The Blau family: a tale of three cities

The year was 1935 when this story begins. The place was Budapest.

Mr Blau was a furrier, quite well off. In his younger days he had an ambition to study at university; but in the end, without any pressure from his father, he chose to join the family firm. He ran it well after his father’s death.

Mr Blau had three children: a son called Jeno and two daughters, Rozsi and Ibi. Ibi was pretty. Rozsi was rather plain. Ibi was married. (I regarded that fact as rather unfortunate, because I contemplated marrying her myself in spite of the large age difference between us. She was twenty seven, I was five.)

Jeno was much older than the girls. He was interested in politics. As a young man, he joined the Hungarian Social Democratic Party. In 1919, during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, he joined the Communists and had a high profile in their movement. It was high enough to make him a potential victim of the White Terror that followed the Red Terror.

And so Jeno Blau had to leave the country. He first fled to Vienna and then settled in the Soviet Union, where he got an administrative job in the Soviet economy. He soon made a name for himself there as one of the pioneers of the planned economy. He was elected to the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

Mr Blau did not like Communists. His fur business nearly went under the hostile anti-business rules introduced by the Communist Party in 1919 during its few months in power.  For a while Mr Blau went as far as refusing to reply to his son’s letters, but after a decade or so he relented.

“How is Rozsi?” asked the son. Mr Blau had to admit that things were not going well. “You know,” wrote the father, “Rozsi has always been a lonely soul. She never liked company, neither of girls nor of boys, and she has been deteriorating in the last few years. Sometimes she just sits in her room — you know, the small one at the back that she insisted on moving into — and when she is there she just stares at the wallpaper.  Your mother and I have introduced a number of nice boys to her, but in vain. She refused to go out with any one of them and talked to them in monosyllables; I don’t know what to do.”

Father and son had quite an extensive correspondence on the subject of Rozsi’s loneliness. “Here in Moscow we have a happy community,” Jeno wrote. “We all believe that in the Soviet Union we have found the ideal society, that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Do you remember, Dad? You introduced me to Candide.” Then one day the son had a new idea. “Let me make a suggestion. I don’t know whether it would work,” he wrote, “but perhaps a change of scenery would help. What do you think of her coming to Moscow for a few weeks? I could get her a visitor’s visa. What do you think? In any case, ask her.” Rozsi said yes.

My mother, a childhood friend of the two girls, told me of Rozsi’s possible visit to Moscow and the reasons. “You know,” my mother told me, “Rozsi is still single, she is 31 and she has not yet found a husband. I think she wants to go to Moscow, and she might hope to marry one of Jeno’s friends.” I did not understand why Rozsi had to go to Moscow to get married, but I thought that was her problem and expressed no further interest in the matter.

As it happened Rozsi was back from Moscow in less than three weeks. She was apparently full of energy. She invited all her friends, whom she had not seen for years, for afternoon tea. “I shall tell you what Moscow is like”, she told everyone.

My mother asked me whether I wanted to go with her to listen to Rozsi’s story. I had only two questions. (i) Will Ibi be there? And (ii) will there be any cakes with the afternoon tea? To both questions, my mother replied: “Yes, quite likely.” So I decided to go with her.  It took us about 3 minutes to walk to Mr Blau’s flat. There were about half a dozen women already sitting there. Mrs Blau was busying herself with the tea and crockery.

Rozsi started to talk. She did not waste her time with any introduction.  “You just can’t imagine the poverty there,” was her first sentence. “You can’t imagine the food they have, nor the way they live. Jeno’s flat was once owned by a single family. Now, in the same flat, live as many as eight families. For the toilet you have to queue up, beds are divided by curtains. There is always some argument going on in the kitchen. It is a miracle that I managed to stay there for nearly three weeks. Jeno was incredibly nice to me, but I could not hide my disappointment.”

The cakes were good. I liked Mrs Blau’s cakes. Rozsi remained in high spirits all afternoon. She was a changed person: ebullient, lively, cheerful. The likely reason was her sudden realisation of how lucky and how privileged she was. She ended her account with a new ambition: “Once you get the travel bug, it is difficult to stop. Daddy promised to get an American visa for me. I’m going to New York.”

Rozsi got the visa. I never saw her again. After the war, I heard from a friend that she was happily married in America and had two children. They lived in New York. Her husband had many years before been an apprentice in Mr Blau’s furriery. Meanwhile, Ibi disappeared. No one knew what had happened to her.

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