2. LOVE OF A GARDEN

My maternal grandmother Ethel Photo5 had always wanted a garden: a place to raise flowers and walk around on summer afternoons, with maybe a bench for reading if she had the time. Time was what she lacked, while raising her three children and investing her hopes in their future. Those hopes that she had given up for herself, with her worthless husband never making enough money to improve their lives in Hungary after the First World War. He tried various professions but failed at them all, ending up as overseer on a series of country farms, taking the place of absentee landlords in managing the peasants.

This meant changing homes every couple of years, with each of the children being born and registered in a different village. There was no time for planting a garden and no sense in it either, as they would soon be moving on. They lived in the overseer’s small house, surrounded by chickens and other barnyard animals. Grandmother Ethel’s dream was to move to town, into her own house with its pleasant garden in front. Her children could then attend better schools than the ones available in the villages and prepare for real careers.

The only son, Gyuri, could become a lawyer and enter the middle class, while the girls Edith and Magda could marry well, with a couple of well-to-do (or at least ambitious) men they would meet in town. Yes, ambition, just what was lacking in her own husband! Ethel foresaw no problem for beautiful Magda Photo6, but had some doubts about Edith, with her long nose and timid ways. Actually, Edith was the one who resembled Ethel the most and maybe that's why she was so hard on her, with criticism that shook her self-confidence for life. My mother Edith later passed on her “nose complex” to me as well.

One day Ethel’s prayers were answered. Her husband Lajos Photo7 finally got a job in town and they could just manage to rent a small house. As for a garden, a tiny field of mud lay between the outer gate of the property and the main door to the dwelling. She started planting her seeds right away, but the rains kept muddying everything. What she needed was some paving, but of course they could not afford it. Then she noticed that the street outside the gate was being paved, using the large stones common at that time, with a big pile slowly diminishing right in front of her house.

What luck - all she had to do was wait for evening, when the workers went home, and then help herself to some of those wonderful stones in the pile. Even at this her husband was useless, refusing to "steal" city property. She was sure, however, that they would never know the difference and carried each heavy stone in by herself, until she had enough to make a lovely path through her budding flowers. Her husband, now grown fat without his active outdoor job, could wobble down the path too.

This was the path that the men courting the daughters were to take, leading right into respectability and the middle class. By the time the girls were grown, though, Fate had intervened. Gyuri, the intelligent son, actually managed to go down the path to University, to study law. He gave lessons to and shared the books of a fellow student less bright than himself, whose rich father gratefully paid Gyuri's fees as well. That is, until the Fascist laws were passed that forbade Jews to attend universities. Not even the wonderful garden path could help them then, or later, when the parents were taken away to the death camps from which they never returned.

All of Ethel’s ambitions of respectability for herself were thus in vain, though after the war her three children (who had been in hiding in Budapest) did find their feet again. They started families of their own and finally emigrated to the US and to Australia, the real lands of opportunity. Such a strong woman, my grandmother, whose dreams were finally realized only overseas, far from her garden paved with such hope and daring.