Transylvania, “the Land Beyond the Forest,” was a very real
place and not the invention of Bram Stoker, who based his novel
Dracula on extensive and thoroughly conducted research.
It is seldom remembered that Stoker’s character Jonathan Harker
described the Transylvanian countryside as being
full of beauty of every kind…
Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods,
with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or
with farmhouses… There was everywhere a bewildering mass of
fruit blossoms—apple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I
could see the green grass under the trees spangled with the
fallen petals.
Of course the Borgo Pass was a different story.
The thriving city of Kolozsvár (Klausenburg in German) was
capital of Transylvania and heart of the country. Here in 1440
had been born Matthias Corvinus, Hungary’s most celebrated king:
a renowned warrior against the Turks and one of the foremost
patrons of Renaissance art and learning.
A bronze equestrian statue of Matthias sat atop a castellated
pedestal in front of the Church of St. Michael in Kolozsvár’s
great public square.
Transylvania was a Hungarian province at the turn of the 20th
Century, and Kolozsvár’s people were described
as the most charming in Europe. Strolling through the streets,
you might encounter not only cosmopolitan folk dressed in the
latest continental modes, but “shaggy peasants” from the
surrounding mountains, and colorful groups of Gypsies.
Matild Kohn was born in Kolozsvár on September 2, 1895. Her
father Móric Kohn had come hereas a young man and become a well-to-do árverési becsűs,
an appraiser of goods for auctions;
he often dealt with antiques, and the Kohn home was full of
period china and furniture.
It was also full of children, for Móric had twelve: Fáni,
Hermina, Dezső, and Márton by his first wife; and Náthán,
Margit, Milli, Matild (or “Matyu”), Jenő, Rózsa, Elza, and Ilona
(always called Ili or Ily) by his second wife, Berta Schwartz.
“We were a large and very happy family,” Matild would recall,
“eight girls and four boys, I was smack in the middle of them.”
Despite their vast age-range, the children were so close that
Matild was almost grown up before she realized they had not all
been born of the same mother.
Matyu enjoyed a loving childhood, proving to be an apt pupil not
only at school but in the fine arts of sewing and cooking and
baking. She learned how to prepare dishes such as cholent,
the beans-and-barley Sabbath meal; paprikás csirke, the
famous Hungarian “chicken paprikash,”
served with dumpling-like egg noodles; gyümölcslevesek,
Transylvanian fruit soups, served cold in summertime; and what
Matyu would always call “fancy cookies”—pastries like díos
kalács and mákos kalács: walnut rolls and poppyseed
rolls.
The Kohn home was near a college,
and Matyu watched its students going to and from the dormitory
“around the corner from us and over the bridge” across the River
Szamos. She learned to ice skate on this river, and all the
Kohn children were taught to swim there—except Matyu, who
“always sank.”
And her mother Berta taught her to be a lady. In this too Matyu
took her lessons to heart; all her life she would try to live as
ladies were supposed to live, and act as ladies were supposed to
act. From quite an early age she definitely expected to be
treated like one.
In Hungary there was a May Day custom that a sixteen-year-old
girl’s beau was to serenade her late at night. In 1912 Matyu’s
sweetheart came to the Kohn home with a group of musicians and
duly serenaded her. She was not allowed to show herself at the
window, but her father appeared and lit matches to acknowledge
that the young man’s efforts were heard and appreciated.
Matyu’s beau left for America in search of work, corresponding
with her while he got himself settled and established. He then
asked Matyu to come to America and marry him, but she considered
this a most unladylike course of action; her beau should return
to Kolozsvár and marry her there, after which they could go to
America together. Her young man lacked the money to return, and
against his wishes their engagement was broken. Eventually
Matyu lost all track of him.
As it happened, the Kohns already had relatives in America:
Móric’s brother Samu and his family had left Temesvár in 1907
and emigrated to Chicago. Before departing, they’d come to
visit Móric’s family in Kolozsvár, and Matyu had been introduced
to her Samu bácsi and Jenka néni (Uncle Sam and
Aunt Jenny) and their three children: lively Rózsa,
mild-mannered Margit, and taciturn little László.
Fascinating as faraway America might be, it could not compare
with Transylvania “where the countrysides were dotted with the
old ruins of a thousand years’s story we’d learned at school,”
Matild would say. “Wars and Turkey’s occupation, which were
just stories to us, and didn’t interest anyone but us
youngsters. It was very picturesque and we loved to show it off
to visitors, and we used to get together picnicking with friends
there.”
Idyllic it might well have been, for this was the Golden Age for
Hungarian Jews. It was a time of Interessengemeinschaft,
a friendly cooperative “commonality of interest” between the
Christian gentry and the Jewish middle class who helped them run
Hungary, and were accepted—almost—as equals. A month after
Matild was born, the government had declared Judaism a legally
recognized religion; and in the 1910 census Jews were officially
counted as Zsidóvallású Magyarok: “Hungarians (Magyars)
of the Israelite faith.”
Transylvania outdid the rest of Hungary in religious toleration,
but anti-Semitism was not unknown here. The Jewish response was
to emphasize their having overwhelmingly and wholeheartedly
identified themselves as Hungarians, adopting the Magyar
language and customs with “spontaneous eagerness.” It was not
at all uncommon for people with German or Slavic surnames to
change them to Hungarian ones, saying “Now I am Magyar!” with a
tremendous feeling of nobility.
One of Matild’s brothers changed his name from the German
Kohn to the Hungarian Kun, and Berta then had the
rest of the family’s names altered to match.
“We were all doing what came naturally,” Matild would remark,
“until the war started and dumped us all in a sad situation.”
At first it seemed anything but sad: the Dual Monarchy was going
to teach the Serbs and Russians a proper Imperial lesson, and
the crowds cheered and threw flowers and waved flags and played
jolly martial music as Hungary’s young men marched off to the
front.
Dezső, Márton, and Náthán Kun were called up and sent to be
trained, while their sisters and girlfriends began their share
of war work at home, sewing shirts and socks and comforters for
the soldiers. But the war was brought home, all too quickly and
in all its reality, when Náthán went missing in action during
his first week in Galicia.
As the Austro-Hungarian army was hurled back from Russian Poland
and started to retreat, autumn rains turned a hundred miles of
heavily-trodden Galician roads to mud. Laden with weighty
backpacks, the troops slogged back till they reached the slopes
of the Carpathian Mountains, fording the swollen Rivers San and
Wisloka. Náthán was an excellent swimmer, but disappeared
during the river-crossing and was never seen again, nor was any
trace of him found afterward.
“We all felt heartbroken,” Matild would say, “but Mother
couldn’t accept that and wouldn’t give up the search as long as
she lived.”
It became painfully evident that the war was not going to end by
Christmas. “Eventually life quieted down and we all hoped our
men would come back home, but it took a long time. So we tried
to live as best we possibly could.”
Berta wanted all her girls to have a respectable trade to fall
back on if necessary, and suggested that Matild, now nineteen,
might earn her living as a kalaposnő or milliner. In
January 1915 Matyu was sent to stay with Berta’s brother Áron
Schwartz in Budapest, and there “learn at a famous place how to
make ladies’s hats, and to be a good business lady as well.”
Before Matyu left, her brother Márton’s wife Sára (“we called
her Serena”) mentioned that she had cousins in Budapest, and
asked Matyu to take them a letter when she got there.
“It was winter, after the New Year and very cold, and soon I was
enrolled to learn the business. It was interesting and I
enjoyed it while it lasted.” Matild spent a month at her Uncle
Áron’s and had a wonderful time, but for several weeks she
hesitated to intrude upon her sister-in-law’s relatives. “I
dreaded the thought, and carried the letter in the my purse
until the last week before it was time to go home. But time was
nearly over for me in Pest and about a week before my return I
had to go and take Sára’s letter to her cousins.
“I still remember so well, it was a Saturday afternoon when I
went up to the third floor walkup after an appointment was made
to meet them and to give the letter, which was to get me
acquainted with the family sooner. Well, I found the two girls
lovely and their mother very nice too. I was there just a short
time when a young cadet walked in on a pair of crutches and one
leg in a cast. The family jumped up and greeted him as a
long-lost brother, telling me they haven’t seen him for several
years, and he is a cousin who used to live with them as a young
boy going to school in Pest.”
His name was József Ehrlich.
“Later in the afternoon his mother also unexpectedly stopped in
for a visit, and she and her son fell in love with me at first
sight. Later on I found out she told her son she’d be very
happy to have me for a daughter.
“When the time came for me to leave, he offered to escort me
home and I said OK. We walked downstairs and I wondered how
could he walk with crutches in the snow-covered grounds? First
he stopped nearby at a candy stall, to buy some mixed chocolate
bonbons for me, also hot roasted chestnuts. Then he hailed a
horsedrawn carriage with rubber-covered wheels.
“My young escort was nice, and lots of fun, but very soon we
were home. He took me to the door, as it was too late to come
in, and watched until I got in the house—but not before he would
ask me if he could see me again. I told my relatives about it
and they were happy to know I didn’t have to come home alone at
night, and we all thought that was the end of that. I’d had a
good time with him and his cousins, but didn’t expect to see any
of them anymore.”
Two or three days later Matild received a large box of candy,
mailed by József with a polite note enclosed. On this note his
brother Sándor scribbled “Greetings from your brother-in-law.”
Matild, ever the proper young lady, took this as an insult: “I
got angry and hurt, I thought they were just making fun of me,
and told my aunt I’m not going to see that cadet if he comes.”
That cadet, no doubt, had raved to Sándor about having met the
girl of his dreams—beautiful and well-bred—and how Fate
must have brought about their encounter. Sándor’s
mischief-making now threatened to jostle Fate’s hand.
“Sure enough he came to the house, but my aunt, amused by it
all, told him I didn’t want to see him and why. He begged to
see me, and when he did he assured me he didn’t know about the
note, and please to forgive it. He would tell his brother off
for writing it, and that Sándor was teasing him, not me.”
Matild left Budapest at the end of the week, having forgiven
József but not expecting to encounter him again. Her parents,
however, heard from József just before Easter 1915: he wrote to
say he was back in the war, on the Polish front, and would they
have any objection to his writing their daughter?
“My father answered him, saying he had no objection at all. So
my young soldier started to write to me, and my mother made me
answer each letter. The more letters I got, the more I started
to enjoy them, and soon the letters were coming and going, and
we both started hoping he could come to see us.
“I was surprised at my mother, as I was the third daughter from
the oldest at home. The two oldest sisters were married, but I
had two sisters older than me still single. At that time in
Europe, the younger sisters had to stay in the background until
the older ones got married, or at least engaged to be married.
I guess the war and man shortage had to change that custom too.”
Even before customs changed, Matyu had been doing pretty well
for herself; when she first met József, she already had “three
other boyfriends at the same time.” And she was definitely not
being kept in the background; when she returned to Kolozsvár,
her parents “fixed up for me a beautiful salon all furnished
with period French furniture with a floor-to-ceiling mirror, and
I just had to go in and start my new millinery business.”
The fashionable hats of the day were deep-brimmed and trimmed
with ribbons and flowers. They were worn along with matching
gloves and parasols, lace collars and cameos pinned to one’s
dress: all the accoutrements of a lady.
During the winter of 1915 the Cossacks continually threatened to
force their way through the Carpathian passes; but the
Austro-Hungarian army, broken and humiliated though it was,
managed to withstand the Russians and prevent invasion. Then in
May the Germans spearheaded an offensive that smashed through
the Russian line, driving the enemy east and north; by September
Galicia was recovered and all of Russian Poland taken as well.
Following this victory the Central Powers swarmed over Serbia,
knocking it out of the war for the duration. All things
considered, 1915 ended much more promisingly for Hungary than it
had begun.
And for József Ehrlich, 1916 held even more promise. Around
March, after nearly a year of correspondence, he wrote Matild
that he was now a lieutenant, due for a furlough and wanting to
come visit Kolozsvár.
“He got his first leave from the trenches and instead of going
home to his mother he came to see me and to meet my family. He
had a month’s leave and decided to come spend two weeks with us
and get acquainted. Well, when he got there, it was mutual love
at first sight—the whole family liked him very much, and fell in
love with his charm before I did.”
Matild’s oldest sister Fáni and her husband, upholsterer János
Fruchter, invited József to stay with them “as they had an extra
bedroom and lived within walking distance of our home, and so he
didn’t have to stay in a hotel. But he spent the days at our
house.”
“He was full of life, and my mother loved him. He used to read
out loud to us. He was the one to introduce The Three
Musketeers to us, and Dostoyevsky, and several classics, and
we loved him for it, and loved to listen to him. He bought for
us season tickets to our theaters, and we went every week to see
everything shown. We all had a beautiful time together.”
József must have been delighted with Kolozsvár. There were the
theaters, the opera, and museums among the arches and
battlements and ancient palaces of the Transylvanian nobility.
Kolozsvár boasted an enlightened university whose foundation had
largely been due to the labor of another József, Baron József
Eötvös (1813-1871), the author and progressive statesman who had
done as much to improve Hungarian public education as he had
toward achieving emancipation and equal civil rights for the
Jews.
The banks of the Szamos were bordered by gardens pleasant to
walk through, in which military bands and Gypsy musicians often
played. Matild always greatly enjoyed going out for strolls,
and with József “wherever we went, we were going together,
visiting relatives and friends, and having a good time. He
marveled at how large the family was—several aunts, uncles,
dozens of cousins, and not one who didn’t get to like him.
Already it was taken for granted by all that he belonged to our
family, and was treated as one of us. He received two more
weeks’s extension of furlough, and in that time we got to know
each other well, and we fell very much in love.
“But as usual everything has to come to an end. The time flew
and he had to go back to the war, but first he went home to see
his mother in Budapest. I was afraid she’d be angry or hurt for
his spending his time with us, but later on she wrote to me and
the family thanking us for giving her son such a nice time.”
József went to Budapest not simply to see Sarolta, but also to
get a ring from her. Though most of her jewelry had been sold,
she did have a ring to give him, and this József offered to
Matild as her engagement ring.
“He asked me to wait for him until the war was over. He had a
definite idea about one thing: if he got shot or crippled, he
didn’t want to hold me to my promise to marry him out of
loyalty. Naturally I promised him whatever he asked me to, just
to put his mind at rest. When the time came for him to leave,
we parted sadly, but promised we’d write to each other
faithfully, and kept the promise. But we got engaged officially
too.”
A formal photograph was taken of the newly-betrothed couple. József, wearing his officer’s uniform, sits in a plush chair, on
one arm of which Matild gracefully perches, wearing her ring and
smiling slightly. Her dark eyes are fixed on an imaginary point
a little to the photographer’s left; but József is looking
directly at the camera, with an expression of mingled pride and
wonderment.
Notes
