I am writing a Jewish-themed memoir. It’s about my grandpa’s experiences in pre-Holocaust Hungary and my own odd Jewish journey. Please check back here now and then for more excerpts, written and audio, as I complete the story.
The following is an excerpt from my work in progress. It will be incorporated into my second novel, which has the working title of Diaspora Blues. I haven’t yet changed any names. This really happened.
I’m glad I didn’t see it for myself. The way my father described it was bad enough. My three beautiful black cats had been tortured, their whiskers cut, their fur singed with cigarette burns. Our house had been vandalized, anti-Jewish epithets painted on the wall. Of all the houses on our street, why was ours chosen for this treatment? Why were our pets singled out for abuse? It was obvious to me. How else are we different from others in our neighborhood? At the age of nine, after having lived in Georgia for four years, I knew of only one way in which we were different.
We had pulled into our driveway in the summer of 1975 after a long vacation out west, and my dad could tell something was wrong with the house. He told us to wait in the camper while he went inside. He was gone only a few minutes before he came back, climbed back into the driver’s seat, and drove us out of the Confederacy for good. We did not stop until we hit Michigan. I never even got to say goodbye to my friends.
But to really understand why we left Georgia and why our house was targeted, we need to go back three years, before the Yom Kippur War, to 1972, when our school was forced to comply with a federal school integration order. For the first time, black students were going to be bused into A. Brian Merry Elementary School, where I was attending the first grade.
The college antisemitism I faced at Wayne State University in Detroit in the ’80s was of a similar character to kind endured by Jewish college kids today. The only difference is that I had no online network to which I could turn for solidarity or comfort. I faced it alone. I told my story to the Detroit Jewish News, which was then picked up by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (where I was once managing editor) and by other newspapers, including The Jerusalem Post.
I don’t want anybody to think that my college experience was all negative, though. In fact, I loved my time at Wayne State. This story is one of a few that really molded me into the kind of journalist, and Jew, I am today. That’s why I’m also going to file this post under “memoir,” too, because it is part of a continuing story of my life and the evolution of my relationship with Judaism. Here’s how this story begins:
In 1985, I stood in the corner of a crowded meeting room at the Wayne State University Student Center, stone-faced, while people I did not know lined up at a microphone to denounce me before the Student Newspaper Publications Board.
“I don’t think Howard Lovy should be editor of The South End because he is biased toward Israel,” said one, referring to the student newspaper, where I was up for the editor’s position.
The board would decide if I should take the top job. By virtue of my role at the paper, I was in position to assume the top editor slot.
“Howard is a Zionist,” said another critic, “so he should be disqualified from this important job as editor of The South End.”
Some of them said something about the racist rabbi, Rabbi Meir Kahane. Another said something about the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon three years previously by an Israel-allied militia group and with the knowledge of the Israeli army. Apparently I was responsible for all these things and people. I should not have been surprised.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, here is my family’s Holocaust story. This story is based on memories passed on to me by my grandfather and by my great-uncle Charles, who went back to Hungary after the war, but changed his name to Lukacs, which sounded less Jewish. Charles became a journalist in postwar Hungary, and many relatives said that I take after him. My grandfather helped Charles get out in 1956 during the Soviet invasion, and he Americanized his name to Lucas. I spent a lot of time with my great-uncle Charles before he passed away in his 90s. It’s where I get a lot of my firsthand information about the Holocaust.
It was in 1939 that Charles put a four-year-old Andrew Lovy—my father—on a train heading west out of Budapest. He was accompanied by my grandmother Elza. They both later joined my grandfather, who had gone on ahead to America to establish a life there. My grandparents didn’t have to see the crematoria to know that they were waiting for them. I owe my existence to the far-sightedness of my Grandpa Joe, who got out in time. But, his is a different story to tell. Here is where it begins.
Hungarian Jews sat out most of the war in relative peace, although with increasingly draconian anti-Jewish laws passed. Hungarian ruler Admiral Horthy was allied with the Germans, but would not do the Nazis’ bidding when it came to the Jews. At least, not yet.
But toward the end of the war—when Horthy knew it was lost—he tried to make a separate peace with the Russians, who were already on Hungary’s doorstep. So, on October 15, 1944, the day Horthy was to announce his surrender to the Russians, the Germans stepped in and installed a Nazi puppet regime run by the viciously anti-Semitic Arrow Cross. Yes, this is the same Arrow Cross that Donald Trump adviser Seb Gorka idolizes. They has been my family’s tormentors since before the war.
Then the familiar pattern began. First, influential Jews were stripped of their government and teaching positions. Next, Jewish businesses were smashed, looted, burned, or confiscated. Then Jews were stripped of all their possessions, rounded up and, starving, forced into cramped and disease-ridden ghettos. Entire villages in the Hungarian countryside were drained of their Jews, who were transported to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, or Mauthausen.
Already, most of European Jewry had been murdered. The world knew that Hungary was next—including Franklin Roosevelt. There were formal protests, and attempts to make secret deals to save the lives of a few Jews here and there, but the Allies—by then firmly superior in the air and on the ground—did nothing to save the Hungarian Jews.
The world watched.
Death-camp deportations and mass executions of Hungarian Jews were recorded matter-of-factly on the inside pages of the New York Times.
Sometime in the summer of 1944, my great-grandmother—a deeply religious woman who came from a long line of rabbis and Jewish scholars—was placed in a cattle car, taken to Auschwitz, and murdered in a gas chamber.
In Czechoslovakia, the word came out that it was now safe for the surviving Jews to come out of hiding. My great-aunt Hedwig, her husband, and two children believed it. They, too, were handed over to the Germans and murdered.
They were taken to the border of Austria and made to dig anti-tank trenches to try and slow the Russian army. The conditions were appalling, as sadistic German guards murdered Jews at random and threw their bodies in the trenches dug by the victims.
My uncles Andor and Charles were able-bodied men, so they were used as slave labor. By the end of 1944, they were marched from one camp to another, just a few steps ahead of the advancing Allies. They were taken to the border of Austria and made to dig anti-tank trenches to try and slow the Russian army. The conditions were appalling, as sadistic German guards murdered Jews at random and threw their bodies in the trenches dug by the victims.
It was by chance that Andor, in a separate death march, met up with his brother Charles. They marched together for a while. But soldiers of the nearly defeated German army were firing random machine-gun volleys into the marchers. My uncles decided it would be best if they split apart, so one of them would have a better chance of surviving until liberation.
They were right. Andor fell when one of his German guards opened fire. He would have been killed, but the Germans were in a hurry at this point. He heard one of the say, “Don’t waste a bullet on him. He’s dead already.”
Charles found Andor critically wounded, but alive, among a heap of bullet-ridden bodies. Charles picked his brother up and helped him continue to the march to the Mauthausen concentration camp. There, despite horrible deprivations and abuse, he was able to nurse Andor back to health and wait it out until Americans came six months later.
After the war, Andor testified against one of his Mauthausen guards, who was hanged for his crimes.
A few relatives survived Auschwitz and were sent to displaced persons camps. Many immigrated to Israel, but the trauma continued. An uncle could not cope with the memories of Auschwitz and committed suicide. My brother is named for him.
The Holocaust story involving my family is both unusual in its cruelty, but not so unusual in the context of the Holocaust. Many families suffered worse. Life-and-death decisions that would impact the existence of future generations were made in split seconds. There is more to my family’s story, and it is very much intertwined with my own.
Me with my classmates at A. Brian Merry Elementary School, 1972. I’m in the middle row, two kids down from my teacher.
Thank you to the Jewish Daily Forward for running this memory of growing up Jewish in the South. Some aspects of being a Southern Jew was painful, some of it I’m proud of. The memory was triggered by the busing integration debate between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Oh, and that’s 6-year-old me in the middle, two kids down from my teacher, Mrs. Vanover. As usual, I’m staring off into space, dreaming of being far away. Mrs. Vanover was a horrible teacher. She would make kids who “told on” other kids stand in a corner wearing a cut-out donkey tail that said, “I am a tattletale.” Once, she threw out my jacket for not hanging it properly. My father had to come and get it.
Culture is slower to change than laws. Sometimes, it takes generations. I would be the only white kid who swapped desserts with an African American classmate at lunchtime. My white classmates refused to eat any food they touched.
I left Jewish journalism 18 years ago, but decided to return due to the rise in anti-Semitism. I felt like there’s more I needed to say after all these years. So, two Jewish publications accepted two separate essays. And they both ran July 3, 2019. The first one was picked up by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, where I used to be managing editor. You can read that one here:
Anyway, this tale of Southern Jews, white supremacists, and cat-torturing Nazis is part of a larger narrative in my memoir-in-progress. Chronologically, the two incidents come just before and after this excerpt, which ran in Longreads, detailing my memories of the Yom Kippur War as seen through the prism of OCD. It will all make sense, in context, I hope.
Me, in 1985, age 19, with more hair than I needed and wearing the keffiyeh given to me by my Palestinian friend.
In this scene of my memoir-in-progress, I learn an important lesson in college about perception and reality when it comes to Muslim-Jewish relations. And I’m introduced to the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. More on that in a bit. The year is 1985, and, as I say in this excerpt, I think I know everything, when in fact I know very little. This is typical for a person who is only nineteen years old and being exposed to many things for the first time in life.
This is the story of the beginning of many things in my life: An understanding of Arab perceptions, an intense friendship I had with a Palestinian woman, my own journey through the way others perceive Judaism, and the accidental beginning of my career in Jewish journalism. The passage at the end will make sense in context, I hope. A recurring theme in my book is also my struggles with OCD and how the comfort of Jewish ritual gave it a home.
From time to time on this blog, I’ll post various excerpts as I get closer to completing my book about my grandfather’s life in pre-Holocaust Hungary, and my own personal journey through Judaism.
I decided to narrate this short chapter to see if I had the stamina to, eventually, record my own audiobook. Turns out, I’m not sure. I decided to take this seven-minute snippet and add some music to the background to make my voice perhaps sound more appealing. But, then, everybody is critical of their own voices.
You can read more excerpts from my work-in-progress on my Memoir page.
My Private Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
For those who’d rather not hear my voice, here is the raw, unedited version of this chapter.
“You don’t know everything, Howard,” Lamya told me, her eyes rolling slightly, revealing just a hint of humor, letting me know that she was both kidding and not kidding. It was 1985 and we were both working at my college newspaper at Wayne State University in Detroit. I did not know much about her, except I heard that she was Palestinian and had escaped from an abusive marriage.
“You think you know a lot, but you don’t know everything,” she said. Well, a more accurate statement might have been that I didn’t know anything. She was thirty years old and I was only nineteen. There were a great many things I did not know, but Lamya was specifically referring to my lack of knowledge about Arab culture and the way they think about historical and current grievances. I saw this in the angry letters to the editor I was receiving over my coverage of controversy over a book, a kind of silly-looking book. Turned out, the book was not a book at all, but really a fun-house mirror through which one could view many layers of distortions.
A few days earlier, Rabbi Oppenheimer of the campus Hillel approached me at the Student Center. I don’t know how the rabbi found me, or even how he knew who I was. I had never dropped by Hillel’s area of the Student Center. Somebody must have pointed me out to him as the guy who was writing pro-Israel commentaries in the student newspaper. He didn’t look like much of a rabbi to me. He wore a Greek fisherman’s cap. Tall, scruffy-bearded, he walked with a slouch that made it appear as if he was folded in half at the waist, but the crease stayed.
We had never spoken before, yet Oppenheimer approached me as if we had known each other for years and were continuing an earlier conversation. He tossed a book near my lunch tray, shaking the gravy well in my mashed potatoes, and then hovered above me and asked, “Guess what I found the Muslim Students Association selling at Manoogian Hall?”
It wasn’t really a book. It was more like a pamphlet. On the cover were a strange combination of words that actually struck me as funny.The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. I didn’t know what to make of it. There was an undertone of what I took to be Jewish sarcasm right there in the title. It seemed like it could be the script for a new Mel Brooks movie. You know, like Jews in Space. I looked up at the rabbi with a half-grin on my face, waiting for the punch line. Instead, there was silence. It took a couple of beats for me to realize that Oppenheimer was waiting for a reaction from me. I had nothing. He let out a tiny sigh and sat down next to me.
“Surely you’ve heard of the Protocols,” Oppenheimer said.
My blank stare was his answer.
This is what Lamya was trying to tell me when she said that I did not know anything. “It doesn’t matter if the Protocols are true,” she said. “Most Arab Muslims believe they are true, so that is the reality you deal with.”
Up until then, my knowledge of anti-Semitism was narrow, despite some experience with it during my early life in Georgia, and later in a suburb of Chicago (“Hey, Howard, aren’t you going to pick up that penny?”). But the serious, deadly kind of anti-Semitism was confined primarily to the Holocaust, fed mostly by my grandfather’s stories of Hungary. What happened before the life of my grandfather, or how it fit in with the larger narrative of my people, I was clueless. That’s what it is to be truly obsessive in the clinical sense. The information you obtain, obsessively, is narrow, focused, and often incomplete because it ignores the periphery and all that comes before and after. It was akin to extreme contemplation of the chalk outline of a corpse with no knowledge of the events that led to the murder. My obsession with the Holocaust was devoid of context except my own family’s.
“The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” I grinned slightly. The name still sounded funny to me.
“I’ll leave this here with you,” said the rabbi, who was not smiling at all. “Read it, and then come see me at Hillel and I’ll give you a statement for your story.”
My story? I had never agreed to write a story on this. But, nevertheless, I flipped the book open and the more I read, the more curious I became. Mel Brooks indeed, It was filled with what I found to be laughable lines about One World Government under the control of International Jewry. It was obviously written by anti-Semites, but if you are a Jew who denies it was written by Jews, well, then that just proves that you are part of the plot. That’s the beauty of a conspiracy theory. The more you deny, the guiltier you seem. And, now, Arab students are using it as some kind of proof of Jewish intent in the Middle East.
This is what Lamya was trying to tell me when she said that I did not know anything. “It doesn’t matter if the Protocols are true,” she said. “Most Arab Muslims believe they are true, so that is the reality you deal with.”
Semite and Anti-Semite
“We are Semites ourselves,” said Mohammed, the association’s president, speaking to me in a cramped office at the Student Center. “How can we be anti-Semitic?” Mohammed seemed a bit old to be a student. He came to Detroit from Egypt, which led to the rumor that he was also with the Muslim Brotherhood. I had no idea if that was true, but he was to become my nemesis for the next three years.
“It doesn’t matter if the Protocols are fiction. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t,” said Mohammed, arms waving, gesturing, hovering over me as I remained seated. “But you cannot deny that many of the prophecies in this book have come true. Jews run the financial systems.”
“Prophecies,” I thought. “Prophecies.” It’s the language of religion used to describe an anti-Jewish invention from the czarist era. I cocked my head a bit like a dog. Mohammad picked up on it immediately. “Yes, prophecies.”
Strangely, my story would be plagiarized by an intern at The Detroit Jewish News, leading to the firing of the intern who was replaced by me. This unexpectedly led to my career as a “Jewish journalist,” and eventually, years later, managing editor at JTA, a Jewish news service. I hadn’t meant these things to happen.
But I was only in college, was learning as I went along, and had not yet had my full immersion into Arab culture with Lamya and her friends. That would come later, and through it an appreciation of how very alike Jews and Arabs were in many respects. At that moment, though, at the age of 19, I thought I knew what an anti-Semite was.
Accidental Jewish Journalism Career
I wrote the Protocols story, which led to my friendship with Lamya, who would change my life in many ways, aside from telling me that I did not know everything. Strangely, my story would be plagiarized by an intern at The Detroit Jewish News, leading to the firing of the intern who was replaced by me. This unexpectedly led to my career as a “Jewish journalist,” and eventually, years later, managing editor at JTA, a Jewish news service.
I hadn’t meant these things to happen. But I felt I was being dragged there by this state of Jewishness that I could not escape. It was a voice that was always there since as long as I had conscious thought. It was sometimes my grandfather’s voice, other times I interpreted it as God’s. It could not have been my own, since there were obviously forces outside myself at play. I was convinced of it.
This voice led to the illusion of conviction and confidence and how very convinced I was that I was right. It’s how I stoically endured, expressionless, when the entire Arab student body showed up to a public forum to denounce my application to be editor-in-chief of my college newspaper. It’s how I handled the humiliation when Abbie Hoffman, himself, denounced me at a campus rally as representative of all that was wrong with the youth of the 1980s.
The tics of my early childhood had morphed into rigid thought in college. Yet, the feelings of being out of sync with my peers, of having another being travel with me, forcing my muscles and my brain synapses into rigid rituals, were still there in more disturbing forms. The tics, the habits, even the waking sleep paralysis and night terrors I had mistaken for God much of my life. What else could they be? But by 1985 I knew that it was a flaw in me. The voice was more than an impulse. It was much more dark, persistent, life-swallowing than the narcissism of youth.
This is a kind of memory of a memory. It is my grandfather’s childhood accounts of a Hungarian pogrom and other anti-Jewish violence and blood libel. Longreads says this takes 17 minutes to read. For slow readers like me, longer. It took about 100 years to write, from the time my grandfather experienced it then told it to my brothers and me. It’s part of a memoir I’m writing about my grandfather, Judaism, and other ghosts.
By the way, I was looking for historical references to the Hungarian pogrom described by my grandfather. I found it in the American Jewish Year Book. These disturbing accounts were of anti-Jewish violence well before the Holocaust. These were post-WWI. Click for a closer look.
There is much to unpack in the excerpt, from Hungarian pogroms to my grandfather’s memory of family and the town in which he grew up, to an actual instance of blood libel. In future posts, I’ll explain more about what my grandfather witnessed.
Howard Lovy retells his grandfather’s childhood accounts of anti-Jewish violence and blood libel in pre-Holocaust Hungary.
On the banks of the Danube, there is a place where the great river takes two sharp 45-degree turns, making it difficult for ships to pass unseen. For centuries, this feature made the city, nestled within, a fortification against foreign attack. But from an enemy inside the city’s own boundaries, there was no natural protection. And for a 9-year-old boy, hiding as his neighbors ransacked his grandparents’ home, a wine barrel was the only shelter. There he hid, silent, while around him echoed the muffled, angry, anguished sounds of a pogrom.
One of the themes in my memoir-in-progress is the complex relationship I’ve had between my lifelong struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and the comfort of Jewish religious rituals. In this segment, which ran in Longreads, I am eight years old and struggling with both as best I could.
At the time I was aware I was different, and thought differently, but I did not know what to call it. I was decades away from identifying what I had as OCD. To me, it was all wrapped up in the other way I was different from my classmates. I was a Jew in the South.
It was not until I worked at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in the late ’90s and early ’00s that I officially, in my own mind, tied the two together. I received a press release from a psychologist warning that Jewish women with OCD have problems around Pesach, obsessively cleaning out chametz. It was a eureka moment for me as I looked at my own past.
This is an idea explored in my memoir, that the comfortable rituals of religion can also be manifestations of a Jewish OCD mind in never-ending loops.
I wondered if Grandpa — who to me was almost God himself, and who surely knew God — had had to control his thoughts the way I do in order to survive in that place where everybody was Hungry, where everybody hated Jews.
As an 8-year-old with OCD, Howard Lovy hoped his magical thinking might persuade God to end the Yom Kippur War.
… I turned away in shame. To me, the head nodding, the clucking, the shoulder shrugging, the sniffing, the spinning, and repeated touching of objects … all of it, all my rituals, they were God, or a test by God, a test that I failed every single hour of every day.
God tested me to see if I could stop it, and I could not. But if I could use the obsessive side of the obsessive-compulsive partnership, then I could obsessively summon up the willpower to resist engaging in the noises and tics. Wasn’t that what God did to the heroes in the Bible?
The rabbi once said in a sermon that Moses must have been staring at the burning bush for hours before he determined that it was not being consumed. “Think about it,” he said. “Have you ever stared for that long at a burning object? It could take hours to see that the fire was not consuming it. Moses must have been a very contemplative man.” Well, if you ask me, it was an obsessive commitment. I know how Moses’ mind worked.
