One Must Also Be Hungarian by Adam Biro, translated by Catherine Tihanyi

The title for the English version of Adam Biro’s memoir comes from a lamentation allegedly uttered by the Italian director Frank Capra amidst a 1940s Hollywood bloated with the perhaps questionable artistry of Hungarian immigrants. Upon seeing a studio sign warning that “It’s not enough to be Hungarian to make films. One must also have talent,” Capra is said to have turned the edict around and griped: “It’s not enough to have talent to make films. One must also be Hungarian.”

Hollywood, writes Adam Biro, is “the main vehicle of American myths,” and with this moving memoir he has rendered for his homeland the same service its many émigrés — among them Zsa Zsa Gabor, Tony Curtis, and Bela Lugosi — provided to America’s Tinseltown. Having left Hungary for France during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Mr Biro is the last one in his family “to have known the world of Then and Over There,” and his story is an attempt to capture for his French-born grandson Ulysse “this mysterious and mythical other side … whose bittersweet specificity is fast disappearing” as it becomes engulfed by “their Europe … the EU-nizing, Euronizing one, a Europe reduced to a market.”

Through a series of whimsical vignettes, he brings us Finkelstein Ábrahám, who toiled the land in an old Hungarian village at the dawn of the 19th century; his son Jakab, a seltzer deliveryman so poor he had to give up one of his children, the author’s maternal grandfather, for adoption; and the great Luy Gyorgy, Mr Biro’s grandfather, a Jew-turned-Catholic who converted back to Judaism to get married and became a fat, jolly lawyer in Budapest, originally an activist and lefty, later a commanding officer at a camp for Russian POWs, a soccer fan, a bon vivant, poet, and lover of witty repartees. On his father’s side, we meet his uncle Nándor, an intellectual steeped in Old World elegance who represented the Hungarian minority in the Transylvanian Parliament during the inter-war years and who instilled in young Adam a love for reading, writing, and women. (Mr Biro demurely admits to always having been “burdened with heterosexuality.”)

But the attachment to Hungary that emerges as a common thread among these characters was an unrequited love. Mr Biro’s ancestors were Jews in a country that was “no more anti-Semitic than other nations” until the 20th century, when it earned the dubious distinction of being the first modern state to enact explicitly anti-Jewish laws and, with a series of pogroms in 1919, gave its citizenry a taste of the horrors to be later wrought by the advent of Nazi Germany. In a brief but haunting scene, the author describes the murder of his paternal grandfather and uncle Jószi at the hands of the Arrow One Nazi party. The killing was a fluke: his uncle’s work on behalf of Transylvania protected him and his close family from the laws affecting Jews; one of Jószi’s mistresses was, moreover, the daughter of a high commander in the Nazi party.

The episode casts a lingering shadow over the rest of the book, but the flip side to its dark irony is the same roguish sense of the absurd that made Biro’s Two Jews on a Train, published in America in 2001, such a deeply entertaining and playful evocation of Jewish folklore and mythology. Amid the horror and loss, the author revels in the “Dantaesque fate” that befell a vaguely anti-Semitic Hungarian actor who is condemned to playing Polish Jews in Paris because the French lack a discriminating ear for Eastern European accents. And readers learn of an Uncle Eugene who strikes gold in America and whose wife, a breezy California blonde with a limited grasp of foreign names, occasionally sent parcels to her husband’s family, one of them addressed to Feladó, which means “sender” in Hungarian and which she had evidently copied from the back of one of the “deliriously grateful letters” her in-laws had sent to thank her for previous gifts. Upon Eugene’s death, the Soviet financiers hand the family a Java-brand Czech motorbike in lieu of his monetary bequest; “it was no car: the bureaucrats had a petit bourgeois imagination and were used to thinking small,” quips Mr Biro, adding that “Grandmother felt it more reasonable to put the motorcycle up for sale than to learn to ride it at age 69.”

Mr Biro has a weakness for heroes and bad guys. Against fulsome portrayals of long-dead family members, villains are rendered with almost childlike disdain. Everything evil — “mussolini, hitler, stalin, rakosi, communism” — is delivered “in small letters, please.” To perhaps unintentional comic effect, Admiral Miklós Horthy, who unleashed the White Terror against Hungarian Jews at the end of World War I, is referred to as “the piece-of-garbage regent horthy” and “horthy-the-puke himself.” Only the author’s relationships to his parents bear the gritty mark of reality in measured but heartbreaking descriptions of the father’s slip into senility and the suffocating motherly love from which the 15-year-old Biro felt the need to escape. Mr Biro, it turns out, is a maternal rather than political refugee.

He notes, of his uncle Jószi’s photographs, that a picture is “a two-sided mirror,” telling us as much about its subject as it does about the person behind the camera. The same can be said for books, and to his credit, the author recognizes that his characters are as much a reflection of himself as they are individuals in their own right. “Can one love a country? Isn’t it always ourselves that we love, through a place, a person?” he muses, with a dash of characteristic grandiloquence.

Biro laments the loss of a time when he was “loved unconditionally” — a loss expedited and magnified by war and genocide, but one which is the universal and enduring province of adulthood. He succeeds in bottling some of the magic of that bygone world. But in the end the reason he offers for its lasting, if elusive, sway is deceptively simple. “It was like all childhoods,” he writes, “but it was mine.”