Susan Suleiman returns to Hungary and to the city she once called 'home'

By Debra Bradley Ruder

Gazette Staff

The vacation that Susan Rubin Suleiman took to Budapest in 1984 was, in some ways, a typical trip down memory lane. She and her two sons roamed the Hungarian city, explored restaurants, and took lots of photographs.

But the trip was hardly typical, because Suleiman was returning -- for the first time in 35 years -- to the city of her birth, a city she had fled at age 10 to escape Communism.

She visited the apartment house where she had lived, the synagogue where her parents were married, and the hills where she had picnicked on Sundays with her family.

"I became, for a few days, a tour guide to my own life," recalls Suleiman, a professor of Romance and comparative literatures.

That trip led to a renewed friendship with Budapest and to considerable reflection on Suleiman's part about the relationship between one's life story and history, about exile and creativity, and about the Holocaust.

It also led to Suleiman's latest book, Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, published in October by the University of Nebraska Press.

Part memoir, part diary, the book will likely strike a chord with anyone who shares Suleiman's passion for Budapest or who has been uprooted from one's home, no matter where that home may be.

"It's the story of a woman's return, after many years of forgetfulness, to a city she once called home," Suleiman explains in the prologue. "Her peculiar relation to the city is best summed up as a relation to language: she speaks its language like a native, but with an accent. In the process of rediscovering the city as an adult . . . she comes to experience it as home; but not the home, sentimentalized, found again at last. Rather, Budapest becomes one of the places where she feels at home."

Tracking Down the Past

Suleiman moved to the U.S. in 1950, went on to Barnard College and Harvard (for bachelor's and doctoral degrees), traveled extensively to Paris and other parts of Europe, but never considered returning to Budapest.

Not, that is, until she watched her seriously ill mother playing Hungarian games with Suleiman's two sons in the fall of 1983.

"I decided before the end of my mother's visit that I had to take my children [to Budapest]," she recalls. "I desired to see again, and let my sons see, the city of my childhood, which had suddenly become for me, now that she was dying, the city of my mother's youth."

In 1993, Suleiman went back to Budapest as a fellow of the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study. Over the next six months, she completed a scholarly book of essays called Risking Who One is: Encounters With Contemporary Art and Literature (Harvard University Press, 1994).

But she also took the opportunity to find traces of her childhood and family by visiting streets, houses, and cemeteries, and by hunting for copies of official documents such as birth and marriage certificates.

She also sought to learn everything she could about the Jewish communities in Hungary and Poland, some of which were wiped out completely during the Holocaust. For example, she traveled to Gorlice, Poland, the city of her father's birth, and discovered that the city that once was home to 4,000 Jews -- half the total population -- today counted not a single Jew among its 80,000 inhabitants.

Everywhere she went in Hungary, Suleiman never hesitated to ask scholars, taxi drivers, and others she encountered about daily life and politics in Hungary after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

During her stay, she kept a diary that often kept her tapping at the keyboard until 1 or 2 in the morning. She described lectures and movies, dinner conversations, trips to the public baths, and friendships formed as Suleiman became increasingly comfortable in her native city.

The diary became a central part of her book, which also contains flashbacks to 1944, when her family went into virtual hiding after the Nazis began rounding up Jews in Budapest, and to 1949, when her family crossed by foot into Czechoslovakia, leaving behind practically everything they owned.

Although many of her memories are painful, "writing this diary was one of the most deeply pleasurable writing activities I have had," she said in a recent interview. "It's what I call 'writing without footnotes.' It's just me and my life and the page."

A Motherbook

The subtitle that Suleiman chose for her work -- In Search of the Motherbook -- carries many meanings. A motherbook, in Hungarian, is an official registry, and the term for copies of official documents translates into English as "excerpts from the motherbook." To most Hungarians, the expression is very ordinary, but to Suleiman, it is rich and poetic.

Not only does motherbook evoke her mother and father, "I also imagine it as an actual book," she writes, "a great blank ledger in which we inscribe our lives -- either literally, as I have attempted to do here, or metaphorically through the accumulation of choices, losses, and recoveries that constitute a life story."

That one's life story is bound with history became altogether clear during Suleiman's visits to Budapest. She notes, for example, that it is almost impossible to meet a Jew there who did not lose at least one relative during the Nazi period. Suleiman has realized that, although she did not personally experience the horrors of Auschwitz or Dachau, she is nonetheless a survivor of the Holocaust.

The book is, in many ways, about retrieving the past and making it part of one's present. Although the process can be frustrating, it can also be pleasurable, according to Suleiman.

"Almost without exception, the experiences of searching for information about my family produced a kind of exhilaration, even though what I found very often was very little," she said. "Even if I ended with a blank, I think the process of going to these places and actually walking the streets is what produced the pleasure."

In one poignant passage in Budapest Diary, Suleiman describes the satisfaction she derives from finally possessing her mother's birth certificate, her parent's marriage certificate, and her own birth certificate.

"Why has it meant so much to me to track down these pieces of paper?" she asks after unfolding the pale blue, stamped documents and spreading them out in her Budapest apartment. "They tell a story, however minimal: A girl is born, marries, and gives birth to a girl. The continuity of generations has prevailed over war and destruction, and I am the beneficiary of that victory."

SIDEBAR:

The phone rings in Susan Rubin Suleiman's Church Street office, and she answers "hello." Seconds later, she bursts into conversation in Hungarian, her mother tongue.

The caller is a Hungarian scholar now in the U.S., one of many colleagues Suleiman has added to her Rolodex as a result of her renewed relationship with Budapest.

In addition to this cadre of colleagues, Suleiman has embarked on a number of new scholarly projects that grew out of her six-month fellowship at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study in 1993.

For instance, she is currently coediting an anthology of postwar Hungarian Jewish writing.

"It's not the kind of thing I would have done before," said Suleiman, who specializes in modern literature and culture.

This spring, she will teach a Literature Concentration course that poses the question, "How can the story of the Holocaust be told?" She also plans to offer a course next fall on War and Memory: Representations of World War II in Postwar French Literature and Film (French 270).

In addition, Suleiman has developed a special double issue of the journal Poetics Today that features essays by 18 scholars on creativity in exile; that is, exploring whether displacement from home spurs or paralyzes creativity. It will appear as a book next year and will include pieces by Suleiman and Harvard professors Doris Sommer and Svetlana Boym.

"This new work has to do with my awareness that I'm part of this century's enormous mass movements of individuals due to war and other collective trauma," Suleiman explained. "As I say in the book, every life story is part of a larger history."