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.