Myth, Legend and Memory

...And like so many Jews today, he is engaged in reassembling the memories of a family that has been scattered throughout the world and so to reassemble, through stories, a world that once was whole It is rare and precious, however, when such tales can carry us back to the early 18th century, when Jews still possessed no legal identity, using only the traditional single name followed by their father's...

...Such a journey could well prove hazardous, and precautions must be taken [I] n great secrecy, someone had to get hold of one of the four carriage rods that reined in the two horses Because no matter how honest the wagon-owner, nor how much confidence was placed in him as Samuel's companion, it was not necessary for him to know which of the rods has been hollowed-out and stopped up to conceal the money in case the travellers were attacked by robbers...

...Sent by the family during a time of economic scarcity, he will purchase wine that will then be resold in his home village Much rests on the young man's shoulders (including a borrowed suit, since the family cannot afford to pay for a new one...

...Perhaps, too, he knew of the beautiful and wise daughter, a perfect match for his "spirited, impetuous son...

...Indeed, he goes on to draw implications from the tale that Shumi seems innocent of...

...B'shert, my ancestors must have said at the wedding, fond of this swift hammer-blow of a Yiddish word which means "it was meant to be " But my ancestors also knew that it is no meddling with the intentions of the Almighty when someone prepares the ground so that His will may prevail...

...Jacob Wiesner, himself starded at such boldness, is pleased nevertheless, insisting only that protocols of family visits and rabbinical consultations must first be followed Uncle Shumi's story ends with the report of a "wedding that lasted three days and three nights, and later, seven wonderful sons and one excellent daughter...

...David H Lynn teaches at Kenyon College and is associate editor of the Kenyon Review...

...Naturally enough, the young man falls in love with her and immediately asks for her hand in marriage...

...The journey is safely accomplished, however, and the traveller arrives at the home of Jacob Wiesner, seeking his hospitality and help in the mission...

...I recount this tale in such detail to suggest what Charles Fenyvesi is up to He himself was born in Hungary in 1937, surrounded by a large family with tales and legends of its own history One of the few members to survive the war, he came to the United States after the failed 1956 revolution...

...A good story, a story belonging not to the world we spy out the windows, but one where myth and legend and memory intermingle...

...In those days, a woman not putting her hair up and not having a kerchief on her head was as indecent as someone only partially dressed...

...For Fenyvesi believes that his great-great-grandfather must surely have sent his son to buy the wine with greater foreknowledge of what he was likely to enounter He muses that the father, Lazar, must have known, perhaps through the gossip of "knowledgeable iunerant beggars," of Wiesner's reputation as a man "who earned credit in heaven by inviung visitors of all kinds to their dinner tables, particularly on the Sabbath and other holidays...

...In this chapter, "Two Barrels of Wine," the author's uncle Shumi, "Samuel on his birth certificate," recounts the tale of his own grandfather Samuel's journey, in about 1850, to a distant village in the highlands of Hungary...

...BOOKS Myth, Legend and Memory When the World Was Whole Charles Fenyvesi Viking, 1990 226 pp , $19 95 Reviewed by David H Lynn Late one Friday afternoon, standing before the small Jewish community, made up of students, faculty and small children, in the college town where I teach, I read aloud one of the stones from When the World Was Whole in place of a dvar torch or formal talk It is one of those rare, hushed moments, where the external world has withdrawn very far away, and in which I sense the utter absorption of my listeners Partly, of course, this has to do with the skill of the author, but in its rhythms and resonances as much as in its details, the story belongs to a collective memory that sends its echoes through us all...

...But Fenyvesi is not an oral historian...

...he is not interested in merely piecing together fragments gleaned here and there, including Hungary itself...

...And on a chilly, grey Friday afternoon towards the end of the semester, as our litde community sits together in its pocket of light and listens, it is one we share in the richest sense For this is our tale, too, our family, part of that larger family scattered far and wide, held together by ceremony, by memory, by story...

...And Fenyvesi is a master storyteller, of that there is no doubt...

...He is warmly welcomed, invited to the dinner table, and begins to explain the purpose of his visit, when an unexpected incident startles him: A door opened and in came a young woman, with her long, golden hair unued She was surprised by the presence of two strange men and prompdy ran out...

...He does, in other words, what all the earlier storytellers had done shaping, giving order to, making sense of the past, and so coming to terms with it Even Uncle Shumi's story, which was set down at a typewriter in Shumi's old age, is given new life, new flesh, through the telling...

...Rather, Fenyvesi appropriates the tales and makes them his own...