Tag Archives: Hungary

Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts

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Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts, a wonderful book by my friend and fellow crime-writer A.J. Sidransky, is a success on many levels. This nonfiction book is part travelog, part family history, part culinary adventure, and part coming of age story, as seen through a father’s loving eyes, and it satisfies on many levels.

I particularly liked the author’s writing style. It was as if he and I were sitting at a tiny outdoor café table somewhere in Hungary and, over a plate of cherry strudel (not apple for me), he was telling me a story. It’s that personal, immediate, and written from the heart.

You don’t have to be Hungarian as he and I (not my Texas half) are to enjoy the touches of Old Europe he found, interspersed with enough history to make events unfolding there today more meaningful. He tells the story of his Jewish immigrant ancestors and how they came to America from Hungary and Slovakia (which was part of Hungary until after World War I) and made new lives here. Not all came, though, and many of those who clung to their homeland perished in the Holocaust.

My grandparents were likewise Hungarian and Slovakian, from the same part of the country, though they were Roman Catholic, and I treasured each detail and scene. But you needn’t share his family’s history to find a thrilling tale in his forebears’ determination, their courage in embarking on the long journey and starting their lives anew, their daily difficulties in a country whose language they didn’t speak. When Alan found remnants of the family’s homes and the businesses they left behind, it was compelling evidence of their past lives, like a lingering fingerprint in the community.

Alan had envisioned taking this trip ever since he became interested in family history several decades ago. Finally, as his son Jake graduated from law school, they decided to do it together. As a result, you see several Central European countries not just through Alan’s eyes, a man who has “lived it” vicariously for a long time, but through the eyes of his son Jake, who came of age more than a half-century after the Holocaust. Alan wasn’t sure Jake would be interested, but the young man’s observations proved him a perceptive, compassionate observer. In this way, it’s a story about the maturing of a father-son relationship that is heart-warming to read amidst all the tribulations and disconnects in the world, past and present.

Alan is also a trained chef, and you’ll be extra-pleased to find several family recipes he’s collected at the back of the book. They are just another way he transforms the abstractions of history and culture into something meaningful in daily life. Jó étvágyat!

P.S. I’m told my grandmother’s strudel dough was so thin, your could see the pattern of the cloth beneath it, as in this photograph. Alas, none of her six daughters did what Alan has done and preserved those precious recipes. — VW

The Rouge Shadow

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I see my grandfather in the background in Diego Rivera’s North Wall mural at the Detroit Institute of Art, (here’s a link; these famous works aren’t free for reproduction), dwarfed by the scale of the machinery and the enterprise around him. For decades, he worked at the legendary Ford Rouge plant, where Great Lakes freighters brought sand (for glassmaking), iron ore, and coal to the mile-long factory, and, every 49 seconds, out rolled an automobile.

Ford Rouge plant, Dearborn

Ford Rouge plant, Dearborn, Michigan (photo: wikimedia)

Today, a tour of an auto plant suggests a relatively clean job. Robots do the heavy lifting, with just-in-time sourcing of parts. In the 1920s to 1940s, when my grandfather worked there, the Rouge was the country’s only auto factory with its own steel mill, and clouds of sulphurous smoke and grit filled the air. It had a tire-making plant, a glass furnace, plants for making transmissions and radiators, its own railroad, and even a paper mill. As I understand it, one of my uncles was in charge of keeping the steel mill’s fires stoked, which explains why he always had to work Christmas Day.

My grandfather was born in 1888, and I could not find his immigration record until I realized the Hungarian spelling of Frank is Ferencz. Even then I had to search using all the spellings of the family’s last name my various uncles used: Hadde, Hedge, Hegyi, and Heddi. By the process of elimination, my best candidate is Ferencz Hegyi, who immigrated from Fiatfalva, Transylvania, Hungary, in 1906 and arriving at Ellis Island aboard the S.S. Kaiser Wilhelm II. (Alfred Stieglitz’s photo “The Steerage,”—called “one of the greatest photographs of all time,” was taken aboard that ship.)

(2017 research unearthed my grandfather’s naturalization papers, which reveal a quite different story. It was hard for me to give up this Transylvania connection!)