Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

This eBook edition published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

Copyright © 2016, 2017 by Susan Faludi

Susan Faludi asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This is a work of nonfiction. The names and identifying characteristics of three individuals have been changed to protect their privacy.

‘I Am Easily Assimilated’ from Candide by Leonard Bernstein. Lyrics by Leonard Bernstein. Copyright © 1994 by Amberson Holdings LLC. Copyright renewed, Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company, publisher. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

Excerpt from ‘Red Riding Hood’ from Transformations by Anne Sexton. Copyright © 1971 by Anne Sexton, renewed 1999 by Linda G. Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from ‘Optimistic Voices (You’re Out of the Woods)’ from The Wizard of Oz. Lyrics by E. Y. Harburg. Music by Harold Arlen and Herbert Strothart. Copyright © 1938 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., renewed 1939 by EMI Feist Catalog Inc. Rights throughout the world controlled by EMI Feist Catalog Inc. (publishing) and Alfred Music (print). Used by permission of Alfred Music. All rights reserved.

All photographs courtesy of the author, except for the following: here, Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe by Wellcome Library, London; here, Christine Jorgensen by Art Edger/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images; here, Melanie’s Cocoon by Mel Myers; here, Class of ’45 photograph courtesy of Otto and Margaret Szekely; here, Parasite Press photograph courtesy of Judit Mészáros, the original in Budapest Collection of Szabó Ervin Central Library; here, Ford convertible by Marilyn Faludi; here, Magyar Garda rally by European Pressphoto Agency/Tamas Kovacs

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008194475

Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008193515

Version: 2017-06-24

Additional Praise for In the Darkroom:

A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016

‘Faludi’s remarkable, moving and courageous book is extremely fair-minded’

Guardian

‘In the Darkroom reads like a mystery thriller yet packs the emotional punch of a carefully crafted memoir. Susan Faludi’s investigation into her father’s life reveals, with humour and poignancy, the central paradox of being someone’s child. However close, our parents will always be, perhaps by nature of the role, fundamentally enigmatic to us’

AMANDA FOREMAN

‘Faludi weaves together these strands of her father’s identity – Jewishness, nationality, gender – with energy, wit and nuance … Faludi has paid her late father a fine tribute by bringing her to life in such a compelling, truthful story’

New Statesman

‘[A] mighty new book … a searching investigation of identity barely disguised as a sometimes funny and sometimes very painful family saga … reticent, elegant and extremely clever’

Observer

‘A fascinating chronicle of a decade trying to understand a parent who had always been inscrutable’

Economist

‘Compelling’

Sunday Times

Well-written … touching … compelling’

The Times

‘An astonishing, unique book that should be essential reading for anyone wanting to explore transsexuality’s place in contemporary culture’

Irish Independent

‘In the Darkroom is a unique, deeply affecting and beautifully written book, full of warmth, intelligence and humour’

Saturday Paper

Dedication

For the Grünbergers of Spišské Podhradie and the Friedmans of Košice, and their children and their children’s children, the family I found, and who found me

Epigraph

He thought about how he had been despised and scorned, and he heard everybody saying now that he was the most beautiful of all the beautiful birds. And the lilacs bowed their branches toward him, right down into the water. The sun shone so warm and so bright. Then he ruffled his feathers, raised his slender neck, and rejoiced from the depths of his heart. “I never dreamed of such happiness when I was an ugly duckling!”

Hans Christian Andersen, “The Ugly Duckling”

The identifying of ourselves with the visual image of ourselves has become an instinct; the habit is already old. The picture of me, the me that is seen, is me.

D. H. Lawrence, “Art and Morality”

Long ago

there was a strange deception:

a wolf dressed in frills,

a kind of transvestite.

But I get ahead of my story.

Anne Sexton, “Red Riding Hood”

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Additional Praise for In the Darkroom

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface: In Pursuit

PART I

1. Returns and Departures

2. Rear Window

3. The Original from the Copy

4. Home Insecurity

5. The Person You Were Meant to Be

6. It’s Not Me Anymore

7. His Body into Pieces. Hers.

8. On the Altar of the Homeland

9. Ráday 9

PART II

10. Something More and Something Other

11. A Lady Is a Lady Whatever the Case May Be

12. The Mind Is a Black Box

13. Learn to Forget

14. Some Kind of Psychic Disturbance

15. The Grand Hotel Royal

16. Smitten in the Hinder Parts

17. The Subtle Poison of Adjustment

18. You’re Out of the Woods

19. The Transformation of the Patient Is Without a Doubt

PART III

20. Pity, O God, the Hungarian

21. All the Female Steps

22. Paid Up

23. Getting Away with It

24. The Pregnancy of the World

25. Escape

Footnotes

About the Author

Also by Susan Faludi

About the Publisher

PREFACE

In Pursuit

In the summer of 2004 I set out to investigate someone I scarcely knew, my father. The project began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had absconded from her life. I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful dodger who had skipped out on so many things—obligation, affection, culpability, contrition. I was preparing an indictment, amassing discovery for a trial. But somewhere along the line, the prosecutor became a witness.

What I was witness to would remain elusive. In the course of a lifetime, my father had pulled off so many reinventions, laid claim to so many identities. “I’m a Hungaaaarian,” my father boasted, in the accent that survived all the shape shifts. “I know how to faaaake things.” If only it were that simple.

“Write my story,” my father asked me in 2004—or rather, dared me. The intent of the invitation was murky. “It could be like Hans Christian Andersen,” my father said to me once, later, of our biographical undertaking. “When Andersen wrote a fairy tale, everything he put in it was real, but he surrounded it with fantasy.” Not my style. Nevertheless, I took up the dare with a vengeance, and with my own purposes in mind.

Despite the overture, my father remained a refractory subject. Most of the time our collaboration resembled a game of cat and mouse, a game the mouse generally won. My father, like that other Hungarian, Houdini, was a master of the breakout. For my part, I kept up the chase. I had cast myself as a posse of one, tracking my father’s many selves to their secret recesses. I was intent on writing a book about my father. It wasn’t until the summer of 2015, after I’d worked my way through many drafts and submitted the manuscript, and after my father had died, that I realized how much I’d also been writing it for my father, who, in my mind at least, had become my primary, imagined, and intended reader—with all the generosity and hostility that implies. It wasn’t an uncomplicated gift.

“There are things in here that will be hard for you to take,” I warned in the fall of 2014, when I called to announce that I had a completed draft. I braced myself for the response. My father, who had made a career in commercial photography out of altering images and devoted a lifetime to self-alteration, would hate, I assumed, being depicted warts and all.

“Waaall,” I heard after a silence. “I’m glad. You know more about my life than I do.” For once my father seemed pleased to be captured, if only on the page.

PART I

1

Returns and Departures

One afternoon I was working in my study at home in Portland, Oregon, boxing up notes from a previous writing endeavor, a book about masculinity. On the wall in front of me hung a framed black-and-white photograph I’d recently purchased, of an ex-GI named Malcolm Hartwell. The photo had been part of an exhibit on the theme “What Is It to Be a Man?” The subjects were invited to compose visual answers and write an accompanying statement. Hartwell, a burly man in construction boots and sweat pants, had stretched out in front of his Dodge Aspen in a cheesecake pose, a gloved hand on a bulky hip, his legs crossed, one ankle over the other. His handwritten caption, appended with charming misspellings intact, read, “Men can’t get in touch with there feminity.” I took a break from the boxes to check my e-mail, and found a new message:

To: Susan C. Faludi

Date: 7/7/2004

Subject: Changes.

The e-mail was from my father.

“Dear Susan,” it began, “I’ve got some interesting news for you. I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.”

The announcement wasn’t entirely a surprise; I wasn’t the only person my father had contacted with news of a rebirth. Another family member, who hadn’t seen my father in years, had recently gotten a call filled with ramblings about a hospital stay, a visit to Thailand. The call was preceded by an out-of-the-blue e-mail with an attachment, a photograph of my father framed in the fork of a tree, wearing a pale blue short-sleeved shirt that looked more like a blouse. It had a discreet flounce at the neckline. The photo was captioned “Stefánie.” My father’s follow-up phone message was succinct: “Stefánie is real now.”

The e-mail notifying me was similarly terse. One thing hadn’t changed: my photographer father still preferred the image to the written word. Attached to the message was a series of snapshots.

In the first, my father is standing in a hospital lobby in a sheer sleeveless blouse and red skirt, beside (as her annotation put it) “the other post-op girls,” two patients who were also making what she called “The Change.” A uniformed Thai nurse holds my father’s elbow. The caption read, “I look tired after the surgery.” The other shots were taken before the “op.” In one, my father is perched amid a copse of trees, modeling a henna wig with bangs and that same pale blue blouse with the ruffled neckline. The caption read, “Stefánie in Vienna garden.” It is the garden of the imperial villa of an Austro-Hungarian empress. My father was long a fan of Mitteleuropean royals, in particular Empress Elisabeth—or “Sisi”—Emperor Franz Josef’s wife, who was known as the “guardian angel of Hungary.” In a third image, my father wears a platinum blond wig—shoulder length with a ’50s flip—a white ruffled blouse, another red skirt with a pattern of white lilies, and white heeled sandals that display polished toenails. In the final shot, titled “On hike in Austria,” my father stands before her VW camper in mountaineering boots, denim skirt, and a pageboy wig, a polka-dotted scarf arranged at the neck. The pose: a hand on a jutted hip, panty-hosed legs crossed, one ankle before the other. I looked up at the photo on my wall. “Men can’t get in touch with there feminity.”

The e-mail was signed, “Love from your parent, Stefánie.” It was the first communication I’d received from my “parent” in years.

My father and I had barely spoken in a quarter century. As a child I had resented and, later, feared him, and when I was a teenager he had left the family—or rather been forced to leave, by my mother and by the police, after a season of escalating violence. Despite our long alienation, I thought I understood enough of my father’s character to have had some inkling of an inclination this profound. I had none.

As a child, when we had lived together in a “Colonial” tract house in the suburban town of Yorktown Heights, an hour’s drive north of Manhattan, I’d always known my father to assert the male prerogative. He had seemed invested—insistently, inflexibly, and, in the last year of our family life, bloodily—in being the household despot. We ate what he wanted to eat, traveled where he wanted to go, wore what he wanted us to wear. Domestic decisions, large and small, had first to meet his approval. One evening, when my mother proposed taking a part-time job at the local newspaper, he’d made his phallocratic views especially clear: he’d swept the dinner dishes to the floor. “No!” he shouted, slamming his fists on the table. “No job!” For as far back as I could remember, he had presided as imperious patriarch, overbearing and autocratic, even as he remained a cipher, cryptic to everyone around him.

I also knew him as the rugged outdoorsman, despite his slender build: mountaineer, rock climber, ice climber, sailor, horseback rider, long-distance cyclist. With the costumes to match: Alpenstock, Bavarian hiking knickers, Alpine balaclava, climber’s harness, yachter’s cap, English riding chaps. In so many of these pursuits, I was his accompanist, an increasingly begrudging one as I approached adolescence—second mate to his captain on the Klepper sailboat he built from a kit, belaying partner on his weekend assays of the Shawangunk cliffs, second cyclist on his cross-the-Alps biking tours, tent-pitching assistant on his Adirondack bivouacs.

All of which required vast numbers of hours of training, traveling, sharing close quarters. Yet my memory of these ventures is nearly a blank. What did we talk about on the long winter evenings, once the tent was raised, the firewood collected, the tinned provisions pried open with the Swiss Army knife my father always carried in his pocket? Was I suppressing all those father-daughter tête-à-têtes, or did they just not happen? Year after year, from Lake Mohonk to Lake Lugano, from the Appalachians to Zermatt, we tacked and backpacked, rappelled and pedaled. Yet in all that time I can’t say he ever showed himself to me. He seemed to be permanently undercover, behind a wall of his own construction, watching from behind that one-way mirror in his head. It was not, at least to a teenager craving privacy, a friendly surveillance. I sometimes regarded him as a spy, intent on blending into our domestic circle, prepared to do whatever it took to evade detection. For all of his aggressive domination, he remained somehow invisible. “It’s like he never lived here,” my mother said to me on the day after the night he left our house for good, twenty years into their marriage.

When I was fourteen, two years before my parents’ separation, I joined the junior varsity track team. Girls’ sports in 1973 was a faintly ridiculous notion, and the high school track coach, who was first and foremost the coach of the boys’ team, mostly ignored his distaff charges. I designed my own training regimen, leaving the house before dawn and loping the side streets to Mohansic State Park, a manicured recreation area that used to be the grounds for a state insane asylum, where I ran a long circuit around the landscaped terrain, alone. By then, I had developed a preference for solo sports.

Early one August morning I was lacing my sneakers in the front hall when I sensed a subtle atmospheric change, like the drop in barometric pressure as a cold front approaches or the prodromal thrumming before a migraine, which signaled to my aggrieved adolescent mind the arrival of my father. I reluctantly turned and made out his pale, thin frame emerging from the gloom at the bend of the stairs. He was wearing jogging shorts and tennis sneakers.

He paused on the last step and inspected the situation with his peculiar remove, as if peering through a keyhole. After a while, he said, “I am running also,” his thick Hungarian accent stretching out the first syllable, “aaaalso.” It was an insistence, not an offer. I didn’t want company. A bit of doggerel, picked up who knows where, spooled in my head.

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d go away …

I pushed through the screen door, my father shadowing my heels. The air was fat with humidity. Tar bubbles blistered the blacktop. I poked them with the toe of one sneaker while my father deliberated, turning first to his old VW camper, then to the lime-green Fiat convertible he had recently purchased, used, “for your mother.” My mother didn’t drive. “Waaall,” he said after a while. “We’ll take the Fiat.”

We drove the five-minute route in silence. He wheeled into the lot of the IBM Research Center, a block from our destination. Prominent signs made clear that parking was for employees only. My father paid them no mind. He took a certain pride in pulling off small scams, which he called “getting awaaay with things,” a predilection that led him to swap price tags on items at the local shopping center. He acquired a camping cooker in this manner, at a savings of $25.

“Did you lock your door?” my father asked as we headed across the lot, and, when I said I had, he looked at me doubtfully, then turned and went back to check. The flip side of my father’s petty transgressions was an obsession with security.

We hoofed it down the treeless corporate drive to Route 202, the thoroughfare that runs along the north edge of the park. We dodged between speeding cars to the far side, and climbed over the metal divider, jumping down into the depression beyond it. My father paused. “It happened there,” he said. He often talked this way, without antecedents, as if mid-conversation, a conversation with himself. I understood what “it” was: some months earlier, after midnight, teenagers returning from a party had run the stop sign on Strang Boulevard and collided with another car. Both vehicles had hurtled over the divider and landed on their roofs. No one survived. A passenger was decapitated. My father had been witness not to the accident itself but to its immediate aftermath. He was on call that night with the Yorktown Heights Ambulance Corps.

My father’s eagerness to volunteer for the local emergency medical service had seemed out of character, at least the character I thought I knew. He shrank from community affairs, from social encounters in general. On the occasions when my parents had guests, my father would either sit mum in his armchair or take cover behind his slide projector, working his way through tray after tray of Kodachrome transparencies of our hiking expeditions, naming each and every mountain peak in each and every frame, recounting every twist and turn in the trail, until our visitors, wild with boredom, fled into the night.

He referred to his service with the ambulance corps as “my job saaaaving people.” Which I also didn’t understand. Our town was a place of non-events, the 911 summons a suburban emergency: a treed cat, a housewife having an anxiety attack, an occasional kitchen-stove fire. The crash in Mohansic State Park was an exception, although again there was no one to save. When my father arrived, the police were covering the bodies. The ambulance driver grabbed his arm. “Steve, don’t look,” my father recalled him saying. “You don’t want that in your memory.” The driver had no way of knowing the wreckage already lodged in my father’s memory, and of how hard he had worked to erase it.

Leaving the old accident site behind, the two of us took off running along the paved road and into the picnic area, past rows of empty parking lots. The route began on a dull flat stretch of baseball diamonds and basketball courts, then looped around the giant public pool (where I worked summers at the snack stand) and along Mohansic Lake, finishing up a long hill. By the lake, we picked up a narrow footpath. We ran without speaking, single file.

At the final climb, the path gave way to wider pavement, and we began jogging side by side. Minutes into the ascent, he picked up his pace. I sped up. He ran faster. So did I. He pulled ahead again, then I did. We both gasped for breath. I looked over at him, but he didn’t return my gaze. His skin was scarlet, shiny with sweat. He stared straight ahead, intent on an invisible finish line. All the way up the hill, the fierce mute maneuvering maintained. When the pavement flattened, I ached to ease the pace. My stomach was heaving and my vision had blurred. My father broke into a furious stride. I tried to match it. It was, after all, the early ’70s; “I Am Woman (Hear Me Roar)” played on the mental sound track of my morning jogs. But neither my ardor for women’s lib nor my youth nor all my training could compete with his determination.

Something about my father became palpable in that moment, but what? Was I witnessing raw aggression or a performance of it? Was he competing with his daughter or outracing someone, or something, else? These weren’t questions I’d have formulated that morning. At the time, I was trying not to retch. But I remember the thought, troubling to my budding feminism, that flickered through my mind in the final minutes of the run: It’s easier to be a woman. And with it, I let my legs slow. My father’s back receded down the road.

At home in those years, my father was a paragon of the Popular Mechanics weekend man, always laboring on his latest home craft project: a stereo and entertainment cabinet, a floor-to-ceiling shelving system, a dog house and pen (for Jání, our Hungarian vizsla), a shortwave radio, a jungle gym, a “Japanese” goldfish pond with recycling fountain. After dinner he would absent himself from our living quarters—our suburban tract home had one of those living-dining open-floor plans, designed for minimal privacy—and descend the steps to his Black & Decker workshop in the basement. I did my homework in the room directly above, feeling through the floorboards the vibration of his DeWalt radial arm saw slicing through lumber. On occasion, he’d invite me to assist in his efforts. Together we assembled an educational anatomy model that was popular at the time: “The Visible Woman.” Her clear plastic body came with removable parts, a complete skeleton, “all vital organs,” and a plastic display stand. For much of my childhood she stood in my bedroom—on the vanity dresser that my father also built, a metal base with a wood-planked top, over which he’d staple-gunned a frilled fabric with a rosebud pattern.

From his domain in the basement, my father designed the stage sets he desired for his family. There was the sewing-machine table with a retractable top he built for my mother (who didn’t like to sew). There was the to-scale train set that filled most of a room (its Nordic landscape elaborately detailed with half-timbered cottages, shops, churches, inns, and villagers toting groceries and hanging laundry on a filament clothesline) and the fully accessorized Mobil filling station (hand-painted Pegasus sign, auto repair lift, working garage doors, tiny Coke machine). His two children played with them with caution; a broken part could be grounds for a tirade. And then there was one of my father’s more extravagant creations, a marionette theater—a triptych construction with red curtains that opened and closed with pulleys and ropes, two built-in marquees to announce the latest production, and a backstage elevated bridge upon which the puppeteer paced the boards and pulled the strings, unseen. This was for me. My father and I painted the storybook backdrops on large sheets of canvas. He chose the scenes: a dark forest, a cottage in a clearing surrounded by a crumbling stone wall, the shadowy interior of a bedroom. And he chose the cast (wooden Pelham marionettes from FAO Schwarz): Hunter, Wolf, Grandmother, Little Red Riding Hood. I put on shows for my brother and, for a penny a ticket, neighborhood children. If my father ever attended a performance, I don’t remember it.

“Visiting family?” my seatmate asked. We were in an airplane crossing the Alps. He was a florid midwestern retiree on his way with his wife to a cruise on the Danube. My assent prompted the inevitable follow-up. While I deliberated how to answer, I studied the overhead monitor, where the Malév Air entertainment system was playing animated shorts for the brief second leg of the flight, from Frankfurt to Budapest. Bugs Bunny sashayed across the screen in a bikini and heels, befuddling a slack-jawed Elmer Fudd.

“A relative,” I said. With a pronoun to be determined, I thought.

In September 2004, I boarded a plane to Hungary. It was my first visit since my father had moved there a decade and a half earlier. After the fall of Communism in 1989, Steven Faludi had declared his repatriation and returned to the country of his birth, abandoning the life he had built in the United States since the mid-’50s.

“How nice,” the retiree in 16B said after a while. “How nice to know someone in the country.”

Know? The person I was going to see was a phantom out of a remote past. I was largely ignorant of the life my father had led since my parents’ divorce in 1977, when he’d moved to a loft in Manhattan that doubled as his commercial photo studio. In the subsequent two and a half decades, I’d seen him only occasionally, once at a graduation, again at a family wedding, and once when my father was passing through the West Coast, where I was living at the time. The encounters were brief, and in each instance he was behind a viewfinder, a camera affixed to his eye. A frustrated filmmaker who had spent most of his professional life working in darkrooms, my father was intent on capturing what he called “family pictures,” of the family he no longer had. When my boyfriend had asked him to put the camcorder down while we were eating dinner, my father blew up, then retreated into smoldering silence. It seemed to me that was how he’d always been, a simultaneously inscrutable and volatile presence, a black box and a detonator, distant and intrusive by turns.

Could his psychological tempests have been protests against a miscast existence, a life led severely out of alignment with her inner being, with the very fundaments of her identity? “This could be a breakthrough,” a friend suggested, a few weeks before I boarded the plane. “Finally you get to see the real Steven.” Whatever that meant: I’d never been clear what it meant to have an “identity,” real or otherwise.

In Malév’s economy cabin, the TV monitors had moved on to a Looney Tunes twist on Little Red Riding Hood. The wolf had disguised himself as the Good Fairy, in pink tutu, toe shoes, and chiffon wings. Suspended from a wire hanging off a treetop, he flapped his angel wings and pretended to fly, luring Red Riding Hood out on a limb to take a closer look. Her branch began to crack, and then the entire top half of the tree came crashing down, hurtling the wolf in drag into a heap of chiffon on the ground. I watched with a nameless unease. Was I afraid of how changed I’d find my father? Or of the possibility that she wouldn’t have changed at all, that he would still be there, skulking beneath the dress.

Grandmother, what big arms you have! All the better to hug you with, my dear.

Grandmother, what big ears you have! All the better to hear you with, my dear.

Grandmother, what big teeth you have! All the better to eat you with, my dear!

And the Wicked Wolf ate Little Red Riding Hood all up …

Malév Air #521 landed right on time at Budapest Ferihegy International Airport. As I dawdled by the baggage carousel, listening to the impenetrable language (my father had never spoken Hungarian at home, and I had never learned it), I considered whether my father’s recent life represented a return or a departure. He had come back here, after more than four decades, to his birthplace—only to have an irreversible surgery that denied a basic fact of that birth. In the first instance, he seemed to be heeding the call of an old identity that, no matter how hard he’d run, he’d failed to leave behind. In the second, she’d devised a new one, of her own choice or discovery.

I rolled my suitcase through the nothing-to-declare exit and toward the arrivals hall where “a relative,” of uncertain relation to me, and maybe to herself, was waiting.

2

Rear Window

In my luggage were a tape recorder, a jumbo pack of AA batteries, two dozen microcassettes, a stack of reporter’s notebooks, and a single-spaced ten-page list of questions. I had begun the list the day I’d received the “Changes” e-mail with its picture gallery of Stefánie. If my photographer father favored the image, her journalist daughter preferred the word. I’d typed up my questions and, after much stalling, picked up the phone. I had to look up my father’s number in an old address book.

A taped voice said, in Hungarian and then in English, “You have reached the answering machine of Steven Faludi …” By then, more than a month had passed since she’d returned from Thailand. I added another to my list of questions: Why haven’t you changed your greeting? I left a message, asking her to call. I sat by a silent phone all that day and evening.

That night, in a dream, I found myself in a dark house with narrow, crooked corridors. I walked into the kitchen. Crouched against the side of the oven was my father, very much a man. He looked frightened. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said. I saw he was missing an arm. The phone rang. Jolted awake, I lay in bed, ignoring the summons. It was half past five in the morning. An hour later, I forced down a cup of coffee and returned the call. It wasn’t just the early hour that had stayed my hand. I didn’t want to answer the bedside extension. My list of questions was down the hall in my office.

“Haaallo?” my father said, with the protracted enunciation I’d heard so infrequently in recent years, that Magyar cadence that seemed to border on camp. Hallo. As my father liked to note, the telephone salutation was the coinage of Thomas Edison’s assistant, Tivadar Puskás, the inventor of the phone exchange, who, as it happened, was Hungarian. “Hallom!” Puskás had shouted when he first picked up the receiver in 1877, Magyar for “I hear you!” Would she?

I asked about her health, my pen poised above my reporter’s notebook, seeking safety in a familiar role. A deluge commenced. The notepad’s first many pages are a scribbled stutter-fest of unfinished sentences. “Had to pick up the papers for the name change, but you have to go to the office of birth records in the Seventh District for—, no, wait a minute, it’s the Eighth because the hospital I was born in—, waaall, no, let me see now, it maaay be …” “I’m so busy every day, I don’t have time for dilation, and they tell you to dilate three times a day, four times at first, waaall, you can do it two times probably, but—, there are six of these rods, and I’m only on the number 3 …”

The operation, I noted, had not altered certain tendencies—among them, my father’s proclivity for the one-sided rambling monologue on highly technical matters. When I was young, he had always operated on two modes: either he said nothing, or he was a wall of words, a sudden torrent of verbiage, flash floods of data points on the most impersonally procedural of topics. To his family, these dissertations felt like a steel curtain coming down, a screech of static jamming the airwaves. “Laying down covering fire,” we had called it. My father could hold forth for hours, and did, on the proper method for wiring an air conditioner, the ninety-nine steps for the preparation of authentic Hungarian goose pâté, the fine print in the regulatory practices of the Federal Reserve, the alternative routes to the first warming hut on the Matterhorn, the compositional revisions to Wagner’s score of Tannhäuser. My father had mastered the art of the filibuster. By the time he was finished, you’d forgotten whatever it was you’d asked that had triggered the oral counteroffensive—and were as desperate to flee his verbal bombardment as he was to retreat to his cone of silence.

“I could have gone to Germany, they cover everything,” my father rattled on, “but they make you jump through so many hoops, and, waaall, in the U.S., the surgery is vaaary expensive and it’s not in the front line, but, now, in Thailand, they have the latest in surgical techniques, the hospital has an excellent website where they go into all the procedures, starting with …” “I have to change the estrogen patch twice a week, it was fifty micrograms before the operation, but after the operation it gave me hot flashes, now it’s twenty-five micrograms and …” “I got the first hair implant in Hungary, five hundred thousand forints, it came out pretty good, but it’s still short in front, but maybe my hairdresser can do something, waaall, I could get another one, but it might be better in Vienna, yaaas but to go just for—, I’m taking hair growth medication, so—”

I quit trying to get it down verbatim.

“Long speech abt VW cmpr stolen,” I wrote. “Thieves evywhre. Groc store delivry this wk., many probs.” “Great trans sites online, evrythng on Internet, many pix dwnloaded.”

My attempts to cut through his verbal eruption—“Why have you done this?”—only inspired new ones.

“Waaall, but you couldn’t do it for a long time, waaall, you could, but it was risky. In Thailand, the hospital has greaaat facilities, faaantastic. In every room, bidets with special sprayheads, a unique nozzle that …”

I asked if she’d been dressing as a woman before.

“No. Waaall … Maybe a little … I have to pick up the papers to get my passport changed, and I need to get my name changed with the Land Registry, but first you have to go to the municipality office and get a certificate to bring to the Ministry of …”

“Why didn’t you tell us before you had the operation?”

“Waaall … I didn’t talk until everything was all right, successful. Dr. Sanguan Kunaporn, he was faaantastic, trained with one of the leading surgeons of vaginoplas—, his name was—, it’s—, no, wait—waaall, he is well-known as the best of—”

I lost my patience.

“You never talk to me. You aren’t talking to me now.”

Silence.

“Hello?” I ventured. Hallom?

“Waaall, but it’s not my fault. You never came here. Every year, you never came.”

“But you—”

“I have a whole dossier. They stole our property.” My father was referring to the two luxury apartment buildings that my grandfather once owned in Budapest. They had been commandeered by the Nazi-allied state during the Second World War, nationalized under the Communist regime, and then sold off to private owners after 1989. “You showed no interest whatsoever.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“You’re a journalist. You should at least somewhere mention it. They’re consorting with thieves. Your country of birth, you know.”

“Mention to whom?” I asked, thinking: the country of my birth?

“A family should work together to get back their stolen property. A normal family stays together. I’m still your father.”

“You’re the one who—”

“I sent you the notice about my school reunion, and you never came,” my father said. The surviving members of my father’s high school class in Budapest had gathered in Toronto three years ago. Guilty as charged: I didn’t attend. “I sent you a copy of the movie I made of the reunion, and you never said anything.” She wasn’t finished. “One of my classmates lives near you, right in Portland, and I e-mailed you the Google map with his address, and you never contacted him. You never …”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to this writ of attainder.

After a while, I said, “I’m sorry.”

Then: “You said you were going to write my life story, and you never did.”

Had I said that?

“Is that what you want?”

We both went mute. I scanned my list of questions. What I wanted to ask wasn’t on the page.

“Can I come see you?”

I could hear her breathing in the silence.

In the arrivals hall at Ferihegy Airport, a line of people waited to greet passengers. I reluctantly scanned the faces. Maybe I wouldn’t recognize him as her. Maybe she wouldn’t be here. Maybe I could turn around and fly home. Salutations in two genders were gridlocked on my tongue. I wasn’t sure I was ready to release him to a new identity; she hadn’t explained the old one. Did she think sex reassignment surgery was a get-out-of-jail-free card, a quick fix to a life of regret and recrimination? I can manage a change in pronoun, I thought, but paternity? Whoever she was now, she was, as she herself had said to me on the phone, “still your father.”

I spotted a familiar profile with a high forehead and narrow shoulders at the far end of the queue, leaning against an empty luggage cart. Her hair looked thicker than I remembered his, and lighter in color, a henna-red. She was wearing a red cabled sweater, gray flannel skirt, white heels, and a pair of pearl stud earrings. She had taken her white pocketbook off her shoulder and hung it from a hook on the cart. My first thought, and it shames me, was: no woman would do that.

“Waaall,” my father said, as I came to a stop in front of her. She hesitated, then patted me on the shoulder. We exchanged an awkward hug. Her breasts—48C, she would later inform me—poked into mine. Rigid, they seemed to me less bosom than battlement, and I wondered at my own inflexibility. Barely off the plane, I was already rendering censorious judgment. As if how one carried a purse was a biological trait. As if there weren’t plenty of “real” women walking around with silicone in their breasts. Since when had I become the essentialist?

“Waaall,” she said again. “There you are.” After a pause: “I parked the camper in the underground lot, it’s a new camper, a Volkswagen Caaalifornia Exclusive, much bigger than my last one, the biggest one they make, the next-to-the-fastest engine, I got it from the insurance for the old one, it was one year on the market because the German economy is bad, the first one I bought was six years old, eighty thousand marks—forty-six thousand euros—fifty thousand dollars, the new one they sold to me for forty thousand euros, the insurance paid twenty thousand euros, it’s parked by the guard booth, it’s safer there, waaall, nothing’s safe, thieves stole my old camper right out of the drive, I had the alarm on, they must’ve disabled it, climbed the fence, thieves were probably watching the house, they saw no one was home for weeks and—”

“Dad, Stefánie, how are you? I want—” My desire got lost in my own incoherence.

“—and they came right into my yard, and the neighbors did aaabsolutely nothing, no one saw anything, waaall, that’s what they said. But they were great at Rosenheim, the man there was vaaary nice, he said to me, ‘Oh, meine gnädige Frau, it’s not safe for a woman to travel alone!’”

“Rosenheim?” I asked. I put my luggage on the cart, and she led the way to the parking garage. I trailed behind, watching uncomfortably the people watching us. The dissonance between white heels and male-pattern baldness was apparently drawing notice. Some double-chinned matrons gave my father the up-and-down. One stopped in her tracks and muttered something. I didn’t understand the words, but I got the intent. When her gaze shifted to me, I glared back. Fuck off, you old biddy, I thought.

“Rosenheim VW,” my father said, “in Germany, where I bought the new camper, aaand my old one, they do all my servicing and maintenance, aaand I register the camper there, you can’t trust anyone else to work on it, waaall, they’re German, they’re very good, and the man was very courteous. Now that I’m a lady, everyone treats me very nicely.”

We had no trouble finding the van. It was, as advertised in the brochure my father still had at home, VW’s biggest model (eight and a half feet high), “Der California Exclusive.” It looked like a cruise ship beached in a parking lot, a ziggurat on wheels. A heavily defended ziggurat: my father had installed a wrap-around security system, which she set off twice while trying to unlock the driver’s door. Right there in the airport lot, she gave me the tour: the doll-sized kitchenette (two-burner gas cooker, fridge, sink, fold-out dining table, and pantry with pots and pans and well-stocked spice rack), a backseat bench that opened into a double bed (an overhead stowaway held duvet, linens, and pillows), a wardrobe with a telescopic clothesrail, and, in the very rear, a tiny bathroom and closet (with towels, toiletries, wall-mounted mirror). She opened up the cabinets to show me the dishware she’d just purchased, a tea service in a rosebud pattern.

I couldn’t quite put the disparities into focus: Motor Trend meets Marie Claire. Was this why I’d flown fifty-six hundred miles? Here we were, meeting after twenty-seven years, a high-stakes reunion after a historic Glasnost, and she was acting like she’d just returned from Williams-Sonoma by way of NAPA Auto Parts.

“Ilonka helped me pick it out,” my father said, handing me a saucer to admire.

Ilonka—I had met her; for some years after my father returned to Hungary she’d been what he called his “lady friend.” She had accompanied my father to a family wedding in California, but I hadn’t gleaned much from our encounter: she spoke no English. I wasn’t clear on their relationship—though Ilonka would tell me later that it was platonic. She was married and very Catholic. For years she seemed to function as an unpaid housekeeper for my father, cleaning, cooking, sewing. She helped him pick out the furnishings for his house, from the lace curtains to the vintage Hungarian Zsolnay porcelain (purchased to impress a snooty couple, distant kin of Ilonka’s, who had come to dinner at my father’s house one night; the husband had claimed to be a “count”). My father had taken Ilonka on trips around Europe and loaned money to her family. When one of her grandchildren was born, my father assumed the duties of godfather, now godmother.

“How is Ilonka?” I asked.

My father made a face. “I don’t see her so much.” She took the saucer from me and placed it carefully on the cabinet shelf with its mates. The problem evidently was Ilonka’s husband. “It was fine with him when I was the man buying things for his wife and giving money to his family. But now that I’m a woman, I’ve been banished.”

She shut and secured the cupboard doors. We went around to the front. It took some effort to hoist ourselves into the elevated cockpit. My father disengaged the clutch and shifted into reverse and we lurched backward, nearly plowing into a parked car. I noted with dismay that the makers of the well-appointed Exclusive had excluded one feature: a usable rear window. The tiny transom above the commode showed only empty sky.

At the pay booth, she fished through her purse for her wallet. The ticket taker, another Magyar babushka, stuck her head out the window and gave my father the once-over. As the bills were counted, I studied my father, too. I could see the source of her thickening hair (a row of implant plugs) and the lightened color (a dye job). Her skin had a glossy sheen. Foundation powder? Estrogen? What struck me most forcefully, though, wasn’t what was new. I’d spotted it in the airport—that old nervous half-smile, that same faraway gaze.

On the road, she steered the lumbering Gigantor into the fast lane. It was rush hour. A motorist trailing us in a rusted subcompact blasted his horn. My father leaned out the window and swore at him. The honking stopped. “When they see I’m a laaady, they pipe right down,” she said.

We merged onto a highway, and I gazed out the window at the dilapidated industrial back lots flying by, a few smokestacks belching brown haze, boarded-up warehouses with greasy windows, concrete highway dividers slathered in graffiti. We passed through a long stretch of half-finished construction, grasses growing high over oxidizing rebar. Along the shoulder, billboards proliferated, shiny fresh faces flashing perfect teeth, celebrating the arrival of post-Communist consumption: Citibank, Media Markt, T-Mobile, McDonald’s. Big balls of old mistletoe parched in the branches of trees. Along the horizon, I could make out the red-roofed gables of a distant hamlet.

Half an hour later, we entered the capital. My father threaded the monster vehicle through the tight streets of downtown Pest, shadowed by Art Nouveau manses nouveau no longer, facades grimy and pockmarked by a war sixty years gone. A canary-yellow trolley rattled by, right out of a children’s book. We drove past the back end of the Hungarian Parliament, a supersized gingerbread tribute to the Palace of Westminster. In the adjacent plaza, a mob of young men in black garb and black boots were chanting, waving signs and Hungarian flags.

“What’s that about?” I asked.

No answer.

“A demonstration?”

Silence.

“What—”

“It’s nothing. A stupid thing.”

Then we were through the maze and hugging an embankment. The Royal Palace, a thousand-foot-long Neo-Baroque complex perched on the commanding heights of Castle Hill, swung into view on the far bank of the Danube, the Buda side. My father swerved the camper onto a ramp and we ascended the fabled Chain Bridge, its cast-iron suspension an engineering wonder of the world when it opened in 1849, the first permanent bridge in Hungary to span the Danube. We passed the first of the two pairs of stone lions that guard the bridgeheads, their gaze stoical, their mouths agape in perpetual, benevolent roar. A faint memory stirred.

The camper crested the bridge and descended to the Buda side. We followed the tram tracks along the river for a while, then began the trek into the hills. The thoroughfares became leafier, the houses larger, gated, many surrounded by high walls.

“When I was a teenager, I used to ride my bicycle around here,” my father volunteered. “The Swabian kids would say, ‘Hey, you dirty little Jew.’” She lifted a hand from the wheel and swatted at the memory, brushing away an annoying gnat. “Yaaas but,” she answered, as if in dialogue with herself, “that was just a stupid thing.”

“It doesn’t sound—” I began.

“I look to the future, never the past,” my father said. A fitting maxim, I thought, for the captain of a vehicle without a rear window.

Growing up, I’d heard almost nothing about the paternal side of my family. My father rarely spoke of his parents, and never to them. I learned my paternal grandfather’s first name in 1967, when a letter arrived from Tel Aviv, informing us of his death. My mother recalled aerogrammes with an Israeli postmark arriving in the early years of their marriage, addressed to István. They were from my father’s mother. My mother couldn’t read them—they were in Hungarian—and my father wouldn’t. My mother wrote back a few times in English, bland little notes about life as an American housewife: “Between taking care of Susan, cooking, and housekeeping, I’m very busy at home … Steven works a lot, plus many evenings doing ‘overtime.’” An excuse for his silence? By the early ’60s, the aerogrammes had stopped.

I knew a few fundamentals. I knew my father’s birth name: István Friedman, or rather, Friedman István; Hungarians put the surname first. He’d adopted Faludi after World War II (“a good authentic Hungarian name,” my father had explained to me), then Steven—or Steve, as he preferred—after he’d moved to the United States in 1953. I knew he was born and raised Jewish in Budapest. I knew he was a teenager during the Nazi occupation. But in all the years we lived under the same roof, and no matter how many times I asked and wheedled and sometimes pleaded for details, he spoke of only a few instances from wartime Hungary. They were more snapshots than stories, visual shrapnel that rattled around in my childish imagination, devoid of narrative.

In one, it is winter and dead bodies litter the street. My father sees the frozen carcass of a horse in a gutter and hacks off pieces to eat. In another, my father is on a boulevard in Pest when a man in uniform orders him into the Grand Hotel Royal. Jews are being shot in the basement. My father survives by hiding in the stairwell. In the third, my father “saves” his parents. How? I’d ask, hungry for details, for once inviting a filibuster. Shrug. “Waaall. I had an armband.” And? “And … I saaaved them.”

As the camper climbed the switchbacks, I gazed out at the terra-cotta rooftops of the hidden estates, trying to divine the outlines of my father’s youth. As a child and until the war broke out, he’d spent every summer in these hills. The Friedmans’ primary address was on the other side of the Danube, in a capacious flat in one of the two large residential buildings my grandfather owned in fashionable districts of Pest. My father referred to the family quarters at Ráday utca 9 as “the royal apartment.” But every May of my father’s childhood, the Friedmans would decamp, along with their maid and cook, to my grandfather’s other property in the hills, the family villa. There, an only child called Pista—diminutive for István—would play on the sloping lawn with its orchards and outbuildings (including a cottage for the resident gardener), paddle in the sunken swimming pool, and, the year he contracted rheumatic fever, lie on a chaise longue in the sun, tended by a retinue of hired help. As we ascended into the hills of Buda I thought, here I am in the city that was the forge of my father’s youth, the anvil on which his character was struck. Now it was the stage set of her prodigal return. This proximity gave me a strange sensation. All my life I’d had the man without the context. Now I had the context, but with a hitch. The man was gone.

3

The Original from the Copy

I’d met the lions on the Chain Bridge before, when I was eleven. We were on a family vacation in the summer of 1970: my mother, my father, my three-year-old brother, and me. It was, all and all, a vexed journey. One evening we drove across the river to attend an outdoor performance of Aida. I remember the crossing for its rare good cheer; family trips were always fraught affairs. The car seemed to float over the Danube, the cable lights winking at us from above, the leonine sentries heralding our arrival to the city. My father reminisced about how his nurse used to push his pram past the lions and over the bridge to the base of the Sikló, a charming apple-red funicular that chugged up the Castle Hill palisade. He told us the story about the sculptor who had forgotten to carve tongues for the lions: a child had pointed out their absence at the opening ceremonies, and the humiliated artist leaped off the bridge into the Danube. It was a popular tale in Hungary, he’d said, but “probably not true.”

Castle Hill, my father informed us, was honeycombed with subterranean caverns, carved out of the limestone millennia ago by thermal springs coming up “from the deep.” The occupying Turks had turned them into a giant labyrinth. “They say Vlad the Impaler—the real-life Dracula!—was locked up down there.” During World War II, the caves were retrofitted to accommodate air raid shelters and a military hospital. Thousands of the city’s inhabitants took refuge here for the fifty days of the Siege of Budapest. “It’s said that some people even had their mail delivered here,” my father reported. “But that’s probably a made-up story, too.”

Some days earlier, we had driven to Lake Balaton, south of Budapest. I remember walking a long way out into the shallow lake, the water only reaching my thighs. No matter how far I fled from shore, I could still hear my parents, their voices raised in acrid argument. The sour climate extended beyond our domestic circle. A scrim of sullenness seemed to hang over every encounter: the long waits in queues to receive a stamp so that we could proceed to other long queues to be issued other certifications of approval from scowling apparatchiks; the pitiful settee spitting yellowed foam in the guest room my father had rented; our aged landlady’s resentful eyes, sunk deep in a walnut-gnarled face, as she gave us each morning a serving of boiled raw milk, a thick curdled rind floating on its surface; the murky intentions of the “priest” in vestments who approached us one day after we’d toured the Benedictine monastery of Pannonhalma, asking my father if he’d deliver a letter to “friends” in the States—a government agent, my father said. The day we crossed the border into Hungary from Austria, customs officers combed through every inch of our luggage. My father stood to the side, uncomplaining, eager to please, a strange servility in his voice.

Throughout that visit, my father was in search of “authentic” Magyar folk culture. Driving through the countryside, we stopped to watch “traditional village dances” that were, in fact, staged tourist attractions: the government paid locals to whirl in what was billed as the national dress, the women in ornamental aprons and floral wreaths, the men in black vests and high leather boots. (As I’d learn later, the outfits and dances were only marginally traditional: they had been enshrined by urban nationalists in the mid-nineteenth century, and again in the interwar years, to create the impression of an ancient Magyar heritage.) In a village shop, my father insisted I try on folk dresses. As I modeled elaborately embroidered frocks, while cradling an elaborately clad Hungarian doll in my arms, my father took what felt like far too many rolls of film. The shop owner played stylist. Eventually my father purchased a lace-up bodice-and-dirndl number with a puffy-sleeved embroidered chemise, bell-shaped blue skirt, and a starched white apron with a tulip and rosebud motif. He thought I could wear it to school. His American daughter thought there was no way in hell she was going to junior high dressed as the Hungarian Heidi.

That fall, there ensued a series of tense standoffs over The Dress. My father would demand I put it on in the morning before school. I’d wait until he left for work, then run upstairs and change. He caught me once in suburban mufti. I was ordered to wear the costume to school the next day, which I did in a state of high mortification. Eventually he lost interest, and I banished the dress to the back of my closet. A year or so later, with hippie garb in vogue, I dug the offending garment out from its purgatory, detached the embroidered chemise from the rest of the outfit, and paired it with acid-washed jeans. It was my attempt at an au courant peasant look. Which was about as “authentic” as my father’s Hungarian folk fashions.

The visual chronicle of this vacation resides in a stack of Kodak carousels that my father kept for the rest of her life in an attic closet, slide after slide of my mother and me and my brother in the shadow of Gothic cathedrals and castle ruins, leaning against the rails of a Danube cruise boat, waving from a train at a saluting Pioneer scout in starched uniform and red neckerchief, or staring up at the mammoth Hungarian Parliament topped by a red star. We often face away from the camera. Many of the shots are taken from a distance, as if my father were on safari, tracking a fleeing herd.

On that long-ago trip we took a break from sightseeing one day to visit two apartment buildings in Pest, fin de siècle Vienna-Secession edifices once grandly appointed, now derelict and coated in soot. Tatty shutters hung catawampus over the graceful arched windows of Váci út 28; the ceremonial balconies of Ráday utca 9 were visibly rotting. At Ráday 9, we climbed a set of dimly lit stairs to knock on a door. And toured a series of high-ceilinged rooms, partitioned now with plywood boards, shabbily furnished and overflowing with tenants, several families jammed into living quarters meant for one. I remember especially my father’s distress. This building, like the other one, once belonged to my grandfather. The flat was my father’s childhood domicile, the “royal apartment.” On the sidewalk again, my father looked back up at the dingy facade of Ráday 9, where a blond girl in a white hair ribbon peered down from a crumbling double balcony, the one attached to the opulent rooms where a boy named Pista had grown up. He took a photograph. It was the last frame on the roll.

In 1940, when Pista turned thirteen, he’d received a Pathé 9.5mm movie camera. It was a bar mitzvah gift from his father. From then on—in Hungary where he joined an amateur film society during the war and a youth film club right after, in Denmark where he started a movie-distribution business, in Brazil where he made documentaries in the rain forests and on the pampas—my father would continue to prefer the moving picture over the still one. “With photography, you get one chance,” my father told me once. “You’re stuck with that shot. With film, you can cut it up and change it all around. You can make the story come out the way you want it.”

For a brief time in my infancy, my father’s filmmaking enterprises were domestic. In a box in my cellar, I possess the results, salvaged from a trash can, where my mother had relegated them after the divorce. A set of metal canisters holds the reels of the 16mm home movies my father had made from 1959 to 1961, the two years following my birth. My parents and I were living then in Jackson Heights, Queens, in a tiny upstairs rental in a brick duplex, and the films record the banal milestones of newlywed life: my mother large with child and eating pizza in her third trimester, my mother pushing a baby stroller and washing diapers in a plastic bucket, my first birthday, my first day at the beach, my first Easter Parade and Christmas. The “director,” as my father listed himself in the credits, makes an occasional appearance. In a shot filmed with the aid of a tripod, my father poses just inside the front door of our apartment, impersonating the man he aspired to be. He is wearing a suit and tie, a herringbone coat, leather gloves, a fedora. His gaze is trained on the camera. He leans over to give my mother an awkward peck on the cheek. Then he gives a stagy wave and mimes something in the direction of my mother, his eyes still fixed on the lens, and heads out the door. It’s a silent film, but I can script the “Father Knows Best” voice-over.

The longest reel is dedicated to Christmas. The camera lingers on the tree—reverential close-ups of frosted ornaments, tinsel strands, a large electric nativity star. Then a slow pan over the three red-and-white-striped stockings tacked to the wall in descending order. Poppa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear. And finally the ceremonial unwrapping of the gifts: my father holds up each of his to the camera—tie, striped pajamas, Champion Dart Board. He mugs a forced grin and mouths, “Just what I wanted for Christmaaas!” My mother sits cross-legged on the floor in a ruffled blouse and pleated skirt, staring at her gifts with a wan expression: apron, bedroom slippers, baby-doll nightie.

In the final minutes of “Susie’s First Christmas,” the camera shifts to an eight-month-old me, wobbling to a precarious standing position before the full-length hall mirror, baby-fat fingers scrabbling along the slick surface for a purchase. I press my nose and then crush my whole face against the mirror, as if searching for something behind the reflection. What the film hid, I thought as I watched it decades later, was my father. Who was nowhere more absent than in the brief moments when he appeared on-screen, surrounded by the props of his American family, parading an out-of-the-box identity before the camera, splicing himself, frame by frame, into a man whose story had been replaced by an image, an image of anyone and no one.

By then, he was working in a darkroom in the city, commuting to a windowless chamber that would become as thoroughly his domain as our suburban basement. He became a master of photographic development and manipulative techniques: color conversions, montages, composites, and other transmutations of the pre-Photoshop trade. “Trick photography,” he called it. He always smelled of fixer.

My father was particularly skilled at “dodging,” making dark areas look light, and “masking,” concealing unwanted parts of the picture. “The key is control,” he liked to say. “You don’t expose what you don’t want exposed.” In the aquarium murk where he spent his daytime hours, hands plunged in chemical baths, a single red safelight for navigation, he would shade and lighten and manipulate, he would make body parts, buildings, whole landscapes disappear. He had achieved in still photography what he had thought possible only in film. He made the story come out the way he wanted it to.

His talent made him indispensable in certain quarters—most notably in Condé Nast’s art production department. From the ’60s to the ’80s, Condé Nast relied on my father to perform many of the most difficult darkroom alterations for the photography that appeared in its premier magazines, Vogue, Glamour, House & Garden, Vanity Fair, Brides. For years a note that one magazine art director had sent to another hung in my father’s studio: “Send it to Steve Faludi—don’t send it to anyone else!” My father performed his “tricks” on the work of some of the most celebrated fashion photographers of the time—Richard Avedon, Francesco Scavullo, Irving Penn, Bert Stern—at several commercial photo agencies and, later, on his own at his one-man business, Lenscraft Studios, in a garment-district loft previously occupied by fashion photographer Hank Londoner. He also worked his magic on many vintage photographs whose negatives had been lost; he could create a perfect copy from a print. Among the classic images he worked on were those by the preeminent Hungarian photographer (and World War II Jewish refugee), André Kertész. My father’s handiwork “was so precise and close and meticulous, there would be no bleeding of color or light,” Dick Cole, the director of Condé Nast’s art production department in that period, told me many years later, as we sat in his living room in Southern California, leafing through glossy coffee-table books that featured my father’s artifice. “It was amazing. You could never tell what had been changed. You couldn’t tell the original from the copy.”

Occasionally as a small child I would take the commuter train to the city with my father and visit one of the series of Manhattan photo agencies where he worked. He’d lead me to the other side of the partitioned studio, where men perched on high stools before light tables, effacing with fine-tipped brushes the facial imperfections of fashion models. He regarded retouching as the crowning glory of the photographic arts. He would hold up the before-and-after shots of ad copy for me to appreciate. See, she no longer has that unsightly mole! Look, no more wrinkles! He admired the men bent over those light tables, obliterating blemishes. My father rarely involved himself with my educational or professional prospects. But he did, several times, advise me to become a retoucher. Which was peculiar counsel for a daughter who was consumed, from the day she first joined the staff of her grade school newspaper, with exposing flaws, not concealing them. At the heart of our relationship, in the years we didn’t speak and, even more, in the years when we would again, a contest raged between erasure and exposure, between the airbrush and the reporter’s pad, between the master of masking and the apprentice who would unmask him.

4

Home Insecurity

Hegyvidék (literally, “mountain-land”), the XIIth district of Budapest, is high in the Buda Hills. Always an exclusive enclave—home to embassies, villas, the residences of the nouveaux riches—its palatial properties were hot investments in post-Communist, new-millennial Budapest. As the broken-English text from one online real estate pitch I read put it, Hegyvidék is “the place where the luxury villas and modern detached houses—as blueblood estates—are ruling their large gardens in the silent milieu.” To reach my father’s address required negotiating several steep inclines and then a series of hair-raising tight turns on increasingly potholed and narrow roads.

“Damn Communists,” my father said, as the Exclusive plunged in and out of craters in the macadam. “They never fix the streets.”

“Weren’t they fifteen years ago?” I said.

“Waaall, they call themselves the ‘Socialists’ now”—she was speaking of the party in power at the time—“but it’s the same thing. A bunch of thieves.”

The camper wheezed up the final precipice and around a tight curve. A house loomed into view, a three-story concrete chalet. It had a peaked roof and stuccoed walls. A security fence ringed the perimeter, with a locked and alarmed gate. A large warning sign featured a snarling, and thankfully nonexistent, German shepherd.

I wasn’t sure whether the bunkered fortress was an expression of my father’s hypervigilance or that of the culture she’d returned to. Later, I read Colin Swatridge’s A Country Full of Aliens, a reminiscence of the British author’s residence in Budapest in the ’90s, and was struck by his remarks on the Hungarian fetish for home protection:

You may peer at the grandiosity of it all—at the grey-brick drive and the cypress trees, and the flight of steps, and the juttings, and the recesses, and the columns and the quoins—but you may do this only through the ironwork of the front gates, under the watchful eyes of a security camera, and of movement-sensitive security lights. It is fascinating, this need to reconcile security and self-display. The house must show its feminine lacy mouldings, its leggy balusters, its delicate attention to detail, its sinuous sweep of steps; yet it must also show its teeth, and muscular locks, and unyielding ironwork. It must be at once coy and assertive, like a hissing peacock—a thing beautiful and ridiculous …

What is, perhaps, characteristically Hungarian about these green-belt houses, these kitsch castles in the Buda Hills and the Pilis Hills, by Lake Balaton and the Bükk, is the conflation of exhibitionism with high security. It is akin to the confusion of the feminine and the masculine that is a feature of the language.

I knew all about that linguistic confusion. It was a staple of my childhood. “Tell your mother I’m waiting for him,” my father would say. Or “Your brother needs to clean up her room.” Hungarians are notorious for mixing up the sexes in English. Magyar has no gendered pronouns.

My father steered the camper to the far shoulder and yanked on the parking brake. She teetered perilously across the road in her white heels and keyed in the code in a box installed on the defending wall, and the gate creaked open—and shut again as soon as we’d pulled through. The camper labored up the steep driveway and came to a halt in a grassy patch—it was too tall to fit in the house’s two-car garage. A twenty-five-foot flagpole presided over the front lawn. It had three ropes, “so I can show all my flags,” my father told me. “I put up the Hungarian flag on March 15”—National Day, commemorating Hungary’s failed 1848 revolution against the Austrian Empire—“and the U.S. flag on July 4.” The third rope periodically hoisted the banners of my father’s other past residences, Denmark and Brazil.

My father scrambled down from the pilot’s seat and swung her purse over one shoulder. We stood in the drive for what felt to me like a good quarter hour while she fussed with various security measures. First she had to reengage the VW’s internal burglar alarm. Then she had to reset an outdoor surveillance system that “protected” the driveway. Once it was armed, we had sixty seconds to hurry to the front door, the one on the right. The house was a duplex; the other side-by-side identical unit, a doppelgänger residence, stood empty.

Before we entered, my father disarmed a third alarm system—and reactivated it as soon as we got inside. While she punched in numbers, I tried to find my bearings in the gloom. We were standing in a dark hallway. To the right was a stairwell, shrouded in shadow. Wooden steps ascended two levels. At the far end of the hall, through an open door, I caught a glimpse of yellow kitchen cabinets, the same cabinets that had adorned his Manhattan loft. (My father had shipped them, along with the refrigerator, dishwasher, oven, and everything else he owned at the time, including a giant stash of lumber and his VW van, in a forty-foot crate.) She led me down the hall and through another door on the left, which led to a large tiled living room and, off it, a dining room with a chandelier and a display case full of Zsolnay china.

A wall of glass with French doors overlooked the front terrace, but they, too, were dark, the thick drapes closed. “Someone could look in and want to steal my electronic equipment,” she said. She had a lot of it to steal. A wall-mounted cabinet system in the living room was filled, floor to ceiling, with monitors, receivers, amplifiers, speakers, woofers, CD, DVD, VHS, and Betamax players, a turntable, even a reel-to-reel tape machine. The last served to play her old opera recordings, the same ones my father used to blast every weekend in our suburban living room in Yorktown Heights. A half dozen cabinets contained a thousand or more operas on CDs, tapes, videos, and record albums.

Bookshelves lined the opposite wall. On one end were all my father’s old manuals on rock climbing, ice climbing, sailboat building, canoeing, woodworking, shortwave-radio and model-airplane construction. The My-Life-as-a-Man collection, I thought. Not that there was a corresponding woman’s section. Other shelves were populated with works devoted to all things Magyar: Hungarian Ancient History, Hungarian Fine Song, Hungarian Dog Breeds, and thick biographies of various Hungarian luminaries, including a two-volume set of memoirs by Countess Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai, the daughter-in-law of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the Regent who ruled Hungary during all but the final months of World War II.

Another section of books belonged to a genre that was as lifelong a preoccupation of my father’s as opera: fairy tales. Even as a girl, I understood that the puppet theater and the toy-train landscapes my father constructed were only ostensibly for his children. They gratified his craving for storybook fantasy. And the more extravagant the fantasy, the better. Likewise with opera. He hated a production that wasn’t lavishly costumed and staged. The two obsessions were, in fact, conjoined. One of my father’s most treasured childhood memories is of the night when his parents first took him to the Hungarian Royal Opera House. He was nine, and the opera was Hansel and Gretel.

“I wish I still had that book,” my father said, gazing over my shoulder at her impressive assortment of fairy tales. She was referring to a children’s anthology that the first of several nannies had read to Pista in his infancy. The nursemaid was German, and her mother tongue would become her young charge’s first language. “Leather binding, thick pages, gorgeous illustrations,” my father reminisced. “A gem. Whenever I go to a bookstore, I look for it.” Over the years she’d amassed many similar volumes, most featuring the tales of her most beloved storyteller, Hans Christian Andersen. She owned editions of his works in Danish, German, English, and Hungarian. (And could read them all. Like so many educated Hungarians, my father was a polyglot, fluent in five languages, plus Switzerdeutsch.) In 1972, when we took a family vacation to Denmark, my father made repeated pilgrimages to the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen’s harbor. I remember him standing for a long time by the seawall, pondering the sculpture of the sea nymph who cut out her tongue and split her tail to become human. I had studied him as he studied the statue, a girl in bronze on a surf-swept rock, her pain-racked limbs tucked beneath a nubile body, her mournful eyes turned longingly toward shore. My father had taken many pictures.

In idle moments on my first visit to Hegyvidék, and on the visits to come, I would take down from the shelf the English version of Hans Christian Andersen’s collected stories and leaf through its pages, repelled and riveted by the stories of mutilation and metamorphosis, dismemberment and resurrection: The vain dancing girl who has her feet amputated to reclaim her virtue. The one-legged tin soldier who falls in love with a ballerina paper cutout and, hurled into a stove, melts into a tiny metal heart. The lonely Jewish servant girl who dreams her whole life of being a Christian—and gets her wish at the resurrection. And most famously, the despised runt of the litter who grows into a regal cygnet. “I shall fly over to them, those royal birds!” says the Ugly Duckling. “It does not matter that one has been born in the hen yard as long as one has lain in a swan’s egg.” And I’d wonder: if the duckling only becomes a swan because he is born one, if the Little Mermaid cleaves her tail only to return to the sea, what kind of transformation were these stories promising?

On still more shelves on the living-room wall kitty-corner to the electronic equipment, stacks of photo albums contained snapshots from my father’s multiple trips to Odense, Andersen’s birthplace. “I took Ilonka there once,” my father said. “I think she was a little bored.” Flipping through them, I was startled to find a familiar townscape: the distinctive step-gabled roof of Vor Frue Kirke (the Church of Our Lady), a GASA produce shop (a Danish market cooperative), and the half-timbered inn of Den Gamle Kro (there’s an inn by that name a block from the Hans Christian Andersen Museum). Had my father reproduced the city of Odense in the train set he’d installed in our playroom? Later, when I inspected the two photos I still had of our childhood model railroad, I admired all the more the particularity of my father’s verisimilitude. The maroon snout of the toy locomotive bore the winged insignia and royal crown of the Danish State Railway.

Above the Odense photo albums, on two upper shelves, a set of figurines paraded: characters from The Wizard of Oz. My father had found them in a store in Manhattan, after my parents divorced and he’d moved back to the city. They were ornately accessorized. Dorothy sported ruby-red shoes and a woven basket, with a detachable Toto peeking out from under a red-and-white-checked cloth. The Tin Man wore a red heart on a chain and clutched a tiny oil can. The Scarecrow spewed tufts of straw, and the Lion displayed a silver-plated medal that read COURAGE. My father had strung wires to the head and limbs of the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West, turning her into a marionette. I paused before the dangling form and gave it a furtive push. The witch bobbled unsteadily on her broom.

My father pulled the drapes aside a few inches so we could slip through a glass door onto the terrace. I’d asked to see the view. The deck ran the length of the house and was lined with concrete flower boxes. Nothing was growing in them, except weeds. “You have to plant geraniums in May,” my father said, by way of explanation. In May, she had been lying in a hospital room in Thailand.

The lawn sloped steeply to the street. Down the center, a path of paving stones was shaded by huge and gnarled chestnut trees, an arboreal specter that put me in mind of Oz’s Haunted Forest (“I’d Turn Back If I Were You …”). Smashed shells and shriveled bits of nut meat littered the steps. From our aerie, you could see down a series of hills to a thickly wooded valley. To the right of the deck was a small orchard my father had planted when she first moved in. She enumerated the varieties: sour cherry, peach, apricot, apple, walnut. “Strange, though,” she said, “this year they bore no fruit.” Her horticultural inventory reminded her of the long-ago resident gardener who had tended the grounds of the Friedman villa in the Buda Hills, the villa where my father had spent every summer as a boy. “The gardener’s family lived in the cottage on our property,” she recalled.

She leaned over the far edge of the deck and pointed to a bungalow a half block below us, the only small structure on the street. “He lives there,” my father said.

“Who?”

“Bader.”

“Bader?”

“Baaader,” my father enunciated, correcting both my pronunciation and my failure to recognize the name. “Laci Baaader.” Laci, diminutive for László. “The gardener’s son.”

“You were playmates?”

“Haaardly. I was one of those.” Jews, she meant.

“That’s weird,” I said.

“What?”

“The coincidence. His living on your street now.”

My father didn’t think so. “He lives in his father’s house.” The gardener’s cottage that sat on my grandfather’s property. She pointed to one of the residential McMansions a stone’s throw from the Bader cottage. I could just see over the high concrete wall that moated it. It was, she said, the old Friedman villa. “There!”

The news rattled me. I had suspected that my father had purchased Buda Hills real estate as a way of recovering all that the Friedmans had lost. I hadn’t understood that my father had bought a house directly overlooking the scene of the crime.

“Waaall, it waaas there,” she amended. “They remodeled it, into that atrocity.” Nonetheless, some weeks after my father had arrived in Budapest on an exploratory visit in 1989, he’d tried to buy the atrocity. “It wasn’t for sale.” When a house nearby came on the market that fall, he’d paid the asking price at once, $131,250, in cash.

The house proved to be a disaster zone of shoddy and half-finished construction. My father summoned Laci Bader. “He took one look and he said, ‘This is no good!’” The roof was a sieve, the pipes broken, the insulation missing, the aluminum wiring a crazy-quilt death trap. “If you drilled into the wall, you’d get electrocuted.” It took most of a year, and tens of thousands of dollars more, to make the place habitable.

The house still needed significant maintenance, for which my father often enlisted Bader. “Now that I’m a lady, Bader fixes everything,” she said. “Men have to help me. I don’t lift a finger.” My father gave me a pointed look. “It’s one of the great advantages of being a woman,” she said. “You write about the disadvantages of being a woman, but I’ve only found advantages!” I wondered at the way my father’s new identity was in a dance with the old, her break from the past enlisted in an ongoing renegotiation with his history. She hadn’t regained the family property, but by her change in gender, she’d brought the Friedmans’ former gardener’s son back into service.

We went back inside, my father pulling the drapes shut again. She said she’d show me to my quarters. I followed her up the dark stairwell to the second floor, and into one of the three bedrooms.

“I sleep here sometimes, but I’m giving it to you because it’s got the view,” she said. She gestured toward the far wall of windows, which was shrouded in thick blackout liners covered by lace curtains. I inched the layers aside to see what lay behind them: closed casement windows that looked out over a concrete balcony, covered in dead leaves. A fraying hammock hung from rusted hooks. The walls were painted a pale pink and the room was blandly, impersonally furnished: a double bed in a white-painted wood frame, a white wooden wardrobe, a straight-back chair (an extra from the dining-room set downstairs), and an old television on a metal stand on wheels. A generic oil painting of a flower bouquet seemed to belong, like the rest of the decor, to a ’60s Howard Johnson’s.

“I had Ilonka sew this,” my father said, gesturing toward the matching fuschia duvet cover and pillowcases. “I built the bed frame. And the wardrobe.”

“You’re still doing carpentry?”

She said her workbench was in the basement. “Like in Yorktown.” She rapped her knuckles on the side of the wardrobe to demonstrate its solid craftsmanship. “You can hang your things in here,” she said.

I opened the wardrobe doors. My father followed my gaze into its shadowy innards and grimaced. Stuffed inside her hand-built armoire was a full armament of male clothing: three-piece business suits, double-breasted blazers, pin-striped shirts, khaki trousers, ski sweaters, rock-climbing knickers, plaid flannel jackets, hiking boots, oxfords, loafers, boat shoes, silk ties, wool socks, undershirts, BVDs, and the tuxedo my father wore to a family wedding.

“I need to get rid of all of this,” she said. “Someone will want these.”

“Who?”

“Talk to your husband.”

“He’s not my—” My boyfriend and I wouldn’t get married for a few more years. I could hear an old anxious hesitancy rising in my voice, which had suddenly lofted into helium registers. “He’s not your size,” I said, willing my voice to a lower pitch.

“These are quality clothes!” The hangers rattled as she slammed the closet door.

She left me to unpack. Ten minutes later, a summons from the adjoining bedroom. “Susaaan, come here!”

She was standing before a dressing table with a mirror framed in vanity lights. I recognized it: the makeup table for fashion models that used to sit in my father’s photo studio in Manhattan. She held an outfit in each hand, a yellow sundress with flounces and a navy-blue frock with a sailor-suit collar. “Which should I wear?”

I said I didn’t know. And thought, petulantly: change your clothes all you want, you’re still the same person.

“It’s hot out—I’ll wear the sundress.” She started peeling off her top. I backed toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To unpack.”

“Oh, come now,” she said, half in, half out of her blouse. “We’re all women here.”

She pulled the top over her head and gestured toward the closet. “Help me pick out the shoes to go with the dress.”

I stood in the threshold, one foot in, one foot out.

My father gave me a familiar half-grin. “Come closer, I won’t bite!”

5

The Person You Were Meant to Be

One evening in the early winter of 1976, an event occurred that would mark my childhood and forever after stand as a hinge moment in my life. The episode lay bare to my seventeen-year-old mind the threat undergirding the “traditional” arrangement of the sexes. Not just in principle and theory, but in brutal fact.

I was in my room, nodding over a book, when I was jolted awake by a loud crash. Someone was breaking into the house, and then pounding up the stairs with blood-curdling howls. It was my father, violating a restraining order. Six months earlier he had been barred from the premises. I heard wood splintering, a door giving way before a baseball bat. Then screams, a thudding noise. “Call the police,” my mother cried as she fled past my room. When I dialed 911, the dispatcher told me a squad car was on its way.

“Already?”

Yes, the dispatcher said. Some minutes earlier, an anonymous caller had reported “an intruder” at the same address.

The police arrived and an ambulance. The paramedics carried out on a stretcher the man my mother had recently begun seeing. He had been visiting that evening. His shirt was soaked in blood, and he had gone into shock. My father had attacked him with the baseball bat, then with the Swiss Army knife he always carried in his pocket. The stabbings, in the stomach, were multiple. It took the Peekskill Hospital’s ER doctors the better part of the night to stanch the bleeding. Getting the blood out of the house took longer. It was everywhere: on floors, walls, the landing, the stairs, the kitchen, the front hall. The living room looked like a scene out of Carrie, which, as it happened, had just come out that fall. When the house went on the market a year later, my mother and I were still trying to scrub stains from the carpet.

The night of his break-in, my father was treated for a superficial cut on the forehead and delivered to the county jail. He was released before morning. The next afternoon, he rang the bell of our next-door neighbor, wearing a slightly soiled head bandage, trussed up, as my mother put it later, “like the Spirit of ’76.” He was intent on purveying his side of the story: he’d entered the house to “save” his family from a trespasser. My father’s side prevailed, at least in the public forum. Two local newspapers (including one that my mother had begun writing for) ran items characterizing the night’s drama as a husband’s attempt to expel an intruder. The court reduced the charges to a misdemeanor and levied a small fine.

In the subsequent divorce trial, my father claimed to be the “wronged” husband. The judge acceded to my father’s request to pay no alimony and a mere $50 a week for the support of two children. My father also succeeded in having a paragraph inserted into the divorce decree that presented him as the injured party: by withdrawing her affections in the last months of their marriage, my mother had “endangered the defendant’s physical well being” and “caused the defendant to receive medical treatment and become ill.”

“I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside,” my father had written me. As I confronted, nearly three decades and nine time zones away, my father’s new self, it was hard for me to purge that image of the violent man from her new persona. Was I supposed to believe the one had been erased by the other, as handily as the divorce decree recast my father as the “endangered” victim? Could a new identity not only redeem but expunge its predecessor?

As I came of age in postwar America, the search for identity was assuming Holy Grail status, particularly for middle-class Americans seeking purchase in the new suburban sprawl. By the ’70s, “finding yourself” was the vaunted magic key, the portal to psychic well-being. In my own suburban town in Westchester County, it sometimes felt as if everyone I knew, myself included, was seeking guidance from books with titles like Quest for Identity, Self-Actualization, Be the Person You Were Meant to Be. Our teen center sponsored “encounter groups” where high schoolers could uncover their inner selfhood; local counseling services offered therapy sessions to “get in touch” with “the real you”; mothers in our neighborhood held consciousness-raising meetings to locate the “true” woman trapped inside the housedress. Liberating the repressed self was the ne plus ultra of the newly hatched women’s movement, as it was the clarion call for so many identity movements to follow. To fail in that quest was to suffer an “identity crisis,” the term of art minted by the reigning psychologist of the era, Erik Erikson.

But who is the person you “were meant to be”? Is who you are what you make of yourself, the self you fashion into being, or is it determined by your inheritance and all its fateful forces, genetic, familial, ethnic, religious, cultural, historical? In other words: is identity what you choose, or what you can’t escape?

If someone were to ask me to declare my identity, I’d say that, along with such ordinaries as nationality and profession, I am a woman and I am a Jew. Yet when I look deeper into either of these labels, I begin to doubt the grounds on which I can make the claim. I am a woman who has managed to bypass most of the rituals of traditional femininity. I didn’t have children. I didn’t yearn for maternity; my “biological clock” never alarmed me. I didn’t marry until well into middle age—and the wedding, to my boyfriend of twenty years, was a spur-of-the-moment affair at City Hall. I lack most domestic habits—I am an indifferent cook, rarely garden, never sew. I took up knitting for a while, though only after reading a feminist crafts book called Stitch ’n Bitch.

I am a Jew who knows next to nothing of Jewish law, ritual, prayers. At Passover seders, I mouth the first few words of the kiddush—with furtive peeks at the Haggadah’s phonetic rendition and only the dimmest sense of the meaning. I never attended Hebrew school; I wasn’t bat mitzvahed. We never belonged to the one synagogue in Yorktown Heights, which, anyway, was so loosey-goosey Reform it might as well have been Unitarian. I’m not, technically speaking, even Jewish. My mother is Jewish only on her father’s side, a lack of matrilineage that renders me gentile to all but the most liberal wing of the rabbinate.

So if my allegiance to these identities isn’t fused in observance and ritual, what is its source?

I am a Jew who grew up in a neighborhood populated with anti-Semites. I am a woman whose girlhood was steeped in the sexist stereotypes of early ’60s America. My sense of who I am, to the degree that I can locate its coordinates, seems to derive from a quality of resistance, a refusal to back down. If it’s threatened, I’ll assert it. My “identity” has quickened in those very places where it has been most under siege.

My neighborhood in Yorktown Heights was staunchly Catholic, mostly second-generation Irish and Italian, families who were one step out of the Bronx and eager to pull up the drawbridge against any other ethnicities or religions—in particular, blacks and Jews. In the mid-’60s, when a petition circulated to block a black family from buying a home on the street, my mother squared off against the petitioners. The family eventually bought the house; my mother remained the neighborhood pariah. Soon after we arrived, a boy down the street welcomed me by hurling rocks while yelling, “You’re a kike!” How he knew was a mystery: we’d shown no signs, and wouldn’t. My father made sure we aggressively celebrated Christmas and Easter and sent out holiday cards with Christian images (The Little Drummer Boy, Little Jesus in the Manger …). His eagerness to pass only reinforced my sense of grievance and, perversely, my commitment to an identity I barely understood. You could say that my Jewishness was bred by my father’s silence.

And my womanhood bred by my mother’s despair. When she gave up her job in the city (as an editor of a life-insurance periodical) and moved to the suburbs, my father awarded her the various accessories to go with her newly domesticated state: a dust mop, a housedress, hot rollers, a bouffant wig (with Styrofoam head stand, on which the hairpiece was left to languish), and a box of stationery printed with a new name that heralded the erasure of hers, “Mrs. Steven C. Faludi.” No doubt I learned some of my anti-nesting tendencies from my mother in this time. My father, for his part, was eager to present himself as a model of postwar American manhood, with wife and children as supporting cast, along with the convertible sports car (and before that, a Lincoln Continental), the saws and drills in the basement, the barbeque grill, the cigar boxes and pipe on the mantel, and the oversized armchair with a headrest in the living room that we all understood to be “his.” The chair was his throne, proof of his dominion and dominance over his quarter-acre crabgrass demesne. We were careful not to sit in it.

When I was in grade school, my father bought me a tabletop weaving loom. After a halfhearted effort that produced a couple of uneven fabric coasters and one miniature scarf, I took the loom off my desk and stashed it in the closet—to make room for my writing pads. Journalism was my calling from an early age. I perceived it, specifically, as something I did as a woman, an assertion of my female independence. I worked my way through stacks of library books on intrepid “girl reporters” and imagined myself in the role of various crusading female journalists, fictional and real, Harriet the Spy and His Girl Friday’s Hildy Johnson, Ida B. Wells and Ida Tarbell. In my schoolgirl fantasies, the incarnation of heroic womanhood was Nellie Bly exposing the horrors of Blackwell Island’s asylum for women, Martha Gellhorn infiltrating D-Day’s all-male press corps (and one-upping her war-correspondent husband, Ernest Hemingway). On the Little Red Riding Hood stage that my father had built, I turned the girl in the red cape into an investigative reporter uncovering the crimes of a wolf who was now the Big Bad Warmonger (it was the Nixon years). By fifth grade, I was championing my causes in my elementary school newspaper—for the Equal Rights Amendment and legal abortion—incurring the wrath of the John Birch Society, whose members denounced me before the school board as a propagator of loose morals and a “pinko Commie fascist.” The denunciations made me all the more a journalist, my sense of selfhood affirmed as that-in-my-makeup-that-someone-else-opposed. And all the more a defender of my gender. I asserted my fealty to women through my reportorial diatribes against the canon of womanly convention. I renounced the standards of femininity not to renounce my sex but to declare it. In short, I became a feminist.

That identity became explicit the day my teenaged self consumed Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. I read that overwrought fulmination against suburban marriage in one sitting, shortly after my now-divorced mother had fled suburbia with her two children, resettling in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in the East Village in New York. But more accurately, my feminist consciousness emerged a season earlier, following a bloody night in a suburban house in 1976, seeing my mother unjustly demoted to “fallen” woman and my father falsely elevated to defender of home and hearth. I would spend the next many decades writing about the politics of women’s rights, always at that one remove of journalistic observer. My subject was feminism on the public stage, in the media and popular culture, legislative halls and corporate offices. But I never forgot its provenance: this was personal for me.

Feminism, according to the insistent mantra, is all about “choice.” Did I choose to be a feminist? Wasn’t it also what I inherited, what I made out of a childhood history I couldn’t control? I became an agitator for women’s equality in response to my father’s fury over his own crumbling sense of himself as a man in command of his wife and children. My identity as a feminist sprang from the wreckage of my father’s “identity crisis,” from his desperation to assert the masculine persona he had chosen. Feminism, as an avocation and a refuge, became the part of my life that I chose. The part I couldn’t escape was my father.

The term “identity” is a hall of mirrors, “as unfathomable as it is all-pervasive,” Erik Erikson asserted in 1968. He had coined the term (shortly before he coined the phrase “identity crisis”). But on the first page of his weighty tome on the subject, Identity: Youth and Crisis, he confessed he couldn’t define it. The best he could hazard was that “a sense” of identity felt like a “subjective sense of an invigorating sameness and continuity.”

A crisis seemed inevitable, given the murkiness of personal identity evident in subsequent definitions, like the one in the Oxford English Dictionary: “The fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else.” Over the years, attempts to come up with “identity theory” have foundered. In 1967, sociologist Nathan Leites bemoaned (as recounted by UCLA colleague and transsexual-treatment pioneer Robert Stoller), “The term identity has little use other than as fancy dress in which to disguise vagueness, ambiguity, tautologies, lack of clinical data, and poverty of explanation.” Mass popularization didn’t help. In a 1983 essay titled “Identifying Identity,” historian Philip Gleason observed: “As identity became more and more a cliché, its meaning grew progressively more diffuse, thereby encouraging increasingly loose and irresponsible usage. The depressing result is that a good deal of what passes for discussion of identity is little more than portentous incoherence.” And yet, for all its ambiguity, the question of identity would define and transfix Erikson’s age, and ours.

Identity as a concept didn’t enter psychological theory until after World War II. When Erikson searched for antecedents in the utterances of his professional forebears, he found that Sigmund Freud invoked the term seriously only once, in an address to the Society of B’nai B’rith in Vienna in 1926. The founding father of psychoanalysis was describing what made him Jewish: “neither faith nor national pride,” Freud confessed, but “many obscure emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity.” In short, he felt like a Jew but couldn’t say why.

Early on, Erikson counseled against the urge to define individual identity as something you acquire and display all by yourself. “Mere ‘roles’ played interchangeably, mere self-conscious ‘appearances,’ or mere strenuous ‘postures,’” he wrote, are not “the real thing,” although they are some of the prominent elements of “the ‘search for identity.’” A sturdier selfhood, he maintained, emerges from the interplay between self-development and a collective inheritance. “We cannot separate personal growth and communal change,” he wrote, “nor can we separate … the identity crisis in individual life and contemporary crises in historical development because the two help to define each other and are truly relative to each other.”

Just as it is impossible to separate your individual identity from your social identity, Erikson held, so is it necessary to synthesize your past with your present, to incorporate all aspects of your experience, even (or especially) the parts you prefer not to acknowledge. When someone tries to deny unwanted history, “the diverse and conflicting stages and aspects of life,” and insists instead on a “category-to-be-made-absolute,” Erikson cautioned, “he restructures himself and the world by taking recourse to what we may call totalism,” an inner tyranny in which an internal despot patrols “an absolute boundary,” maintaining it regardless of whether the new identity is organic or its components coherent.

Erikson famously failed to heed his own warning. In a 1975 article titled “Erik Erikson, the Man Who Invented Himself,” philosopher Marshall Berman, Erikson’s former graduate student, detected a disturbing absence in his mentor’s autobiographical writings: Erikson had scrubbed his past. The erasure began with the family name, Homburger, which he had first reduced to a middle initial, “H.,” then eliminated altogether. The deletion suggested to Berman a more disturbing equivocation:

As we unravel [Erikson’s] story, we discover something else he cannot bear to say: that he is a Jew. We infer that his mother, “nee Karla Abrahamsen,” was Jewish, and we read that his stepfather, Dr. Theodor Homburger, was not only a Jew, but a member of a synagogue. However, Erikson says of himself that as a child he didn’t look Jewish: blond and blue-eyed and “flagrantly tall,” he was jokingly “referred to as ‘goy’ in my stepfather’s temple.”

As an adult, Erikson reinforced that goyishness (along with marrying an Episcopalian minister’s daughter and displaying a crucifix on the wall of his Harvard study) by adopting a new and invented last name, one that implied not only gentile origins but self-genesis. “I made myself Erik’s son,” he told a friend. “It is better to be your own originator.”

Better, that is, if you succeeded in shucking your provenance. Had he? In a long letter to a social worker who had asked him to describe his religious faith, Erikson wrote, “I know that nobody who has grown up in a Jewish environment can ever be not-a-Jew, whether the Jewishness he experienced was defined by his family’s sense of history, by its religious observances, or, indeed, by the environment’s attitudes toward Jews.”

In Identity: Youth and Crisis, Erikson described a patient, a “tall, intelligent ranch owner” who had concealed his religious origins from everyone but his wife. Despite an outwardly successful life, he was plagued by “a network of compulsions and phobias” that derived from his childhood as an urban Jew. “His friends and adversaries, his elders and his inferiors all unknowingly played the roles of the German boys or the Irish gangs who had made the little Jewish boy miserable on his daily walk to school,” Erikson wrote. “This man’s analysis provided a sad commentary on the fact that [Nazi publisher Julius] Streicher’s presentation of an evil Jewish identity is no worse than that harbored by many a Jew,” even a Jew living as far from his collective past as the American West. “The patient in question sincerely felt that the only true savior for the Jews would be a plastic surgeon.”

Whenever as a child I’d press my father on his Jewish heritage, and its banishment from our suburban home, he would dismiss my questions with a vaguely regal wave of the hand and a look of withering condescension. “That’s not interesting,” he’d say. Or, one of his trademark conversation-enders, “A stupid thing.” Later, on my first visit to my father in Hungary, I’d ask why she’d changed the family name. In 1946, the Friedmans became the Faludis. It was eighteen-year-old István’s idea. My father chose Faludi, she told me, for two reasons: it was an old Magyar name, meaning “of the village” (true Magyars hail from the countryside), and she’d seen it roll by on the credits of so many Hungarian films she’d adored as a boy (“Processed by Kovács & Faludi”).

Had she also shed the name Friedman, I asked, because it sounded Jewish? My question prompted her usual gesture.

“I changed it because I was a Hungarian.” She corrected herself, “Because I am a Hungarian. One hundred percent Hungarian.”

I was someone with only the vaguest idea of what it meant to be a Jew who was nevertheless adamant that I was one. My father was someone reminded at every turn that she was a Jew, who was nevertheless adamant that her identity lay elsewhere.

6

It’s Not Me Anymore

My father stood in the doorway in her favorite crimson bathrobe; she wore it every morning of my first visit. It had a monkish cowl and angel-wing sleeves. She called it “my Little Red Riding Hood outfit.” It wasn’t entirely closed. “What are you doing?”

“I’m”—my voice squeaked; I looked down at the receiver in my hand—“phoning someone.”

“Who?” She eyed me, suspicious.

“Just a friend of a friend,” I said guiltily, though I was telling the truth. “She lives in Pest. She wanted to meet me.”

“There’s no time,” my father said.

“I just—”

“You’re only here another week.”

I set down the receiver. No time? I thought. I’d been here four days, and we’d only left the house once—to pick up her new Web camera at Media Markt. My confinement had me wondering whether my father’s elaborate home security system was meant to keep burglars from invading or guests from escaping. She kept the gate in the security fence locked on both sides. Merely to step outside, I had to ask her for the key. Stefánie’s Schloss was starting to feel more like Dracula’s Castle, and as the days passed, I was acting more and more like the passive captive, a character in one of my father’s treasured fairy tales, Rapunzel in the tower. Why didn’t I finish dialing the phone number? When my father refused to visit her family’s old summer villa a half-block away—a place I was eager to see, having heard about it all my life—why didn’t I just go knock on the door? If she didn’t want to venture out, why didn’t I hike down the hill and catch the bus into town? Instead, I retreated to my room, made resentful cracks under my breath, and attempted furtive phone calls when my father was out of earshot. I was slipping back into that twelve-year-old self, timid and sullen, fearful of Daddy. Who was no longer Daddy.

Yet inside the ramparts my reclusive father seemed determined, even desperate, to come out of hiding, or to bring at least one aspect of herself out for inspection. That first week she’d led me up and down the stairs, unlocking closets and cabinets, modeling outfits, donning makeup, and reciting labels (“Max Factor English Rose Lip Gloss,” “Wet n Wild Cover-All Stick,” “Vogue Self-Adhesive 100%-European-Hair Lashes, Trimmed and Feathered”). She was introducing me to “Stefi,” as she preferred to style herself, displaying the evidence of what she called “my new identity.”

Including and especially the evidence of her new physique. The robe seemed always to be falling open. Or the blouse. Or the nightgown. Every morning, she’d summon me to her room for wardrobe counsel. “Do these shoes go with this purse?” she’d ask, more often than not standing in her underwear. What does it matter, I’d mutter to myself, we’re not going anywhere. Or she would barge into my room on some pretext—“I think I left my stockings in here”—to present her new body in a negligee. Her exhibitions felt more like invasions. She said she was “showing” herself. But as the shows piled up, so did my distrust. What lay behind the curtain of her new transparency?

“This is where I put the things I wore when I first started ‘dressing,’” my father said on the second morning of my visit. We were standing on the third-floor landing, before a large, gray-metal locker. She extracted from her apron pocket a key ring worthy of a prison warden. After a half dozen failed attempts and a lot of rattling, she found the one that opened the creaking door. The locker’s contents might have outfitted a Vegas burlesque show: a sequin-and-beaded magenta evening gown with sweep train, a princess party frock with wedding-cake layers of crinoline, a polka-dotted schoolgirl’s pinafore with matching apron, a pink tulle tutu, a diaphanous cape, a pink feather boa, a peek-a-boo baby-doll nightie with matching ruffled panties, a pair of white lace-up stiletto boots, a Bavarian dirndl, and wigs of various styles and shades—from Brunhilde braids to bleach-blond pageboy to Shirley Temple mop of curls. “Why do you keep this locked?” I asked.

“Waaall … These clothes are more”—she considered—“flamboyant. They are from before the operation. Before I became a laaady. Now I dress sedate.”

Another morning, my father summoned me to the two computers in her attic office. Under the eaves was her image palace. On one wall were two locked doors. The first led to her reconstructed photographic darkroom, which she had had crated and shipped from New York in the summer of 1990. And then never used. The digital age had made my father’s talent for “trick photography” with film and print obsolete. Behind the second door was more photo equipment, including her old and giant photo-print drum dryer. The main room contained still more photographic supplies, several studio lights and jumbo rolls of paper for the advertising shoots she no longer conducted. An aluminum frame to hold backdrops was bolted into the floor.

The floor-to-ceiling shelves that wrapped around the central room held a video library: more than two thousand DVD, VHS, and Beta tapes of Hollywood epics, romantic comedies, Disney animations, TV sitcoms, mountaineering documentaries, and, to my dismay, a full set of Leni Riefenstahl films. (“Okay, she was a Nazi,” my father conceded, “but a greaaat filmmaker!”) She also possessed a vast array of digitized NASA footage—she subscribed to the space agency’s daily e-mailed download—and a cache of flight-simulator games. At her request, I’d arrived with the latest edition of Microsoft’s “takeoffs and landings” video, an unnerving item to be carrying in my hand luggage so soon after 9/11. My father wanted me to buy it in the States to avoid the import tax.

Tucked into the far alcove was my father’s electronic command station. Here she trolled the blogosphere, Photoshopped her images, visited the lunar landscape, and piloted her virtual fighter jets. We fell into a routine the first week, sitting for hours every day in front of a computer monitor, my father at the keyboard, me in a folding chair by her side, reporter’s notebook and tape recorder at the ready. Some mornings she wanted me to see all the cross-dressing Web links she had bookmarked to “My Favorites” in the years leading up to her operation: “Costume Wigs,” “Fantasy Femmes,” “Gender Bender,” “Gender Heaven,” “Just Between Us Special Girls,” “Maid Service,” “Miss Elaine Transformations,” “Mrs. Silks,” “Paper Dolls,” “Petticoated.com,” “Pink Gladiolas,” “Sweet Chastity Online,” “T-Girl Shopping,” “Top Sissy Sites” …

“You can find everything on the Internet!” my father exulted.

The longer we spent in the third-floor garret viewing virtual non-reality, the more frantic I became to escape into the world beyond the perimeter. If I stood at the attic window and stretched on tiptoe, I could just make out, over the chestnut and fruit trees and down the sloping hills and across the river, Pest, that fabled cosmopolis, the historic venue of so much creative and cultural ferment. At the turn of the century, Pest had been host to a spectacular upwelling of artists and writers and musicians whose works had packed the museums and bookstalls and concert halls, who’d painted and scribbled and composed in the six hundred coffeehouses, published in the twenty-two daily newspapers and more than a dozen literary journals, filled the more than sixteen thousand seats of the city’s fast-proliferating theaters and opera and operetta houses, and transformed the identity of the long backward capital into the “Paris of Eastern Europe.” The city in my mind was the one I’d read about in John Lukács’s Budapest 1900, the one the London Times correspondent Henri de Blowitz described in the late 1890s: “Buda-Pest! The very word names an idea which is big with the future. It is synonymous with restored liberty, unfolding now at each forward step; it is the future opening up before a growing people.” Blowitz’s city, I knew, belonged to a time long past. Still, my mind somehow wanted to hitch the city’s old aspiration to my father’s current one. Even when I was growing up, I’d felt that a key to my father’s enigma must lie in that Emerald City of István Friedman’s birth. I still couldn’t dispel the notion that to understand Stefi, I had to see her in the world where he was from, visit the streets and landmarks and “royal apartment” that little Pista had inhabited. But Pest was down the hill, visible only on tiptoe.

On those mornings when we weren’t lost in NASA rocket launches or Gender Heaven beauty tips, we were inspecting the images she’d assembled under “My Pictures.” Few of them were actually her pictures; most had been lifted from the Web. An exception was her Screen Saver image, a photo of a servant girl in a French maid’s outfit, a pink bow in her platinum blond curls. She had one white stiletto heel thrust out and was reaching down to adjust a stocking. The chambermaid was my father, who’d taken a selfie standing in front of a mirror.

Then there were the montages: images she’d pulled from various Internet pages, into which she’d inserted herself. All that long experience doctoring fashion spreads for Vogue and Brides had found its final form: Stefi’s face atop a chiffon slip originally worn by a headless mannequin. Stefi implanted on the long legs of a woman ironing lingerie in a polka-dot apron. (“I added the apron,” she said.) Stefi transported into an online Christmas card of a girl wearing a red ruffle around her neck and not much else. Stefi in a pink tutu and ballet slippers, captured in mid plié. Stefi in another maid’s outfit, this one belonging to a little girl, who was being disciplined by a stern schoolmarm in tweeds and lace-up boots. The girl held the skirt up in back to reveal her frilly underwear.

“I did these before I had the operation,” my father said, “but it was too extreme. Transvestite pretension.”

The theme of “before” and “after” was a recurrent one in these viewing sessions. My father seemed intent on drawing a thick line between her pre- and post-op self, as though the matron respectability she’d now achieved renounced her earlier sex-kitten incarnations, made them into a “flamboyance” that she no longer needed or recognized.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a link she’d bookmarked called FictionMania. I was hoping for narrative relief from the onslaught of images. “Oh, people make up these stories about themselves and post them on this site,” she said. “We don’t need to look at that.”

“Stories?” I pressed. I’d look it up later: FictionMania was one of the largest transgender fantasy sites on the Internet, a repository for more than twenty thousand trans-authored tales, the vast majority of them sexual. A popular story line involved a dominatrix (often a female relative) forcing a cowed man into feminine undergarments, dresses, and makeup. The genre had a name: “Forced Feminization Fiction.”

“You know, stories,” my father answered, “like they’re little boys and their mothers make them dress up as a girl as punishment and then their mothers spank them. And they have illustrations.” I reached for the mouse to click on the link. My father pushed my hand aside. “I wouldn’t even share that with a psychiatrist.” Not that she had one; she regarded psychiatry as one of those “stupid things” best given a wide berth. I asked if she had ever posted a story on the site.

“No, I just used some of the pictures they have on here. For my montages,” pasting her face onto one or another costumed playmate. She’d done more than that, though. Her upstairs hall closet contained stacks and stacks of file folders of forced feminization dramas she’d downloaded from FictionMania and similar sites, in which she’d montaged her names into the text (Steven “before,” Stefánie “after”). Her stash showed a predilection for subjugation and domestic service, often set in Victorian times: “Baroness Gloria, the Amazing Story of a Boy Turned Girl” (in which Aunt Margaret in Gay Nineties Berlin disciplines her nephew into becoming a corseted “real lady”) or “She Male Academy” (in which Mom sends her misbehaving son to the Lacy Academy for Young Ladies, a “vast mansion designed in the Victorian Gothic manner,” where whip-wielding mistresses exact a transformation: “Steven will become Stefánie; his bold, brash and arrogant male self will be destroyed and replaced with the dainty, mincing and helplessly ultra-feminine personality of a sissy slave girl”). Along with the altered downloads were a few stories my father had written herself. Her character stayed true to form, submitting to the directives of a chief housekeeper while an all-female crew of iron-handed maids order “Steven” into baby-doll nighties, Mary Jane shoes, and a French chambermaid’s uniform.

At the computer, my father had moved on to another page of links. “I haven’t looked at that website for two years at least,” she said of FictionMania. “It was just a—, like a hobby. Like I used to smoke cigars, but I gave it up. This was all before.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m a real woman,” she said. “But I keep these pictures as souvenirs. I put a lot of work into them; I don’t want to throw them out.”

She hadn’t stopped montaging; she’d only shifted genres. She showed me a few of her more recent constructions. Now she was the lady of the house: Stefánie in a long pleated skirt and high-necked bodice. Stefánie with hair swept up into a prim bun and holding the sort of large sensible pocketbook favored by Her Majesty the Queen of England. This was certainly a persona shift from the “sissy slave girl” in Mary Janes, or at least an age adjustment. And yet, it seemed less a repudiation of her erotica collection than a culmination of it.

The sex fantasies and lingerie catalogs in my father’s file folders in the hall closet were commingled with printouts of downloaded how-to manuals on gender metamorphosis (“The Art of Walking in Extreme Heels”), many of them narrated by virtual dominatrixes: “This is your first step on your journey into femininity, a journey that will change your life,” read the introduction to “Sissy Station,” a twenty-three-step electronic instructional on “finding your true self” by becoming a woman. “You will be humiliated and embarrassed. Most of all, you will be feminized.” The journey required, in different stages, applying multiple coats of red toenail polish every four days, beribboning testicles, and practicing submission with sex toys before a mirror.

“There isn’t any one way to be a trans,” a trans friend cautioned me some years later. “I think of transsexuality as one big room with many doors leading into it.” My father’s chosen door was distinct. But the big room, like any condo, had its covenants and restrictions. A reigning tenet of modern transgenderism holds that gender identity and sexuality are two separate realms, not to be confused. “Being transgender has nothing to do with sexual orientation, sex, or genitalia,” an online informational site instructs typically. “Transgender is strictly about gender identity.” Yet, here in my father’s file folders was a record of her earliest steps toward gender parthenogenesis, expressed in vividly sexual terms. And here in FictionMania and Sissy Station and the vast electronic literature of forced feminization fiction was a transgender id in which becoming a woman was thoroughly sexualized, in which femininity was related in terms of bondage and humiliation and orgasm, and the transformation from one gender to another was eroticized at every step. How to tease the two apart?

My father clicked the mouse and a greeting card popped up: Stefi’s visage pasted onto a frilled lace gown, hands clutching a bouquet, above the card’s preprinted message, “Wish I could be a bridesmaid on your Wedding Day!”

“You sent this card?”

“Not this one. I’ve sent others.”

“To?” Who, I wondered, was the bride she wished she “could be a bridesmaid” for?

“Other trans friends,” my father said.

“People you know?”

“People who have websites. You know, ‘Internet friends.’”

My father had bookmarked some of these “friends’” websites: Annaliese from Austria who, according to her page, “dresses sexy,” is “a size 12,” and “loves to go shopping.” Margit from Sweden, who “loves” bustiers, plush teddy bears, and “the color pink.” Genevieve of Germany, whose blog featured shots of herself topless on a nude beach and a timeline of “my second birth.”

“These pictures aren’t retouched,” my father said, unimpressed. “They aren’t as good as mine.”

“Where are your family photographs?” I asked. Suddenly, I’d had all I could handle of bustiers and second births. “From your childhood.”

My father gave her dismissive wave. “I don’t look at those.”

“But where are they?”

Silence. Then, airily: “Oh, somewhere.”

“Somewhere where?”

She shrugged, kept clicking through her images. Finally: “I keep all the old stuff, the important documents, in the basement. In a lockbox.”

“Could I see them?”

“It’s irrelevant,” she said. “It’s not me anymore.”

I looked at the clock; the day was half over. Day Five in the fortress.

“Dad, Stefi, please,” I said. “Let’s go out. You can show me the places you love in the city. Show me where you used to go in Pest as a child.”

“It doesn’t pay to live in the past,” my father said. “‘Get rid of old friends, make the new!’”

“I don’t think that’s how it goes,” I said. At any rate, I was here to see if I could make a new sort of friend: her. If only she could drop her age-old obstinance long enough to allow it. But our interactions were persistently one way: instead of mutual exchange, a force-fed guided tour of frou-frou fashions and hard-drive fantasies. When was she going to let in the daughter she wouldn’t let out?

“I don’t want to go to old places,” my father said. “It’s not interesting.”

“It interests me,” I said, hating my whininess, my own age-old obstinance.

“You are off the subject,” she said, tapping an insistent pink-polished nail on my notepad. “I’m Stefi now.”

One late afternoon, we stood in the kitchen, my father peeling an apple with her latest Swiss Army pocket knife. It was the “ladies’” version, she noted, with an emery board and cuticle scissors.

“Can I ask you a question?” my father said.

I nodded, hopeful. She was never the one who asked the questions. Maybe this was the start of an actual conversation.

“Can you leave your door open?” she said. “You close it every night when you go to bed.”

I drew back, speechless.

“Can you leave it open?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to be treated as a woman. I want to be able to walk around without clothes and for you to treat it normally.”

“Women don’t ‘normally’ walk around naked,” I said.

The blade snapped shut, and the conversational opportunity, if that’s what it had been, shut with it. She returned her ladies’ knife to an apron pocket.

That night, I closed the bedroom door. Then I reconsidered, and opened it a crack. As much as her intrusions disturbed me, I sensed that she wasn’t really targeting me. Or, if she was, it was only me as a mirror. After a while, a hesitant knock.

“Can you help me with something?”

My father was standing with her back to the door. She was in her bedroom slippers but still wearing her dress.

“I can’t get the zipper … Will you do it?”

I stood there for a moment, then reached for the zipper pull. I stopped when it was halfway down her back.

“You can get it from there,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said.

“You’re welcome.”

I watched her pad back down the hall. And wondered: how could someone so hidden be so intent on being unzipped? If, indeed, that’s what she wanted. All these exposures and disclosures seemed, literally, skin deep.

In the days to follow, my father continued her guided tour of surface ephemerality, leading me through the dresses in her closets, the lingerie in her bureau drawers, the cosmetics in her vanity table, the estrogen patches and dilation rods in her medicine chest, all the secret curiosities in her many Cabinets of Wonder. I couldn’t tell if she thought she was dispensing revelations or distracting me from the real secrets. Look at me, but don’t look at me. As the daughter of a photographer, I knew that letting light into a darkroom can illuminate the evidence or destroy it, depending on your timing. My father and I were in a battle over time, past and present. She wanted me to admire the decorations in Stefi’s new display windows. I wanted to know the contents of another sealed chamber: the lockbox in the basement.

7

His Body into Pieces. Hers.

On the sixth day of the visit, my father decided to lift the house arrest. “If you want to see something authentically Hungarian,” she said, “we could go to the Castle District.”

The Castle District, the former domicile of nobility, sits atop the two-hundred-foot-high limestone escarpment of Castle Hill, overlooking the Danube on the Buda side. It is now a high-toned tourist trap, home to the Royal Palace and, perched above that, the colonnaded Fisherman’s Bastion, a viewing terrace and promenade of turrets and parapets from which seemingly every panoramic picture postcard of Budapest is taken. It is as removed as my father’s own redoubt from the city I wanted to see. Still, it was out of the house.

We rode over in Der California Exclusive in the early afternoon. My father dressed for the excursion in a polka-dotted skirt, white-heeled sandals, and her usual pearl earrings. “Before I decided on Stefánie,” my father told me, “I was thinking of naming myself Pearl.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I like how it sounds,” she said. “Pearl” in Hungarian, which also serves as a female name, is Gyöngy. I flashed on one of my father’s attempts at forced feminization fiction, titled Gyöngyike Becomes a Maid: Confession of Sissy Gyöngyike—Let the Party Start. “Anyway,” my father said, “I love pearls.”

“And Stefánie?” I pressed. I knew that it was also the name of one of my paternal grandmother’s three sisters. “Did you pick it for your aunt Steffy?”

My father shrugged. No more divulgences were forthcoming.

There was no place to park and we made many circles in the camper before my father backed into a space of questionable legality. “It doesn’t matter if I get a ticket,” she said. “The camper’s registered in Rosenheim. They can’t get me.” She reached for the two cameras she’d brought, strapping one to each shoulder. I put my notebook in my back pocket. I was wearing blue jeans.

We descended the cobblestoned steps to the broad forecourt of the Royal Palace, a magisterial muddle of Neo-Medieval and Neo-Baroque architecture, topped off by a gigantic dome in the shape of a studded helmet. Presiding over the parade grounds was a heroic equestrian statue of Prince Eugene of Savoy, whose armies beat back the Turks from Hungarian territory in 1717, and a giant bronze of the Turul, the mythical bird that, according to legend, engendered the country’s thousand-year Magyar rule, the fabled “Hungarian Millennium.” The Royal Palace was now showcase to the National Library, the National Gallery, and the Budapest History Museum, a diadem set atop the city, containing the glittering artifacts of Hungarian antiquity and culture. I was pleased. Not only had I convinced my father to leave her own castle on the hill, I’d managed to get her to visit a palace that housed her past—or at least her nation’s past. Or at least the past her nation claimed to have, for its history was as shrouded in fancy as my father’s.

The Hungarian Millennium is said to have begun when Árpád and six other Magyar chieftains rode over the mountains from somewhere in the East and conquered the great Carpathian Basin sometime in the ninth century, setting the stage for their heirs to establish a Christian monarchy, the Hungarian Kingdom, sometime around the year 1000. What actually happened is hard to say. The story of the “Magyar Conquest” is derived from the Gesta Hungarorum, an account written three hundred years later by a royal notary identified as P. dictus magister (“P. who is called master”), who drew on folk ballads, medieval romances, and the Bible to create a cast of Magyar heroes and the enemies that they allegedly vanquished. The Árpád dynasty, in any event, was extinct by 1301. Kings drafted from foreign dynasties (but generally claiming a drop of Árpád blood) occupied the throne for the next two centuries. And for even more centuries the country was ravaged by invasions, defeats, and occupations from foreign forces—Mongols, Turks, Russians, Habsburg Austrians, Germans, and Russians again. With few exceptions, Hungary’s liberators, like so many of the country’s most celebrated figures, were “foreign,” too. As Paul Lendvai observed in The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat:

One of the most astounding traits of Hungarian history, subsequently suppressed or flatly denied by nationalistic chroniclers, is that the makers of the national myths, the widely acclaimed heroes of the Ottoman wars, the political and military leaders of the War of Independence against the Habsburgs, the outstanding figures of literature and science, were totally or partly of German, Croat, Slovak, Romanian or Serb origin.

In other words, not Magyar.

Hungary achieved its cultural zenith in Europe’s Belle Époque—under the rule of the Austrian Habsburgs. In 1867, Habsburg emperor Franz Josef loosened the reins by creating the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy—usually called the Dual Monarchy—a compromise that granted Hungary a large measure of self-determination and ushered in a cultural and economic revival. The country’s long sense of itself as an autonomous kingdom seemed validated, though the Dual Monarchy’s sole monarch was still Franz Josef. The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I finally brought full independence, albeit with destruction hot on its heels.

The Treaty of Trianon, the 1920 peace agreement reached at the Grand Trianon Palace in Versailles, forced Hungary to relinquish a whopping three-fifths of its population and two-thirds of its landmass to the successor states of Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Austria. If the nation was thus constricted, its self-image as sacrificial lamb was confirmed. “We are the most forsaken of all peoples on this earth,” Hungary’s national poet Sándor Petőfi had written in the mid-nineteenth century. After Trianon, Hungary became all the more a martyr among nations, a people identified by its stigmata. “The realm held together by the Holy Crown has been dismembered, and the lopped off limbs of the Holy Crown’s body are faint with the loss of blood,” jurist Kálmán Molnár pronounced at the time, in language as typical as it was overheated. “In a swoon, they await death or resurrection.” To Hungary’s more recent irredentists, Trianon remains the unholy desecration, a devastating wound, an appalling act of national identity theft undimmed by the passage of more than eighty years.

My father and I headed for the Hungarian National Gallery, which was offering a retrospective of Mihály Munkácsy. The celebrated Hungarian painter had been born and buried in Hungary, but little else. Born Michael von Lieb to German parents, he was trained in Munich and Düsseldorf, spent most of his career in Paris, and died in a sanitarium in Germany. Nonetheless, he was one of Hungary’s most venerated artists—venerated especially for having been celebrated as a “great Hungarian” in the world beyond Hungary. After Munkácsy’s death in 1900, the authorities gave him a state funeral in the city’s sacred Heroes’ Square, his body displayed, beside the plaza’s galloping statuary of the seven Magyar chieftains, on a forty-five-foot-high catafalque surrounded by flaming bronze torches.

The museum’s ticket taker, another crabby granny, scowled at my father as she handed us our passes. I couldn’t tell if the disapproval registered; my father gave no sign. In the exhibition hall, I gravitated to Munkácsy’s earliest efforts, bleakly realistic renderings of impoverished peasant life. (The desperate conditions of the rural Magyar populace, deep in semifeudal penury well into the twentieth century, earned Hungary the moniker “The Country of Three Million Beggars.”) My father frowned; this period didn’t put Hungary in a “positive” light. “You’re making too much of that,” she said, pulling my sleeve as I lingered before paintings of careworn women gathering firewood and tending to hungry children. My father was eager to move on to Munkácsy’s later and more famous creations: the salon portraits of fashionable Austro-Hungarian aristocracy and the epic extravaganzas of biblical dramas and victorious scenes from the Magyar Conquest. “This is authentic Munkácsy,” my father said, directing me to the walls that displayed the artist’s final blast of bombastry.

When we’d exhausted the Technicolor lollapaloozas, she led the way to the permanent collection, a labyrinth of galleries dominated by lugubrious melodramas of Magyar affliction displayed in heavy gilt-edged frames. I sped through the next dozen halls showcasing scenes from Hungary’s genesis—from the heralded arrival of Prince Árpád to the nineteenth-century revolution led by Lajos Kossuth, “The Father of Hungarian Democracy”—and sank onto a bench in a corridor to wait for my father. The room was hushed and dark; light filtered weakly through a set of high grated windows. I thought of catacombs, and that endless trip we took as a family to Hungary in 1970, when my father was so insistent that we tour the nation’s cathedrals and monasteries. Endless, that is, from the perspective of an eleven-year-old who experienced the sepulchral quarters, the cloying smell of candle wax, and the echo of heels clattering on yet another cold marble ambulatory as her own private purgatory. Why, I wondered, did we never visit a synagogue?

There was no sign of my father. A stout matron in a guard uniform inspected me darkly from her wooden chair in the corner. Maybe it was me. Maybe these battle-axes weren’t staring at my father in a dress, after all. Maybe they disapproved of a girl wearing jeans. Or maybe they just didn’t like foreign women. After a while, I got tired of the evil eye and retraced my steps. I found my father many rooms back, transfixed before Gyula Benczúr’s The Baptism of Vajk, an operatic depiction of the tenth-century christening of Hungary’s first king. The Magyar tribesman Vajk kneels bare-shouldered before the holy font and gilded chalice, about to shed his pagan name and receive his new Christian one: István, Stephen. My father’s namesake.

I studied the baptism of the former Vajk over the former István’s shoulder.

“Isn’t it a bit”—I searched for the proper word—“histrionic?”

“It’s a work of true greatness,” she said with a flourish of matching grandiosity, her polka-dot skirt billowing with her enthusiasm. “It’s characteristically Hungarian.”

In an eggheaded attempt to prepare for my visit, I’d read István Bibó’s scathing inspection of “Hungarianism,” in an essay published at the end of World War II. The political scientist saw his country’s identity as Potemkin, a society “deceiving itself” and held together by little more than “wishful” thinking and “frills and veneers.” “Today’s Hungarians are among Europe’s least well-defined groups,” Bibó wrote—and Hungarianism a “grand illusion.” As I recalled Bibó now, the afternoon’s displays threatened to turn hallucinogenic. Everything we were looking at seemed oddly, fatally confectionary, the face of a nation montaged onto one fantasia after another: The anointed Saint Stephen was the “patriarch” whose patrimony had no heirs; Prince Eugene was the (French-born) Austrian Imperial Army general who freed Hungary from the Ottoman Empire only to hand it over to the Habsburgs; Lajos Kossuth was the Father of Hungarian Democracy whose 1848 bid for Hungarian independence (celebrated every March 15 on National Day) was stillborn; the Turul was mythical herald to a thousand-year Magyar reign that never hatched.

I considered the illusions hanging from these walls. As we worked our way back through the echoing galleries, I looked at my father in her polka dots and the image that flashed momentarily through my brain was of a tour guide in theme-park costume, leading me through a tarted-up history that concealed a darker past, a Tinker Bell guide to a storybook culture, neither person nor place what they really were. What the Magyars were was humiliated. Just about every power that had ever dealt with Hungary—whether the Mongols in 1241 or the Turks in 1526 or the Austrians in 1711 and 1848 or the Soviets in 1956—had seen fit to kick it in the teeth.

In the next station of our Castle Hill cultural tour (the Budapest History Museum), my father lingered admiringly before another hagiographic painting of another lionized Hungarian. This one was at least more modern than Vajk. He was dressed in a naval uniform, pinned with rows of medals: the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, whose governance of the country from 1920 to 1944 encompassed the arc of my father’s youth. Her reverence for the man who presided over the deportation of nearly a half-million Jews galled me.

A make-believe royal, I pointed out. (Horthy was elected Regent by the Hungarian National Assembly in 1920, intended as a placeholder for the exiled Habsburg king, who never reclaimed the throne.) And what’s with the “Admiral”? A navy in a landlocked state?

“You don’t know anything,” my father said. “Trianon took away the Hungarian coast. A tragedy. A catastrophe.”

She was right about the coast. The treaty at the end of World War I, which dealt Hungary the harshest penalties of any warring state (including Germany), had stripped the nation of its seaports, along with 65 percent of its waterways, 88 percent of its forests, and all of its coal, salt, and silver mines. In the Second World War, Horthy’s Hungary would ally itself with the Axis in hopes of resurrecting “the lost territories” (and Hitler, indeed, returned two land parcels that Trianon had lopped off). When my father and I would finally make it down into the city, I’d notice the ubiquitous image—plastered on walls, affixed to bumpers, appliquéd onto backpacks—of the map of pre-Trianon “Greater Hungary,” also known as “the mutilated motherland.” The map featured the nation as a butchered torso, surrounded by its four severed appendages. The defenders of Hungarian honor call Trianon “the amputation.”

“It destroyed the motherland!” my father said now, her voice rising. “It cut his body into pieces.”

“Hers,” I corrected.

My father hiked up her purse on a camera-burdened shoulder and headed for the exit.

We left the museum and, instead of descending to the streets of the city I so wished to visit, we climbed even higher to Fisherman’s Bastion. My father wanted to take some “panoramic” pictures.

A turnstile blocked the entrance. You had to buy a token if you wanted to see the view. My father forked over some forints, and we were admitted to the Neo-Romanesque stone arcade punctuated by viewing turrets, viewing balconies, and seven viewing lookout towers (in honor of the seven Magyar tribes). Despite the name, the bastion wasn’t built for fishermen; it was designed in the 1890s as a viewing terrace. “It was meant to be like a fairy tale,” as one chronicler put it, to “feel like history rather than be history.” Follow the Yellow Brick Road, I thought, as I morosely trailed my father’s footsteps.

She stopped at one of the designated lookout towers to take some shots of the city across the river. “A good thing I brought the telephoto,” she said, wrestling the lens out of her purse. While she clicked away, I leaned through a vaulted arch to bask in the fading autumn sun and, despite my cynicism, admire the view. The Danube was a broad dusky ribbon under the city’s seven bridges. To my left, I could see the enchanted greensward of Margaret Island and, beyond it, the approaching river’s long bend to the south.

On the far shore, Pest was a hazy blur. The Hungarian Parliament, a Neo-Gothic wedding cake encrusted with half a million precious stones and nearly a hundred pounds of gold, took up nine hundred feet of prime waterfront real estate. This temple to democracy, the largest parliament building in Europe and the third largest in the world, was built in the late nineteenth century, when Franz Josef reigned and less than 10 percent of the Hungarian population could vote.

On this side of the river, the red incline train, the Sikló (“the Little Snake”), was inching down the cliff. Directly below, the Chain Bridge arced across the water toward the Neo-Renaissance splendor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The learned society was inaugurated by the same man who spearheaded the construction of the Chain Bridge, Count István Széchenyi, a preeminent Hungarian statesman of the nineteenth century. Széchenyi’s quest for an authentic national culture would end in personal despair. “We have no national habits,” Széchenyi lamented once. “Our existence and knowledge depend on imitation.” Subsequent seekers of Hungarianism have been equally riddled with doubt. They have generated two centuries of literature, journalism, and oratory devoted to the question that doubles as the title for many of their angst-ridden jeremiads: “Who Is a Hungarian?” Long before Erik Erikson coined the phrase, Hungarians were having an identity crisis.

My father traced the descent of the shiny red funicular with her camera lens. “I was so happy when they reopened the Sikló,” she said. “The first time I saw it, I cried.”

I asked why and she said, “Because the Russians had destroyed it.” The Sikló was bombed, along with pretty much everything else along this stretch of the Danube, during the Siege of Budapest, the fifty-day Soviet campaign in the winter of 1944–45 to evict the die-hard Waffen-SS and Hungarian troops bunkered along Castle Hill.

“Would you have preferred the other side won?” I asked.

“You have a very stupid American concept of this.”

“Enlighten me.”

“The Russians destroyed everything that was Hungarian.”

Later I would pick up a brochure on the history of the Sikló and take a perverse pleasure in finding that it was put back in service in 1986, under Soviet rule. I didn’t bring it up with my father. By then I knew better than to stick a pin in Hungarian “grand illusion.”

8

On the Altar of the Homeland

I learned to time my more probing questions to my father’s golden hour. She was at her most expansive over late-afternoon coffee, which she took with a slice of Linzer torte or Sacher torte or Dobos torte or some other confection evoking the Austro-Hungarian era. Cake was always served with a hefty dollop of freshly whipped cream, because that’s “the correct Viennese way to do it.” The Habsburg Empire lived on in my father’s prandial habits.

The ritual was lifelong, though in Yorktown Heights confined to the weekends and the selection from American bakeries, which my father found contemptible. Even in his guise as suburban dad, my father had asserted his Old European taste. Weekends, he’d sit in his armchair in his beret and cravat, a demitasse balanced on one knee and classical music thundering on the hi-fi, and heap scorn on Reddi-wip, Cheez Whiz, and ice cubes in drinking water, along with his American children’s proclivity for pop tunes with drum tracks and sitcoms with laugh tracks. He went into a swivet once when it became clear I had never heard of one of his treasured European authors, the Austrian (and Jewish) writer Stefan Zweig. “You have no culture,” he yelled, ripping out of my hand whatever “tacky” novel I’d been reading. On a series of weekend afternoons, my father attempted to get me to master the basic waltz steps in our burnt-orange-carpeted living room, Johann Strauss on the turntable. The lessons ended badly. “You are leading again!” he would shout as I stepped on his foot, not always entirely by accident. “How many times do I have to tell you? The woman does not lead.”

In the years after my father moved back to Hungary, he made regular pilgrimages to Vienna, often with his friend Ilonka in tow, to shop for the “correct” Viennese comestibles and tour the faded palaces and hunting lodges and architectural glories of Emperor Franz Josef’s nearly seventy-year reign, photographing the last vestiges of the empire that collapsed with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. Or he’d take Ilonka to Switzerland, where they paid homage to the ancient Habsburg Castle, the dynasty’s original seat. Or to Germany, where he made a long detour so they could cruise past the Bavarian villa of the then still living Archduke Otto of Austria, last crown prince to the Austro-Hungarian throne. “The best time was under the Habsburgs,” my father told me. “Even as a young child, I could still feel its good influence. If only we could bring the monarchy back—all of Hungary would welcome it.”

My father’s latest transition, from man to woman, debuted in the Habsburg emperor’s former guesthouse. Over coffee and Esterhazy cake one afternoon, she waxed nostalgic about the scene at what was now the Parkhotel Schönbrunn, where she attended the LGBT Rainbow Ball the year before her operation.

“Everybody was beautifully dressed, very elegant,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” I said. She had shown me the video she’d made of the ball, formal dancers in white satin gowns and black tie, white gloves, and cummerbunds, stepping in stately minuet formation across a polished parquet floor while an all-female orchestra played “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” At the end of the evening, each performer received a single rose.

“They always have good taste in Vienna,” my father sighed, licking the last speck of whipped cream from her demitasse spoon. “Even Ilonka enjoyed it.” In my father’s image gallery in the attic, she kept a photograph of the two of them at the ball. In the picture, he (still pre-op) is wearing a bleach-blond wig and a midnight-blue velour evening gown with spaghetti straps; Ilonka is in a plain navy sheath. They are holding hands. My father stares straight into the camera, with a pasted-on smile. Ilonka is looking away from my father, her mouth downturned. Her eyes are sorrowful.

“She didn’t want you to have the operation,” I said, a question.

“Ilonka thought it was a game. She never thought I’d go all the way with it. Ilonka wants nothing to change. Everything has to be the same way it was in the past. She even has to sit in the same pew in the church. I’m not like that. I get used to new things in five minutes!”

She grinned and took another forkful of cake. It seemed like a good moment to press my inquiry.

“Are you used to being a woman?” I asked.

“Waaall, that was easy.”

“How so?”

She held up her arms, as if for surrender. “Look at this,” she said, waggling her arms up and down, a fledgling out of the nest. “Does this look like a man’s body? I never developed. There’s hardly any hairs on my body.” Did this mean the Ugly Duckling had been a swan all along? “Waaall, I had the organs, I did my job, as a man. But I didn’t fit the role. They didn’t approve of me.”

“Who didn’t approve of you?”

“Women didn’t approve of me. I didn’t know how to fight and get dirty. I’m not muscular, I’m not athletic, I had a miserable life as a man. And it became more miserable when I wasn’t accepted for the umpteenth time. By your mother.” My father liked to characterize her that way, your mother. “She didn’t accept me and she threw me away.”

“She didn’t—”

“I wasn’t in the proper role. They can sense that. Now, as a woman, women like me more. I fit my role now better as a woman than when I was miscast in the wrong role.”

I flashed on hostile Magyar babushkas. “Why do you have to cast yourself in any role? Why can’t—?”

“Before, I was like other men, I didn’t talk to people. Now I can communicate better, because I’m a woman. It’s that lack of communicating that causes the worst things.”

“Like what?”

“They see you as some sort of monster. Because you are not doing the things others are doing. They don’t know what you do. You’re vermin. They gas you. They—”

We had fallen through one of my father’s verbal trapdoors.

“—don’t want you around. It’s like once when I was flying to Hungary, and the stewardess heard this man sitting across from me talking and she said, ‘Oh, you’re Hungarian!’ And this man said very angrily, ‘I am not Hungarian! I’m Israeli!’ This is a provocative attitude we don’t need. It helps that I’m a woman. Because women don’t provoke.”

“Some women do,” I provoked.

“You can’t switch back and forth,” my father said. “You have to develop a habit and stick to it. Otherwise, you’re going to be a forlorn something, not a whole person. The best way is not to change someone into someone else, but to put the person back as the person he was born to be. The surgery is a complete solution. Now I am completely like a woman.”

Completely, I thought, or completely like?

“You have to get rid of the old habits. If you don’t, you’re going to be like a stranger all the time, with this”—she fished around for the right words—“this anxiety of non-belonging.”

She repeated the phrase. This anxiety of non-belonging. She polished off the remains of her cake. “That would make a good title for your book,” she said.

She got up and started collecting the dishes. “Back to the kitchen!” she trilled as she left the room. “A woman’s place!”

I didn’t budge from my chair as she washed the cups and saucers.

“Susaaan!” My father was standing at the foot of the stairs. It was early morning, and I’d hoped to sleep in. My father had other plans. “Susaaan, come down here! You’ll be interested in this.” I threw on some clothes and stumbled into the dining room. She had set out on the table the contents of a file folder marked “Stefi.”

“These are my media appearances,” she said, pointing to a fanned-out collection of articles, a cassette tape, and a book. She’d given interviews about “The Change” to a Hungarian LGBT magazine (the only one at the time), an alternative radio station called Tilos Rádió (Forbidden Radio), an academic social-sciences journal called Replika, and a freelance photojournalist who was putting together a coffee-table book titled Women in Hungary: A Portrait Gallery, in which my father was featured, described as a “feminista.” I studied the stash with some astonishment. All of Steven’s life, he’d been behind the camera; Stefi, it seemed, had decided she’d be in front.

The Stefánie who appeared in these pages and recordings was a bit of a coquette. She told her interlocutors that she was a “typical woman” who “loved gossip.” When they asked how old she was, my father answered coyly, “Now, it’s not appropriate to ask a lady her age!” In the photo spread for Mások, the Hungarian LGBT magazine, my father perches on the edge of a planter on her deck, in a floor-length floral dress with a ribbon at the waist. She is clutching two daisies. As she made clear in the accompanying article, she was 100 percent female, “a woman in complete harmony with her wishes.” She was taking dance lessons, she told the magazine, and could waltz “all the female steps,” and had attended a ball “in an elegant full dress.”

The longest account appeared in the academic journal Replika. A young PhD student studying social anthropology had come to my father’s house to interview her for two days. The resulting Q & A was nearly twenty-five thousand words. That morning and for several mornings to follow, my father translated the text for me, altering the parts she didn’t like. (“Don’t write that down! It sounds better if you have me say it this way …”) While the purpose of the interview was to discuss her change in sex, my father had been eager to expound on life in Hungary before the “catastrophe”—the catastrophe, that is, of 1920.

“The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a very peaceful world,” my father said, reading (and revising) her words from the opening pages of the interview. “Hungary grew very fast. Railroads came in, economies were growing. It was a world of plenty. One minority, the Jews, dealt especially with commerce. Many were managers of noble estates. I had an uncle who was managing a noble’s estate and also my great-grandfather was the director of some estates of the wealthy … Then came the tragedy. Trianon. The country lost its thousand-year-old borders. And the era when minorities still lived nicely together came to an end. Whatever they say, there was no persecution of minorities in that time.”

“No persecution?” I sputtered.

My father gave me one of her you-know-nothing looks. “It was the best time,” she said. “The best time for the Jews.”

Her history wasn’t so Pollyanna. From the 1867 passage of the Jewish Emancipation Act, granting Jews civic and political equality, until the 1920 signing of the Treaty of Trianon, an extraordinary set of circumstances led to the “Golden Age” of Hungarian Jewry. The era yielded a spectacular opportunity for the bourgeois Jewish population. And unprecedented acceptance. For a significant subset of the country’s Jews in that period, it seemed possible to be “100 percent Hungarian.” Our family was among them. A century before my father changed gender, her forebears had crossed another seemingly unbreachable border.

My father’s parents, Jenő and Rozália Friedman, came to Budapest out of the hinterlands of what was then northeastern Hungary (and after Trianon, part of Czechoslovakia, and now Slovakia). The members of my grandmother’s side of the family, the Grünbergers, were among the most prominent Jews in the town known in Hungarian as Szepesváralja and later, in Slovak, as Spišské Podhradie—both of which translate roughly as “The Place under the Beautiful Castle.” Overlooking the town atop a limestone cliff is a hulking twelfth-century ruin, the largest castle in central Europe and erstwhile home to Magyar nobles. (It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and perennial location for Hollywood movies, among them Dragonheart and Kull the Conqueror.)

As I later learned from my Grünberger relatives, the baron of the town’s commercial age was Rozália’s father, my great-grandfather, Leopold Grünberger, who owned the biggest lumber enterprise in the region. The train tracks into town terminated in front of his mill. He had risen from poverty in a nearby village, served in the Habsburg cavalry in World War I, and was a Hungarian patriot and avid believer in Central European culture; he reportedly abhorred Zionism. He sat on the town council and was head of the Jewish community, the latter position due less to his piety, which was pro forma Orthodox, than to his wealth and philanthropy, both of which were substantial.

The Grünbergers vacationed at spas in Baden-Baden, skied in the Tatra Mountains, and ordered their clothes, bespoke, from boutique tailors in Bratislava and Budapest. The four sons were sent to universities in Paris and Prague, the four daughters to music lessons and finishing schools. Among the family’s many emblems of privilege (along with the first running water, gaslight, refrigeration, and electricity) was the town’s first telephone—phone number “1.” The Grünberger home was a showpiece of gentility, from its fountain-adorned courtyard and gardens to its chandeliered salon with a grand piano draped in a Shiraz rug and an extensive Rosenthal and Limoges porcelain collection, from its full retinue of maids, cooks, and governesses to its stable of groomed horses. Persian rugs hushed footsteps in every room. The linens were from Paris and monogrammed.

The region’s lumber trade had become a lucrative industry, thanks to the invention of steam-powered electricity and railway construction in the late nineteenth century, which turned the virgin Slovak forests into a commercial honeypot. More than 90 percent of the lumber mill owners and wholesale suppliers in the region were Jewish. The area’s artisans, merchants, and professionals were, likewise, predominantly Jews, and had been ever since the ban on Jews in towns and cities was lifted by government edict in the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1920s, the Jews of Spišské Podhradie owned thirteen of the nineteen grocery and general stores, six of the seven taverns and restaurants, all of the liquor stores, all of the tool and iron shops and small factories, the saw mill and flour mill. They were the doctors, the lawyers, the pharmacist, and the veterinarian.

The Jews in the Hungarian countryside no longer had to live in remote primitive villages or skulk around the edges of towns, peddling their wares. They no longer had to pay a “tolerance tax” to the nobles for the privilege of renting a hovel on their estates. Some of them even owned agricultural land. My great-grandfather’s property included a working farm with cornfields and livestock. Spišské Podhradie also became a flourishing rabbinical center for Orthodox Jewry, with its own synagogue, cheder, yeshiva, beit midrash, mikveh, and charitable and community associations, and (on a patch of hillside two miles out of town, granted because it was too steep to be arable) a walled cemetery. In 1905, after the town’s first synagogue burned down, my great-grandfather marshaled the funds to build a new temple, with a Neo-Classical façade and a Moorish interior. It was installed a few doors down from the Grünberger family home—on Stefánikova Street.

When I visited Spišské Podhradie in 2015, the synagogue (which became a furniture warehouse in Communist times) had recently been restored but sat unused: the town’s last postwar Jewish resident, a dentist named Ferdinand Glück, either left or died (no one seemed to know) in the 1970s. The Grünberger manse, now shabby and painted in Day-Glo colors (with a satellite dish on the roof and curtains for doors), was subdivided and occupied by several generations of a poor and devout Christian family. The old carriage entrance displayed a dozen Madonna icons. In the courtyard, a giant plaster Jesus hung on a four-foot cross. On the outskirts of town, weeds flourished in the Jewish cemetery. Many tombstones were missing, looted over the years, or fallen. The lone Grünberger headstone, marking the grave of Moritz Grünberger, firstborn son of Leopold and Sidonia, who died at sixteen, lay on its back in the grass.

Leopold bestowed a lavish dowry upon each of his four daughters. So endowed, the eldest daughter, my grandmother Rozália, or Rozi as she was usually called, merited the attentions of my grandfather Jenő Friedman, who belonged to one of the wealthiest Jewish families in the largest city of the region, Kassa (later renamed, in Slovak, Košice). Jenő’s father, Sámuel Friedman, owned Kassa’s biggest wholesale goods business. Like Leopold Grünberger, Sámuel was head of his city’s Jewish community and held the post for his affluence, not his religiousness. Unlike Leopold, he fancied himself something of a silk-stocking socialite. “My grandfather Sámuel was a man of leisure,” my father said. “I remember my grandmother saying all the time, ‘Go get your grandfather from the casino!’ He was always in there with the other rich men, playing cards and smoking cigars.”

By the time of Jenő and Rozi’s engagement, the groom was a man of leisure, too. He had begun purchasing luxury apartment buildings in Pest—with a bonanza payout from the Friedmans’ real estate investments in Hamburg. The origins of that bonanza were hardly savory, according to accounts from my few surviving Friedman relatives. My father’s cousin Viktor Schwarcz told me the Friedmans intentionally torched their company warehouse in Kassa and used the fire insurance money to buy properties in Hamburg. “The legend from the Jews in town,” Viktor said, “is that Samu and his sons burned the shop to get the money. No one told the police because they didn’t want to turn in fellow Jews. The Friedmans got rich from it—they bought whole streets of houses in Hamburg and sold them during the great inflation. And from that came your grandfather’s buildings in Budapest.”

However ill-gotten her fiancé’s gains, Rozi had landed, at twenty, the richest catch of the four sisters. She didn’t have much to do with the landing: the marriage was arranged—based on a desire of the patriarchs of both families to meld their wealth. The bride and groom barely knew each other when they were wed in an extravagant ceremony in the Grünberger home and headed off, first by horse-drawn carriage and then by first-class coach, to a fairy-tale honeymoon in Venice. They returned to a sumptuously appointed apartment in one of Jenő’s buildings in Pest, where they spent their days at cards in the casino, their nights at the opera. Their only child was raised by a succession of nursemaids, governesses, and tutors. Rozi’s one other pregnancy, my father told me, ended in miscarriage.

Once in a while when I was young, my father would allow me a glimpse into the vanished world of his childhood, a pinprick or two of light in a landscape otherwise dark. “The parents,” he would say, opening the pasteboard family album my mother had created and pointing to a creased and curling-at-the-edges tinted picture of his progenitors, the lone representative in the album of my father’s side of the family. The photo is a formal studio portrait, vintage ’20s with its soft-focus lighting and pretensions to motion-picture glamour. A halo of light wreathes the heads of two newlyweds, a vignette effect fading into shadow at the edges. Bride and groom stare toward the camera, not smiling. My grandmother Rozi has the severe dark beauty and hooded eyes of a silent-movie star. Her eyebrows are tweezed to pencil-thin crescents and she sports a Joan Crawford hairdo, cropped and set in a tight wave, dark lipstick, and a double-stranded choker of pearls with matching pearl earrings. My grandfather Jenő looks older—which he was, by nine years—and wears an expensively tailored suit; his thinning black hair is oiled and slicked back.

As for the post-wedding life of Rozi and Jenő, their bitter separation when my father was twelve, their forced wartime reconciliation, and their miserable last years in Israel, my father had little to say. But it was clear to me whom she held responsible for her parents’ troubled marriage. Rozi, my father told me, was a “spoiled diva” and a “phony” who “put on airs,” read “lowbrow” books, and was either at the hairdresser or out chasing “rich men.” “She wasn’t interested in a relationship with her child.” Jenő, on the other hand, was “very cultured,” a “true gentleman” who delivered occasional poems at dinner parties and wrote letters in “pearly handwriting,” a man who knew how to mingle in “educated circles.” Jenő was a prominent figure in the Jewish community, an observant but modern Jew who enrolled his son in the most prestigious Jewish educational institutions for boys in Budapest: the elementary school run by the Rabbinical Seminary of Hungary and then the Zsidó Gimnázium, the elite Jewish high school in Pest celebrated for its world-class teachers. “But my father was not Orthodox,” my father stressed, a statement that perplexed me; the Friedmans belonged to the Kazinczy Street Synagogue, which was Orthodox. What she meant was that Jenő didn’t look like an Orthodox Jew, whose appearance might, as she put it, “provoke.”

My father liked to parse out the same several set pieces of this early domesticity, more interior design than life experience, decorative backdrops to a privileged and assimilated bourgeois lifestyle. “My father had all his suits tailored in London.” Or: “We were the first on our street to own a car,” a Renault with leather seats, wood paneling, “a lace curtain on the back window,” and a dashboard vase that “held one rose.” Or she’d recall their “wind-up record player, spring driven,” and the first tune young Pista had played on it, “The Fox and Goose Song”:

Fox, you have stolen the goose.

Give it back to me.

If not, the hunter will get you

With his gun.

More than anything, my father talked about the family real estate: the summer villa in the Buda Hills with its swimming pool and gardening staff, the two apartment houses in posh sections of Pest, and, most of all, the “royal apartment” at Ráday utca 9. The Friedmans’ majestic domicile featured a double balcony, soaring ceilings, French doors between every room, a “salon” to receive guests, and maid’s quarters. My grandfather’s study, which contained “first-edition collectibles” in a locked bookcase, featured heavy carved-wood furnishings with red and brown upholstery in what my father called a “Napoleonic Empire style.” The salon boasted emerald-velvet love seats and chaise longues, a vitrine stocked with Rosenthal porcelain, and a writing table in a “Louis the XVI theme.” One wall displayed three near-life-sized family portraits commissioned from the then noteworthy Hungarian artist Jakab Ödön. The paintings depicted the Friedmans in aristocratic poses: my grandfather in a smoking jacket, my grandmother in a floor-length evening gown, and my ten-year-old father in velvet cutaway coat and matching knee pants. Until, that is, my father “came of age,” at which point the artist was recalled—at the insistence of the adolescent subject—to paint on a pair of long trousers. Young István was already Photoshopping. “It wasn’t manly to be in short pants,” she explained.

In the salon presided over by these imposing regal portraits, my grandparents hosted “balls,” the name my father gave to their dinner and dance evenings. Sent to bed early, Pista would lie in the dark, a crystal radio he’d built by hand pressed to one ear “to drown out the noise.” On other nights, the parents would don their finery to make the rounds of high society and attend opening nights at the theater and the Hungarian Royal Opera House. The Golden Age had been good to Jenő and Rozi Friedman.

“Finally, O Jew, your day is dawning!” József Kiss, son of poor Orthodox parents and acclaimed as turn-of-the-century Hungary’s “most popular” poet, exulted in his first collection of verse, published in 1868. “Now you, too, have a fatherland!” By the end of the century, Jews had full religious standing, too. The 1895 Law of Reception elevated Judaism to a “received” religion, recognized by the state.

The Magyar nobility had its reasons for facilitating the rise of a Jewish bourgeoisie. To accomplish such liberal reforms as civil marriage and nationalized education, the aristocrats enlisted Jews to counter the influence of the Catholic clerics. Also, Hungary desperately needed to modernize and industrialize. In the enterprise vacuum that yawned between its complacent nobles and gentry and its wretched peasants, the Jews formed an essential bourgeois class. The Christian noblemen also had political reasons for aiding Jewish assimilation: the nineteenth-century Magyar electorate was 5 percent short of a majority in a multicultural region teeming with restive Germans, Slovaks, Romanians, Ruthenians, Serbians, Slovenians, Croatians, and other ethnic minorities, all contesting for their rights. The Magyars made up the deficit through artful use of an 1868 “nationalities” law—originally intended as an act of tolerance for minority cultures and languages—to enforce a linguistic Magyarization. Henceforth, anyone who declared Hungarian as their primary language in the national census would be declared a Magyar. Jews, more than other minorities, took the option. By the century’s end, more than 75 percent of Hungary’s Jews claimed Hungarian as their mother tongue (compared with only 54 percent of its Catholics), and the Magyar population had thus magically risen to 51.4 percent. In a country where voting was limited to educated and propertied taxpayers, affluent Jews in urban districts enjoyed significant electoral clout; in Budapest, Jews were more than 20 percent of the population, and 40 percent of the voters.fn1

Whatever the self-serving motives of the old aristocracy, the benefits for the bourgeois Jews of Hungary were unparalleled. “No country in Europe was more hospitable to Jewish immigration and assimilation and no country had more enthusiastic support from its Jews than the pre–World War I Hungarian kingdom,” noted historian István Deák observed. And maybe no Jewish population did more to bring its country into the industrial age. By the 1900s, Hungarian Jews had launched and were running most of the country’s major banks, heavy industries, mining concerns, and the largest munitions plant. Thirty of the fifty founding members of the National Association of Hungarian Industrialists were Jews. For their contributions, the patriarchs of 346 Hungarian Jewish families were granted the ultimate compliment in the aristocracy-obsessed empire: titled ennoblement.

Wealth was only one aspect of the Golden Age’s yield. The era also ushered in a remarkable flowering of creative and professional talent. By the 1910s, the 5 percent of the population that was Jewish represented half of Hungary’s doctors, 45 percent of its lawyers and journalists, more than a third of its engineers, and a quarter of its artists and writers. Hungarian Jews established, financed, and wrote for many of the nation’s important newspapers, literary journals, publishing houses, theaters, cabarets, and cinema, and forged the modern practice of photography.fn2 And they were instrumental in creating a cultural environment in which artists and intellectuals, both Jewish and Christian, could thrive. A notable segment of the gentile literati embraced that collaboration, pinning to it their greatest hopes for a cultural renaissance. “I see before me the prototype of a new people,” Christian poet Endre Ady exulted in 1917. “This would be the solution to all our problems and History’s outstanding event, if it could be true.” And disastrous if it failed: “We either produce a new people,” he concluded, “or the deluge will follow.”

Hungary’s assimilating Jewish population dedicated itself with a formidable intensity to producing that new people. Its most prominent members led a decades-long and wildly successful campaign to “Magyarize” the country, modernizing and promulgating Hungarian as the mother tongue, championing Hungarian handicrafts and viniculture (the worldwide fame of Hungarian Matyó embroidery and Tokáj wine are thanks largely to their Jewish promoters), and organizing the fusion of the three provincial backwaters of Buda, Pest, and Óbuda into a city capital that, by the end of the millennium, would be a cultural mecca rivaling Paris and Vienna. “Their contribution to the development of their country was greater than that of any other European Jewish community,” historian Jacob Katz wrote. More than anyone else, the Jews invented what it meant to be Hungarian. And with that, invented “a fatherland” into which their day could dawn.

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