A VERY CAPABLE LIFE
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ZARAH PETRI
OUR LIVES: DIARY, MEMOIR, AND LETTERS
Series Editor: Janice Dickin
OUR LIVES aims at both student and general readership. Today’s students, living in a world of blogs, understand that there is much to be learned from the everyday lives of everyday people. Our Lives seeks to make available previously unheard voices from the past and present. Social history in general contests the construction of history as the story of elites and the act of making available the lives of everyday people, as seen by themselves, subverts even further the contentions of social historiography. At the same time, Our Lives aims to make available books that are good reads. General readers are guaranteed quality, provided with introductions that they can use to contextualize material and are given a glimpse of other works they might want to look at. It is not usual for university presses to provide this type of primary material. Athabasca University considers provision of this sort of material as important to its role as Canada’s Open University.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ZARAH PETRI
© 2010 John Leigh Walters
Published by AU Press, Athabasca University
1200, 10011 – 109 Street
Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Walters, John Leigh, 1933–
A very capable life : the autobiography of Zarah Petri / John Leigh Walters.
(Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters series)
Also available in electronic format (978-1-897425-42-8)
ISBN 978-1-897425-41-1
1. Petri, Zarah. 2. Hungarian Canadians--Biography.
3. Immigrants--Canada--Biography. I. Title. II. Series: Our lives: diary, memoir, and letters (Edmonton, Alta.)
FC106.H95W34 2010 971’.004945110092 C2009-905091-9
ISSN 1921-6653 Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters Series (Print)
ISSN 1921-6661 Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters Series (Online)
Printed and bound in Canada by AGMV Marquis.
Cover, layout, and book design by Honey Mae Caffin, intertextual.ca
Cover photograph: Private Family Collection
Please contact AU Press, Athabasca University at
aupress@athabascau.ca for permissions and copyright information.
For Jacquelynn Ann Barnes
Fifty years and still not enough
A Very Capable Life: The Autobiography of Zarah Petri by John Leigh Walters is a remarkable book, seemingly straightforward, and highly accessible on one level, yet complex and provocative on another. Walters’s purpose in creating this memoir seems simple enough: to tell his mother’s life story in a way that evokes her own voice as accurately as is possible. Of course, the memoir genre is not a simple one, and in fact readers may well discern several more nuanced and overlapping purposes behind the manuscript: to tell a woman’s story, an immigrant’s story, a working class person’s story, an elderly person’s story, and in so doing, not only to valorize each of these subject positions, but also to reveal his mother, someone who has occupied all of these seemingly marginal spaces, as a truly extraordinary person, one who deserves to be remembered for her place in history as well as for her remarkable personal qualities. Given the range of territories through which it moves, this book will interest diverse readers, from specialists in such areas as women’s history, life writing, immigration history, and working class history, to those who simply enjoy a good read.
Readers familiar with the broad story of the immigration to Canada from central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in particular, with the story of Hungarian immigration, will find in this memoir a compelling case study. While clearly propelled by her distinctive personality, Zarah’s story is nevertheless quite representative of the “Hungarian immigrant story,” in terms of the factors that “pushed” her family out of Hungary and “pulled” them to Canada, the period of their immigration, the places where they settled, even the problems of adjustment that they experienced. Historians of immigration generally, and of immigration to Canada and from Hungary in particular, will find this book a fascinating and valuable addition to the various primary and secondary sources that evidence/explore the second major wave of European immigrants to Canada in the inter-war years, the more so because it is about a woman, and immigration history in Canada has often been skewed toward a male perspective. Similarly, since women’s history in Canada has arguably been biased toward the Anglophone and Francophone majorities, this book makes a valuable contribution to our knowledge and appreciation of the diverse experiences of women who have helped to build this country.
Readers will find here an intricate piece of storytelling, one that offers a skilful rendering of Zarah Petri’s lively voice, as she tells her life story, more or less chronological, complete with engaging flashbacks and flash-forwards that lend the narrative coherence and momentum. However, the narrator’s voice/point of view is a complicated one, because it is retrospective and thus at once encompasses both the child (or young adult, for example) and the elderly woman, while also at times including the voice of John, the second son, the actual writer, his mother’s scribe. Some readers will undoubtedly find such a “memoir” problematic, if not downright objectionable. After all, the voice we hear is not really that of the woman supposedly at the centre of this narrative, but rather, that of the man who dares to speak for her. However, I hope that more readers will applaud Walters’s arguably audacious appropriation as a loving act, one that honours his mother by telling her story as authentically as possible rather than allowing it to fade into oblivion, lost, like most such “ordinary” stories, to all but her immediate family, and eventually even to them.
Clearly, readers of this memoir are in the hands of two storytellers, who simultaneously lead them through Zarah Petri’s extra/ordinary life. Thankfully, both are artful weavers, and together they re-create the complex textures of Zarah’s experiences—the irony, the comedy, and the tragedy that constitute her difficult yet richly eventful life. The narrator takes readers from her childhood in the early years of the twentieth century in the small Hungarian town of Becse, where she and her brother and sisters are left on the eve of the Great War in the capable and loving hands of their grandparents, while their less sensible parents follow the “Judas goat” Count Esterhazy to the wilds of Western Canada in search of a new life there for their young family; to her in many ways ill-fated journey to Ontario, where her poet father has purchased a beautiful but impractical farmhouse, in which later, unable to cope with mounting debts, he commits suicide, leaving his only marginally more capable wife to raise their young family in a foreign land; then to Zarah’s marriage as a teenager to John, a fellow immigrant, but somewhat less than kindred spirit; to their struggles during the Great Depression as they raise their two, and later, three, boys; through her challenges as a mature woman, as a widow, and then as an elderly woman confronting the indignities of Alzheimer’s disease. Her free spirit and sharp intelligence animate the narrative at every turn, making it the kind of story that once begun, one is loath to leave unfinished. Readers will not soon forget the expressive, albeit at times ungrammatical, voice of Zarah Petri—a woman whose courageous spirit, generous heart, and fierce independence as she confronts whatever challenges fate conjures make her worthy of our attention and respect, as she beckons us to join her in discovering anew the country to which she journeyed so many years ago.
TAMARA PALMER SEILER
University of Calgary
THERE IS NOTHING ORDINARY, HERE. ARRIVING AS A CHILD from Europe in the 1920s, Zarah Petri marries at age sixteen, and is subsequently released from her job in a knitting mill. (“No married ladies, please.”) These are also the Prohibition years, so the young bride confined now to the kitchen, moves to replace the missing income by making and selling “grappa,” a homemade liquor, a sweet and satisfying distillate, a quick seller to area speakeasy patrons. Zarah’s grappa becomes unexpectedly popular. Zarah prospers, and her missing income is made bigger by twice. Later, during WWII, faced with a heavy mortgage on a farm she bought, between rows of field corn she grows rows of illegal poppies, the seeds of which she sells to the ethnic baking trade to be used in sweet goods. Historical: The federal government of the day forbade the growing of poppies believing it would lead to the manufacture of heroin as it had in China in the 1930s. And through the war when meat is rationed, Zarah markets freshly butchered hogs from the trunk of a car, in the dark of the night, to a thankful Italian and Portuguese public. All these things are punishable by jail time, but she does them anyway. Zarah has her own test for what is proper or improper, taken from the Good Book, Exodus 20: 1–17 saying, “If it is not forbidden here, it is forbidden nowhere.” Proof to her purpose, there is nothing in the Ten Commandments about distillates, poppies, or pork.
In the pages of this book I am the son mentioned. My birth occurred during the Depression; no money changed hands on that occasion; the attending physician, Dr. Leigh C. Vanderburgh, was paid for his services by means of two imperial gallons of clear grappa. My middle given name is his.
I am also the writer of the text, carefully presented in the unique way Zarah Petri speaks. All events are true, but because of the character of some of those events the names of several family members have been changed.
JOHN LEIGH WALTERS
“Where have you been?”
“Nowhere.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
THE SMALL VILLAGE OF BECSE, PLACE OF MY BIRTH, IS IN THE best part of Hungary I think, the southern part where spring comes early and fall lasts late into the year, just a little snow and the fruit of the mulberry trees in early summer having the taste of sugar, and as big as your thumb. I love this place, every inch of it. Many families in my village talk of leaving, some preferring to go to the United States passing through Ellis Island in New York, or some choosing Canada passing through Halifax Harbour, to seek a new chance away from the war, so they said, but that is just an excuse because our town of Becse in Hungary is not affected by the war, our town being so minor. Who of importance would want to come to Becse? None.
The town’s men are especially excited at the idea of leaving for what they are calling the New World. The women a little more wary, women being always a little more wary than men, because of childbirth. My grandmother, my Oma, the smartest person I have known in my life, then as now, hearing of all these big stories of success in the New World, a logical thinker was she, saying that many who leave Becse will taste bitter bread, the way she would describe it, later proving to be correct. I will draw for you the design of my Hungarian village. It looked like this, with all the farms shaped like a slice of pie and the houses at the tip, if you saw it from the sky:
Houses and farms in Becse. Credit: J.T. Cawllender.
That’s how it was done at that time. There was wisdom in this. Even as a child I thought this was a smart way to build a town. This was a town located in the country, giving everyone living there the best of both town and country. Each of the farms about twenty acres, cut in these pie shapes so that all the houses are close to each other at the point of the slices, providing close neighbours to help each other, a popular requirement since money wasn’t much in use. All neighbours had a reliance on each other in the farm harvest, passing out help whenever asked for, doing so in lieu of actual cash and helping anyone who asked, building up a personal account of good will, much as a bank account but this one being real, being help when it is needed. So, none felt poor or insecure, two of the most important things in life.
But it is asked, how come so many Hungarians from the village of Becse left for Canada and fewer to the United States by proportion? Well, many went to Pittsburgh in the great state of Pennsylvania, everyone knows that, even a famous son of such playing football, the surname Namath being common to Becse, Joe too is everywhere.
So, you ask in repeat: how did it happen that so many Hungarians went to Canada and something fewer to Pittsburgh by proportion? Well, I would say one man is responsible, and he is Count Paul Oscar Esterhazy and he was doing such for improper reasons. He was what is called a Judas goat. A Judas goat is one which is trained at the abattoir to lead the sheep to slaughter, all the foolish sheep following the goat, thinking the goat appears knowledgeable, seems to be okay, nothing bad going on in here, come on let’s go. In a similar way Hungarian families followed Count Paul Oscar Esterhazy.
Here is what happened: The Count advertised by post office billing boards the chance for families to leave Hungary and go to the province of Saskatchewan in the country of Canada, where they would surely prosper. The land is so rich he said, that the corn grew to the sky, the rivers so thick with fish you could scoop them up by hand. There would be opportunities to earn real money he said, not just trading farm goods for hard goods as in Becse, but putting real cash in the pocket. All the men in town believed what the Count claimed, wanting to believe the Count’s story because men like to go adventuring and here was their chance with the Count, not knowing the Count was speaking truthlessly. To explain further, Count Paul Oscar was born to the wealthiest family in Hungary. Being rich, well he must also be smart and that was the general feeling about rich people at the time. Well, we all know much better now, some of the dumbest people in the world being also the richest. And you can just put the Count in there.
But I am calling him a Judas goat because these are the only words to suitably describe him, influencing the men of small towns, breaking up families. Imagine, when I was just nine years old I was required to wave goodbye to my mother and father as the steam train pulled out from our little town in Hungary, my mother and father waving out the window back to us, leaving their four children behind, promising someday later to return for us.
So, we were left behind in the care of my mother’s mother, she being my Oma, who was already getting old and tired and her husband, my Opa, who had but one leg remaining. Just one, the other being run over by a breakaway wagon, and his crushed leg is amputated off with no anaesthesia, just a cup of brandy, the town’s veterinarian cutting through his limb, two other men holding him down because of the pain of it, right before my eyes, using turpentine as a medicament to cleanse it, producing even more pain, making my grandfather, lying in the grass, to flail his arms and scream like an infant. Months later he took me aside to apologize for his behaviour, an apology not required since there is just a cup of brandy and a cloth tourniquet twisted tight to cut off the blood circulation, to reduce the pain and to keep from bleeding to death.
The Count advertised throughout the country, and the townsmen of Becse, my beautiful Hungarian village, bought the biscuit so as to speak, the Count saying he has successfully built a new Hungarian town in the province of Saskatchewan, which he claimed is even better than Pittsburgh. And he named the new town after himself, calling it Esterhazy, by his family name out of improper proudness, I think. It is still on the map of Canada if you look at the province of Saskatchewan, to the eastern part near the Manitoba border you can still see Esterhazy, the town started by the Count, who said by bringing Hungarian families to Esterhazy, he would be bringing a European culture to the New World, which he said was only full of Indians and no culture at all. It became clear later, that he was not doing it for culture’s sake, but doing it for improper reasons, and the Indians had plenty of culture of their own, thank you very much.
Here is why I so despise him: none in Hungary knew so at the time, but the Count was being paid money by the government of the Dominion of Canada for immigrants to come, Canada needing people to populate the western part of the Country, using cash to slow the flow to Pittsburgh, where so many Hungarians went. Yes, you may not believe, but the Count was on the Canadian Dominion Government payroll as a paid immigration agent not revealing the real reason of his interest, saying it was for culture and a desire to be helpful, but it was for the money, breaking up perfectly happy families, parents going away first, saying they would pick up their kids next year, some never picking up their kids ever.
Many families were broken up permanently by this, not being able to save enough cash in the new world to sail back across the Atlantic and then collect their children. Some families broken up this way remain so, even to this day.
So, now hearing all the facts on it, perhaps you too might agree that Count Paul Oscar Esterhazy was indeed a Judas, leading people astray, trading families for money, just a slave trader in finesse. On top of it, he wasn’t a real Count! You might be surprised at that one! It came out later that the Esterhazy family in a Budapest newspaper accused Count Paul Oscar of being a phoney Count, a pretender, improperly using the Esterhazy name.
Not to be thrown from balance by such an accusation, arguing the matter in public the Count claimed that he was indeed of royal blood but fathered out of wedlock by the Crown Prince of Hungary. This was solemnly reported to him by his mother, he said, who was the other party involved, passing this information to him on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday, his coming of age. In this public statement, he said he had remained silent on such an important matter all these years out of a respectfulness to the Esterhazy name. But now challenged in public it was necessary for him to bring the chance fathering out.
My Oma later told me that the Count might be correct about this chance fathering since everyone knew that the Crown Prince, the alleged father, was often seen with ladies of the cabaret classes. This would include the pale and comely Widow Boros, wife of the late Jonas Boros, the celebrated Hungarian novelist.
To which my Oma says with all humour intended, “Hmmmmm. The imperial prince of Hungary, has been sleeping in a dead man’s bed.”
And too bad for the alleged father, by the fact that there were very few birth controls available at that time except by retreat or by safes, and these safes were very poor products indeed, made from sheep intestine, the end tied with fisher thread and not very effective. This was properly proved in the Count’s case, him being born in the first place. So, all evidence in, is the Count a Judas goat?
Yes, and yes again.
And by his own allowance, a bastard on top.
I WILL CALL THIS THE DAY OF LEAVING. AS YOU MIGHT suppose, there was not much in the way of entertainment in Becse and the very idea of one of the families leaving for the New World, for Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, thousands and thousands of miles away, was a big event. The train came by on Saturday and everyone in Becse showed up for it. It was like a carnivale this was, the horses wearing their best harness, all horsemen having two sets of harness, one for work and a fancier set for special events, this being a special event, the shiny, best harnesses were seen everywhere.
A little platform is built, the mayor standing on it and addressing everyone, talking about the adventure of those leaving for Canada, taking the opportunity to display his importance, him saying how he personally knew Count Esterhazy, ignoring the facts of the matter and telling everyone what a fine family this was, name-dropping in other words like any other politician, puffing himself up, a matter of self importance.
So, the whole town was treating it like a celebration, none thinking that I and my sisters and brother were about to become as orphans.
My mother and father, the centre of attraction now, barely paid attention to us with so much commotion on that day, all wanting to congratulate them on their departure and wishing them a great adventure, each being envious in a way, but each also being glad that they will remain here in Becse, where there are perfect certainties. And the few money lenders of the town were there too; every town having a few lenders and always present in case other citizens watching would be interested in this adventure to Esterhazy in Canada thousands of miles away and across an ocean. Emigrants would need to borrow money, and there were those who were willing to loan forints, in the belief that money would be easily obtained in the New World, and paid back in full and some extra, in the form of interest, showing a certain profit.
Just before my parents boarded the train, giving a public kiss to me, coming up close to my face, I could see in my mother’s eyes the look of panic, in shock was she, not even knowing who we were, it seemed. Terrified, I think she was, at what was taking place, presenting a full break from her life in Becse, a trip across a scary ocean at the age of just twenty and nine, leaving her four children behind, a break from her mother, my Oma, leaving the place of her perfect childhood. Myself, I still don’t know how I felt on the day my parents left Becse on that too long trip to North America. I might not have been upset. I can’t remember now. On previous times, my mother and father would to go to the big city of Budapest, perhaps to attend to some legal matter or visit with old family members, occasionally just a tourist trip to see what’s new. And this didn’t feel much different. But this was surely greater than a trip to Budapest, the whole town in attendance, but it was quickly over in just about an hour. After the train left, my mother and father on it, we returned to Oma’s house and suddenly everything became very silent. No one said anything in the house for almost a week. Usually, we were a very talkative household. But now, only Opa would move the pages of the calendar to speak once in a while as the days went by, saying such as, “Well, they must be in Budapest now.” Four days later, “Well, they must be in Trieste now.” And then, “Well, they must be boarding the ship now.” “Well, they must be in the Mediterranean now.” “Well, they must be on the Atlantic now.” “Well, they must be in the middle of the Atlantic now.” “Well they must be approaching Halifax harbour now” and on, and such, following their dangerous trip, his finger pressed heavy on the pages, a worried look on his face, if not openly admitted. He was aware that thousands of miles are now between him and his daughter, my mother, a love of his life. Not as it is now, there were no aeroplanes at that time, no quick travel. Opa had good reason to believe that he had seen his daughter for the last time.
And Oma grieved in a different way. She cooked. And for at least a month after their departure our everyday meals became as rich as only our Sunday meals once were. It was as though she was trying to make up to us for the loss of our parents, with rich foods. She made borjuporkolt, which is made from veal and she made okorfarok ragu, a kind of stew and my favourite, paprikascsirke; almost every day a meat dish. My fat sister Klara was in her glory. All she could talk about was the food. She, being older than me, went to school in the mornings, I went to school in the afternoons. Instead of saying hello to me to be polite, when our paths crossed, she going home, me going to school, she would not even say hello, just to ask what Oma made for lunch, hoping for something rich tasting. I got tired of this business. So one day, again our paths crossing to and from school, she saying, what did Oma make for lunch? Annoyed by the same question again and again and again, I said, “Oh something you will really like Klara. It’s really good. You will love it. Today she is making a special dish – shit with rice.” Klara ran off screaming. She was offended, the idea of that being in her rice.
And she told Oma what I had said. When I returned home that evening, I was severely punished. I was made to kneel in the corner of my bedroom, and since rice was the subject of the offence, Oma put a handful of raw rice on the floor, on which I had to kneel. I brushed some aside, putting my knees down only on clear spots, but later Oma examined my knees and seeing no impressions, said I cheated on the punishment, made me kneel a half hour longer. And think, she said, think of what you did. Using foul language to your sister. I had to spend the evening in there, as a result.
To be truthful what happened in the weeks and months to follow, after my parents left, we kids started to misbehave. Maybe Oma and Opa felt sorry for us, and let us get away with too much, perhaps spoiling us. Maybe, we were angry at events as they were and had become rebellious. It was probably a whole bunch of things that made us go this way, but bad, we were. Just awful. Oma and Opa, now in their sixties, were given a handful; their own children grown and married and away in Canada, were raising still another family and probably too old and tired for the job. But there it is.
My sister Klara, I think was the nastiest of us. Oma would get up very early to do some work in the barn, feeling sorrow for Opa, helping Opa, him with one leg amputated. She never failed to leave breakfast for us on the table. Hungarian breakfasts are always a thin soup and a biscuit, very healthy. Awful Klara would grab my biscuit and rub it on an oozing sore that she always had on her upper arm, a sore that never went away, that almost kept her out of Canada when immigrating, later as you will hear. She rubbed my biscuit into that, so I wouldn’t want the biscuit.
So, we became bad. Not bad, bad. But bad enough. Especially for Oma and Opa who had to control us. We stole fruit from the neighbour’s orchard, which we would never have done before. Later Oma would need to apologize for us, making such excuses to the neighbours saying, “Well, they are only kids, and their parents are gone, and everyone should feel sorry for them.”
An example: now, it is two months since The Leaving, and it is plum season. The plums are ripe. Surprise to us, the son of the neighbour from whom we had stolen fruit, said to us, “The plums are ripe on our trees, why don’t you kids come over and get some.” We were glad to. So, we are standing beneath the tree, the boy says, “I’ll climb to the top and shake some off, the top is where the best ones are.” He is up there in the tree and he is throwing some plums down saying, “Pick up the shiny ones, they got the most sun, they are the sweetest.”
And indeed they were. The shiny ones really were sweet. But I have a very good nose and soon the shiny fruits did not smell of freshness to me. They smelt funny, to tell you the truth, but sisters Klara, Hanna and my brother were filling up on them. But I quickly look up, and I see the most appalling sight. The boy is picking the sweetest plums, from where the sun shone warmest, at the top of the tree, but he is sticking them into his knickers, into his pants, into his bare bum really, and tossing them down, saying the shiny ones thrown down were the sweetest, from where sun shone. But where he was putting them made them not to smell so fresh, and that’s probably also how they got shiny, being moved around.
Boy is in the tree. We are on the ground. I told my sisters and brother of what I had seen the neighbour’s boy doing. We shouted to him, saying we had enough fruit now, and we were going home. The boy came down, all laughing and jovial, laughing a little too much I think and proud of his achievement, until Klara, big fat Klara, jumped on him, held him down while I pulled his pants down and told my brother to fetch some hot Hungarian peppers from the nearby garden, the white Hungarian hots, hotter than the red hots, and bring them over and I rubbed those white hot peppers into the very place where he had earlier put the plums, punishing if not him, that offensive part of his body. I rubbed them over everything saying, dirty boy, dirty boy, dirty boy. And then we let him go screaming home. The mother complained to Oma, saying we were wicked, embarrassing a boy by pulling down his pants, his privacy exposed, to girls. Oma tried to tell the mother that the children were upset with their parents leaving and all, and she would not punish them this time, but if ever they did so again, please to let her know.
Kids being kids, in spite of the stinky plums and the hot peppers remedy, still we were friends with him that summer. Whenever we were in his garden, I would pick up a hot pepper and wave it slowly in the wind, and he would laugh and laugh, him picking up a plum and polishing it slowly, offering it to me, his arm outstretched a sneaky smile on his face. And we would laugh, and laugh, and laugh. For eighty years have I not seen him; I cannot even remember his name now, but if he is still alive, I hope he thinks back to that time, sometimes remembering what little devils we were at that time and what a good time we had.
He was a wonderful boy, regardless of those plums.
I WOULD WANT YOU TO GET TO KNOW MY FAMILY, SO now I will describe family members. First, there is Oma, the oldest, and she is the smartest being my opinion; born to the most politically influential family in Budapest, her father, a judge and highly respected, invited to every important occasion she said, his coat collar even finished in pieces of velvet, proving then, much as now, that persons are given good regard by the clothes they wear. The presence of those velvet collars indicating that this coat had been fashioned in Budapest and not the rural village of Becse, the wearer a substantial person, a person of importance presenting imported velvet collars of such soft beauty, symbolic to the upper classes.
Oma & Opa.
So, when Oma came of marriageable age, naturally her parents believed she would wind up in the cultural city of Budapest, the wife of an influential, in other words a person equal to her status, she attending many velvet-bedecked social events. But that’s not how it turned out. My Oma married my grandfather, an ordinary peasant. Nor was this a mistake as some might feel because the two got along so well, even though he was just a simple peasant carpenter, and she of privilege. A good choice she made I still think, because never in my growing up did I hear a cross word between these two. Oma and Opa were soul mates in a most romantic sense. Intended for each other, collected from the opposite ends of society.
But then of course, the tongue-waggers of the town were busy also, most to say, I would hear it often, that Oma was just a spoilt privileged person, a spoilt daughter of the judge, wilful, rebelling against parents, as some do even now, marrying beneath her station to spite her family, making her own choices, regardless. Not so. Oma had no spite against anyone, but what would you do, if you just happened across a perfect soul mate, taking joy in him, perfect but penniless. Think of it. What would you do? I think you would say Oma did the right thing.
And like anybody else they had problems to deal with, too. For example, Opa had only one leg mentioned earlier, the left leg run over by a threshing machine and amputated. After the amputation, being a carpenter and all, he made a wooden leg for himself; indeed he made two models. One was a false leg he used for farm work; it was a simple peg leg, like in pictures of pirates, made from a cedar tree bough, light and very effective. And amazing it was, to watch him follow the horse drawn plough, using his peg leg, capable even under these circumstances, his horse pulling, Opa keeping up no matter how quick the horse, us kids even giving applause to him at the row’s end, encouraging him on, giggling and having a good time. Yes, he could do most things, even with only one good leg. He could even clean the chimney, up there on the roof to be seen, his peg leg put to purpose, straight out against a gable, holding his balance in the wind, going about his task with ease, the chimney needing to be cleaned in autumn, the storks using the chimney to nest a stork family, the nest removed at season’s end. Well, the nesting of the storks was always welcomed no matter what the inconvenience, and considered a good omen, but the nests had to be taken out of there for the winter, dear friend, or we could not use the fireplace.
And then Opa had his Sunday false leg, which he also made. This was from oak, properly shaped as the real leg would have been, with a shoe on the end. It looked very life like and except for his limp, which he could concentrate away if necessary, if attending a formal event like the town’s annual New Year’s Eve Levee, to which my grandparents were always invited, Oma being who she was. And at these events, Opa never limped, him concentrating it away, even dancing, although in a somewhat awkward manner, if a Viennese waltz okay, but sitting out the Hungarian czardas, which is a very vigorous dance and requiring both legs in lengthy use. In the past, it was as a dance of the peasantry; sophisticated persons would not bother to do it, fearing to be demeaned. But, listen to this, when the Budapest composer Franz Liszt started using czardas rhythms in his famous Hungarian Rhapsodies, everybody started dancing to it; music earlier considered too rural suddenly becomes popular since Mr. Franz Liszt, the important Budapest composer, sees the value of it; everybody else following. But it is a fact, Opa enjoyed dancing the czardas very much until his left leg was cut off.
And then there was Opa’s daughter, my mother, who I am sad to say, wasn’t a smart one. I didn’t think so as a child, nor do I think so now. A good enough lady, honest and sincere, but overly nervous, too often given to the vapours, taking to bed at every problem, ferreting herself away, avoiding decision making, waiting for all complications to pass. You would wonder how she could be the child of Oma and Opa, being so very different.
But my grandmother! My Oma! Oma! Oma! It was she who held my interest. She was always doing, or analyzing, or trying to understand even the smallest of events to the biggest. And there was no gossip in her, only trying to understand the facts, coming out with: Why did this happen? Why would that happen? Figuring things out, and putting it in a nutshell.
And I will speak of my siblings, Klara, Hanna and Bela. Dear fat Klara, the heavy eater in our family. I believe nervousness made her do it, trying to satisfy a frustration perhaps, even taking my morning biscuit as I said earlier. But also, she could be most generous in other ways if the humour took her, though never generous with food, food being a separate issue.
And my brother Bela, the middle born of the four of us, and Bela was just Opa all over again, a lookalike with the same behaviours. So much alike there were townsfolk who would say, in a jokey way, that Opa was the original, and Bela was sent from God as a spare, in case something went wrong with the original, this being said in a humorous way, nothing serious of course.
Then there is Hanna my other sister, good in school but not interested in much else; very conventional I would say, and she stayed that way all her life; she was a very predictable person. So, these are my list of siblings at the time, more added later under some unusual circumstances.
And now I will need to speak of the man my mother chose as her husband, eventualizing as my father. A most complicated man. A poet in his natural self, but a cobbler as his occupation, a maker of shoes really, but fussing over them, making them perfect, using leather from only the same animal, the same pelt, so they would match perfectly, giving the same grain and thickness, the two boots to be absolutely identical. The trouble is, when you treat shoe cobbling as art, it becomes unprofitable. None can pay the high cost of the cobbler examining each piece of leather carefully for thickness and grain, to make a perfect pair of boots, working slowly, cutting with certainty, taking plenty of time with the lasts.
And that’s just how he ended up in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan. Authorities told him that the Northwest Mounted Police would need riding boots of this high quality. Flattering the poet-cobbler, my father, much work would be offered and any amount of time necessary to make the Mounties their boots would be available since the government is paying by tax money anyway.
My father bought the biscuit. To make boots at his leisure, cutting this, honing that, creating perfect riding boots, each a work of art. He was eager for the freedom of producing riding boots of the highest quality for the Northwest Mounted Police in Canada, and to be given plenty of time and materials to do so.
My father was a dreamer.
MONTHS GO BY AND I HAVE NOT HEARD FROM MY parents, no letter, or no word. Some of those returning from the New World reported disappointment with how things went there, returning to Becse now poorer than before, with a debt to be paid off in borrowed money taken in the first place, for passage. Those who returned came back with new debt.