Michael Curtiz, who came from an orthodox Jewish background and whose observant mother joined him in America in the nineteen-thirties, had little problem accepting his Jewishness. Arthur Koestler's brief love affair with Zionism is well known. In 1948, both he and Robert Capa were in Tel Aviv to witness the birth of the Jewish state. "For the first time in his life," Marton writes, "Capa was in the company of Jews who did not need to camouflage that fact." John von Neumann's family, after his father's death in 1929, converted to Catholicism-"for the sake of convenience". But at the end of his life he tried in earnest to affirm his adopted faith. And Edward Teller, who came from a highly assimilated, secular family, in his old age embraced his Jewish self wholeheartedly.
Kati Marton is careful to point out that generally speaking, most of these men were conflicted. She quotes Michael Korda, Alexander's nephew, on the Korda brothers' feelings: "[B]eing Hungarian was challenge enough, you did not need to add Jewish on top of that... Alex's way of dealing with anti-Semitism was to pretend he hadn't noticed." John von Neumann was perhaps the most reticent on the subject, and when he did open up, in the years before World War Two, he was somber and prescient. Polish-born physicist Stanislaw Ulam remembers von Neumann telling him that the Jewish scientists and artists who emigrated to the West and became famous emerged from remote villages in the Carpathian Mountains, or their parents or grandparents had. "Johnny used to say that it was a coincidence of some cultural factors which he could not make precise: an external pressure on the whole society of this part of Central Europe, a feeling of extreme insecurity... and the necessity to produce the unusual or else face extinction." It would be fair to say that none of the men discussed here wanted to look or sound Jewish (though some well-known Americans and Britons, we learn, thought they did anyway). Because they were Hungarian Jews, Yiddish to them was a foreign language. The eminent French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, a close friend of Robert Capa, told the author: "It did not occur to me that André [Capa] was Jewish. Chim [David Seymour, Polishborn photographer, another good friend], though not religious at all, carried the burden of being Jewish within him as a kind of sadness." André Kertész was also tightlipped about his past. "The convoluted subject of his Jewish roots," Marton tells us, "had surfaced in 1946 when he learned the awful truth about the Hungarian Holocaust." A young photographer whom Kertész befriended toward the end of his life witnessed a heated scene between Kertész "and a religious Jew. With a Bible in hand, he was arguing with Kertész about not identifying himself as a Jew." |
