In the Darkroom. Susan Faludi
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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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