passage about hungary
Answers
From the Rosh Hashonah issue of Binah Magazine:
I left Jerusalem with my wife and two children, 829 dollars worth of overweight luggage, and thirty thousand dollars of debt. We arrived six hours later in Budapest, Hungary, at an apartment stocked with two loaves of bread, a bag of apples, and a box of milk. We had no local money and didn’t know where to find a bank. We didn’t know our address or our phone number, either.
Presumably, things could only get better.
Having never quite adjusted to being an American in Eretz Yisrael, I still wonder at the rosy idealism with which I approached this current transmigration. It was the summer of 1993, only four years since the Iron Curtain had come down and, for the first time in decades, allowed Jewish institutions to open up in any Eastern bloc country. In that time, the school was already on its third full contingent of Jewish faculty, and most of the students had only a rudimentary command of English. But Sara and I were first-year teachers, unindoctrinated in the ways of the real world and grateful just to have been offered positions that paid a living wage. When the job sprang up before us as our creditors closed in behind, we jumped.
At least the school’s name sounded hopeful: Mesoras Avos — “Tradition of the Patriarchs.” For nine years I had lived in Eretz Yisrael, studying the traditions and laws of my forefathers and training to teach them to others. Despite all that preparation, however, and despite all my years of attempted acculturation as an American in Eretz Yisrael, I found myself poorly braced for the shock of once again becoming a stranger in a strange land.
I needed almost two weeks just to learn my address, which became, in my own mind, a symbol of all things Hungarian: 68 Dozsa Gyorgy utca — pronounced DOE-zha D’YOR-d’yuh UT-sa hot-von-NYALTS. Sara carried it written on a note in her purse the whole ten months we lived there, after the first time she ventured into the city without it and almost didn’t find her way back home.