Tag #141525 - Interview #102477 (Zsuzsanna G. )

My grandpa, David Kauders, paid absolutely no attention to religion. My father, as he told us, was in the third or fourth grade in a Jewish grammar [school] when the teacher smacked him, and he split with religion for the rest of his life. Except, naturally, for his death bed, when he asked a religious friend to write down the words to the father’s blessing for him, because then it was important to him, that he bless his children. Concerning my mother, keep in mind that the Jews from the Alfold were totally assimilated. So the Jew who stayed religious, did so in such a very neolog way [Neolog Jewry] [7], that is, they kept the high holidays, my grandma even lit candles on Friday evening, my mother also, but for example, they never kept the Sabbath. It never came up. There was school, you had to work. We didn’t work on High Holidays, of course. The candle-lighting and dinner on Friday wore us out. The point I’d like to stress is that my family thought of itself as Jewish Hungarians. Hungarians of the Israelite religion. The stress was on the Hungarian. Starting with the fairy tales, folk songs, the culture that I soaked up from when I was tiny was Hungarian culture. There’s a scene in the ‘Sunshine’ film [by Istvan Szabo] when the Jewish family are singing ‘The Spring Wind Sows Rain” at the dinner table. That reminded me of how much we sang together during my entire childhood, and what we sang: folk songs, so-called ‘Hungarian tunes’, popular operetta songs.