Jewish Ghosts Still Haunt Eastern Europe

...She is the daughter of a rabbi who is trying to arrange a marriage for her...

...In his last will and testament, written in 1920, my great-uncle Yankel left money to the Jewish communities of 15 villages in the region...

...He is a decent fellow, but I do not open up...

...It seems as if he was the secret keeper of our family tree...

...Most people pay no attention to him, but a few do listen, and one person even offers him money, which he declines with a wave of his bony hand...

...But people don't keep someone else's family pictures for decades in the expectation that they may one day need a favor from that family...

...I can't find anybody who would have known my beloved grandmother...

...It is also possible that he has never knowingly spoken with a person of the Jewish faith...

...In the latter part of the 20th century, the authentic, distinct, historical Jew is turning into a folk memory...

...I walk through the narrow back streets where Jews used to live...

...I look for the mezuzah, which Christians sometimes keep for good luck, but the door frames are so riddled with nicks and nailholes that I can't even guess where it might have hung...

...I drive around in a rented car, looking for places I last saw 32 years ago...

...Or the song might have been passed down to him...

...Yet from looking through the photographs he returned, it becomes clear that he held on to at least one picture of each of my grandmother's seven children—as well as of other relatives...

...It means that you are on to a fortune or that a hidden talent of yours will soon be discovered...

...Bards are keepers of memories that are seldom their own...

...But nowhere along the Danube or the Drava or the Tisza rivers is there, these days, a rabbi whose wisdom is famous and who attracts Jews and non-Jews looking for answers to the questions that trouble their souls...

...Jewish peddlers no longer wander from village to village, from country to country, to sell fashion's latest cotton prints or to buy up the plum harvest for brewing kosher slivovitz—the best...

...The land where it stood is now part of a municipal parking lot where I had almost parked but didn't, and ended up parking elsewhere—illegally...

...JEWISH GHOSTS STILL HAUNT EASTERN EUROPE CHARLES FENYVESI In the cigarette-butt-littered, standing-room-only inn of the dingy railroad station of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, a man in his mid-50s sings one ditty after another in a throaty, hoarse baritone...

...In terms of governmental statistics, some thousands of Jews hang on, most assimilated and nearly all living in the capitals...

...Every few years there are stories about a tractor or a bulldozer unearthing a silver menorah or a candlestick that had been buried, one imagines, by a Jew who never returned from a death camp...

...In the Hungarian town of Debrecen—where I was born on the night of the first air raid exercise preparing for World War II—I interview a thoughtful official descended from a family of Protestant ministers...

...I drive a sleek Renault on the same highways where my ancestors once drove their carts laden with produce...

...True, he needed some help from my uncle in a lawsuit, as he explained in a letter that accompanied the photographs, neatly packed in a shoe box...

...His Jews are a tribe of "dreamhunters": people who are driven to collect details of an ancient, proscribed dream that is mostly forgotten—destroyed by barbarians and buried by inquisitions—so that they can re-enact that dream in real life...

...We will never know...

...The markets are devoid of Jewish women praising their wondrously fat geese...

...Aren't all our real Jews dead...

...They are hard to tell apart from other citizens...

...He looks at the tombstones, reads the inscriptions if they are in Hungarian, and marvels at the Hebrew letters incomprehensible to him...

...I can't find the little Chassidic shtiebel my grandmother used to pray in...

...I know their names...

...Besides, he must have known that my uncle would have helped him in any case...

...They return centuries later carrying the same bodily marks and using the same phrases, switching only inessential details such as gender...

...It is unlikely that the singer, a villager or perhaps from the working class of the Yugoslav capital, has ever knowingly met a rabbi's daughter—or a rabbi...

...In Eastern Europe—an area buffeted between Mother Russia and Western- civilization—Jews once stood out as a separate tribe whose members were both mysterious and familiar, fabulously rich and pitifully poor, powerful and vulnerable...

...The Khazar conversion is a unique event in Jewish history, and much has been written about it, most recently by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian Jew, who proposed the provocative but wholly unsubstantiated thesis that Eastern Europe's Jews are descended from the Khazars and hence constitute the Jews' 13th tribe...

...He fears that the same might happen to his fellow Hungarians who have become a minority under Romanian rule...

...At age 18 she married a neighbor, one of the richest Jewish landowners in the county and a dashing man of the world who loved wine, women and song—only to divorce him a year later...

...She loved but once, and they ended up on the same cattle train to Auschwitz...

...There is always the possibility that he might have kept more family treasures...

...Hungary still boasts more than 100,000 Jews, 95 percent of them living in Budapest, a metropolis of some 2 million people...

...Around midnight, he mentions "the dear old Jews," and he laments their passing the way others lament the vanishing of the scribes who once produced illuminated manuscripts...

...One dreamy photo shows her as a young woman against the background of a huge, blooming rosebush, and she smiles her enigmatic, melancholy smile...

...He left 600 kronen to the poor Jews in Rohod because they always supplied him a minyan, ' 'uncomplainingly and unfailingly...

...I am on assignment as an American journalist, doing a story on Hungarian political developments, and I am reticent about my past and my family...

...There is still one small synagogue but it is open only on Shabbos...

...He is aware that Jews, including descendants of Hungarian Jews, survive and prosper in other lands, for instance the United States...

...He is convinced that the Jewish dead are as talkative as they were while alive, and all that a writer must do is "to listen and to listen deep...

...No more, no more, no more...

...The dreamhunters are always killed, but they are always reborn...

...Yugoslavia is in the Balkans, and the peninsula is part of Homer's old neighborhood where the bardic tradition still lives...

...Born after World War II, he has no firsthand knowledge of the 12,000 Jews who once lived and thrived in his town...

...Kovacs keep these mementos of no value to him for more than 40 years...

...We don't know, because no one from my grandmother's house returned from Auschwitz to make a claim...

...Gripping a glass of local Riesling, he talks to himself in a singsong that reminds me of dooming...

...The house where my grandmother lived before she was sent to Auschwitz is about to collapse, with the mortar turning into powder and pouring out between the bricks, and the roof tiles splitting up...

...Bards may add to the oral treasury—and ambitious bards do—but the norm is to draw on what others have collected...

...I find myself muttering the opening words of the Kaddish...

...She is as beautiful as he is wise, and no one from their home town, a dusty little place where two highways meet, is good enough for her—or for her father...

...Written by Milorad Pavic, a Serbian professor, the book continued on page 50 Ghosts of Eastern Europe continued from page 39 is about the Khazar empire, which once flourished in what is now southern Russia and whose ruler and people converted to Judaism in the ninth century...

...It is as if we had never lived in this town...

...He explained every donation: He gave 400 kronen to the Jews of Nyirgyulaj because there he was "a happy new husband," and 500 kronen to the Jews of Nyirlovo "because it has more poor Jews...

...Presumably, these items were given to him for safekeeping prior to deportation, or maybe he helped himself to what was left behind...

...In Yugoslavia, for instance, the great sensation of the decade and now a bestseller throughout Europe is a novel titled Dictionary of the Khazars...

...His favorite subject is life under Turkish rule in the 16th and 17th centuries, yet it is the Jewish cemetery, less than 200 years old, which he says conveys to him "the torment of the past, a perpetual sense of loss...

...There are plenty of Jewish treasures, people whisper, and some look for them the way previous generations dug for the hoard of gold said to have been buried with Attila the Hun somewhere near the Danube...

...But, the official in Debrecen asks, "Where are the real Jews, the Jewish Jews...

...What secrets they must have known," he says with a sigh...

...I am more aware of their presence than of the politics of the people I interview...

...From Debrecen to Oradea, the main highway goes through villages...

...But to his way of thinking, Hungary is the fulcrum of the globe, and the disappearance of all but a few hundred Jews from Debrecen, the country's second largest city with a population of 200,000, constitutes an irretrievable loss to Hungary rather than to the Jewish people...

...Several photographs depict my red-haired aunt Elza, who was said to have been, in her youth, the most beautiful woman in Szabolcs County...

...One of his songs is about a raven-haired, almond-eyed Jewish virgin...

...He may or may not be aware that I am Jewish...

...I have visited some of them...

...There are still rabbis who lead services in improbably splendid synagogues built a century ago, and in some places Jews even gather for purposes other than paying vestigial tribute on Yom Kippur to their ancestors...

...I don't want to theorize about why this happened, but these are the facts...

...He explains that the Jews too have been swept out of the area's history, just like the Ottoman Turks...

...The possessive "our" leaves me speechless...

...There are no more Jews living in the villages of Hungary and Transylvania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia...

...There are no more Jewish innkeepers and no more Jewish beggars...

...When I stop beside a century-old walnut tree to admire the sunset, I can almost hear them saying their evening prayers...

...Seeing a Jew in a dream is good luck, say those who now interpret dreams in the countryside...

...A brooding, taciturn man by the name of Kovacs—the stereotypical Hungarian name, meaning Smith—he was neither a friend nor an enemy...

...He is a mythmaker, a brilliant and inventive storyteller...

...I discover that it has been leveled...

...Kovacs died shortly after he sent his gift—if that is the right word— so nobody could question him further about the photographs...

...A few years ago, the gentile who had been my grandmother's landlord mailed to my uncle in Budapest a batch of family photographs...

...Half-forgotten and ghost-like, Jews haunt the literary imagination as well...

...The marble tombstones are beautiful, he says, and in the quiet of the cemetery he hears voices...

...It had class and a quiet dignity, so important to my gentrified forebears, but it now looks as if it had been part of an abjectly poor medieval ghetto...

...The song is in Serbian, and the singer may be its author...

...There are no Jewish bands playing at Jewish weddings, and no itinerant students of the Talmud...

...Why did Mr...

...Pavic's novel is a historical fantasy...

...Some 50 kilometers to the east, in the Romanian town of Oradea that Hungarians call Nagyvarad, a gentile writer tells me that he often visits the Jewish cemetery for "inspiration...

...The house was a fine structure built in the 19th century...