A Hungarian Refugee in Omaha, 1957, by Peter Kenez
From MemoryArchive
Who: Peter Kenez What: Experience of Omaha, Nebraska, as a Hungarian Immigrant When: 1957 Where: Omaha, Nebraska
I arrived in Princeton in January 1957 as a 20-year-old poor refugee from Hungary. The University accepted me immediately as a student for the second semester, perhaps because it wanted to show its sympathies for the Hungarian revolution, but more likely, because I had an uncle on the faculty who was willing to intercede on my behalf.
Back in Hungary I was ambitious. Not so ambitious as to work very hard – I had no patience, I could not sit and study for long – but I did study some and I did want to do well. Now in Princeton, at least at first, I became something of a fatalist. My world was turned upside down so much that at least temporarily I ceased to believe that work mattered. I assumed that in any case my teachers would not flunk me for I was a special case, a charity case. Still, when the time came, I did fairly well on my written exams and received complimentary comments on my term papers. I preserved one of these papers that I wrote for my literature class. It was a typical Hungarian product: it was full of high-faulting rhetoric, but contained little analysis or even description. I wrote on Chekhov’s plays and described them as similar to musical compositions in which themes and variations followed one another in predictable order. I thought that my gushing admiration for the plays, which, by the way, was perfectly genuine, would win over the reader. Instead, perhaps it was the sheer strangeness of my style that made an impression. As a result of my reasonable performance I was admitted for the following year a regular student, a sophomore. Of course, I was pleased. Life was gradually returning into my soul and I started to see a glimmer of my future.
But what should I do in the summer? The dormitory was to be closed down and I had to move out. Luckily my oldest friend, Gams Jancsi, invited me to stay with him and his family in Omaha. I knew him since we were both nine, and were the only two little Jewish children in the ancient town of Szekesfehervar. I also knew and liked his mother, Magda neni very much. The Gams family was closer to me than anyone else outside of my own family. They got to Omaha after various adventures, spending months in Austrian camps, finally receiving help from local Jewish charities, which acted as sponsors, and helped them to find an apartment and jobs. Jancsi, it seemed to me, felt very much alone and out of place and was glad to have me as a mate. He got his mother and his stepfather to write me and invite me more or less formally. I thought that I would be much less lonely living with them than staying in Princeton. Above all, I felt wanted.
In any case, I did not really have a choice. Miklos was delighted and did not hide his enthusiasm for the plan. I think he was concerned that I would want to stay in Princeton and after the campus closed down for the summer I would want to move in with them. Miklos quickly found for me some nice students who were going home for the summer and lived somewhere in the Midwest and so I got a free ride.
In Princeton my acquaintances would often tell me: Ah, but New York (or Princeton) is not the real America. – you must see the rest of the county. The implication was that “real America” was somehow purer, nobler, and more “American” than New York. In fact, I never believed this for a moment. I did want to see the rest of the country, but only out of curiosity for I took it for granted that I would find it even stranger, even more alien than the small area around New York which I was getting to know. We found the Gams’ house on Davenport street, one of those American streets which is part of a grid, could be in any town, could be called Elm street or Walnut street. It was neither in a suburb nor was it in an area that I would have considered a town. The family, meaning Magda neni, her husband Gabi Salzer and Jancsi, was waiting for me. They were watching the news on TV and with delight I realized that not only do they have a TV but that in Omaha at least one could watch the same news as in New York. The concept of a national network, the idea that you can produce a program in New York and watch it in Omaha was new and surprising to me.
The Gams family was a strange one, even allowing that all families are strange, and that the appallingly unsettled post-war world among Hungarian Jews produced particularly curious combinations. There was, of course, Jancsi. He was a young man, much more adventurous than I was, bright, ambitious, and full of the strangest whimsy, which only occasionally amused me. For example, a few weeks later, he introduced me to a rather ugly, 18-year-old Jewish girl, Maxine, as a Pakistani man of 40. I do not know where he got this idea. It must have just popped into his head. I suppose from the point of view of Maxine, Hungary was as remote as Pakistan and made little difference to her. It is true that later we laughed together at this poor girl’s ignorance, provincialism and naivete, but at the time I was so much taken aback by Jancsi’s introduction that for a moment did not know what to say. Jancsi was working in a hospital as an orderly. Since he had always wanted to be a doctor, this job was not altogether inappropriate for him. On the other hand, his English at this time was still rudimentary and he did not win the friendship or even good will of his fellow workers. He was working hard, was tired most of the time, and rather miserable. As so many of us in a similar situation, he tended to blame America and the incredibly stupid locals for his pain.
Magda neni was a woman in her mid-forties, someone who saw much better days but accepted her difficult situation without complaining. She worked as a cashier in a shoe store. Although she knew German and French, her English was almost non-existent and I could not imagine then and indeed, cannot understand it now how she could work in a store under the circumstances. But the really interesting figure in the family was Gabi, or, as we found out a little later, Herman, for that was his real name. Gabi, as so much else about him was just made up. He was the first genuine con man I had the good fortune of meeting. He appeared in the mid 1950s in Magda neni’s life seemingly from nowhere. He was slight, spoke softly, as he was always imparting some secrets. It is hard to imagine a couple less suited to one another. Magda neni, utterly honest to the point of humorlessness and Gabi seemingly younger, though I never found out his real age, constantly on the move and a man, who saw no reason to distinguish between truth and imagination. What did they see in one another? It is easier to understand why she was attracted to him. For awhile at least she must have believed in his stories, for as an honest person she assumed that others were no different, but what exactly did he want from her?
I first met Gabi in 1954 or 1955 when Magda neni brought him up to Budapest to introduce him to my family. He made a most profound impression. He hinted, though never said it with that many words, that he had been in prison for political reasons. He said that Slansky, a Jew recently executed in Czechoslovakia in one of the bloodiest purges in Eastern Europe, was his brother. He intimated that he had excellent contacts in the highest levels of the Hungarian Communist Party. Jancsi and I were completely taken in by the conspiratorial air that he managed to convey. We felt that through him somehow we were in the know, that high politics, which had seemed so far away, was brought closer. This was immensely exciting to teenagers, interested in politics and fascinated by conspiracies. Talking to one another softly in the street, we referred to him as “G”, to make sure that the non-existent spies behind us could not understand what we were talking about.
After Magda neni and Gabi got married he promised to some people in Szekesfehervar that using his high contacts he would help them to cross the border into Austria. All this, of course, required money. People had to be bribed. So, he accepted some thousands of forints from friends, and, needless to say, no one ever got across the border with his help. I do not know what Magda was thinking at the time, but my family in Budapest began to think that Gabi might not be all that he claimed to be.
In November 1956 the Gams family was among the first who left the country. Immediately on arriving in Austria Gabi became a chemical engineer. He was by no means unique in acquiring an education and a profession at the border, in fact there was a name for this phenomenon: people such as him were called “border engineers” or “border lawyers”. People who had one or two years of university education in Hungary often promoted themselves. After all, people who crossed the border illegally could not have been expected to carry with themselves their official papers. A good friend of mine, who had studied in Budapest at a technical university for two years, arrived in New York as a mechanical engineer, found a job and as far as I can tell performed perfectly well. Some years later I met someone, who claimed to have gotten his law degree from the University of Kecskemet. I felt that it was not up to me to enlighten him that I knew for a fact that Kecskemet had no law school. But, it was a great deal easier to pretend to be a lawyer than to know something about chemistry. As far as I know Gabi had absolutely no chemical education. Unlike Jancsi and Magda neni, who had jobs and worked hard and were dead tired in the evenings, Gabi had no visible occupation, however, he had money. He soon bought himself an airconditioned car and learned to drive. He was practically never at home, day or night. We suspected that he had women. He turned up at odd hours, sat around for a while and then left, of course without saying where he was going or when he would return. Nor did he contribute much to the rent and to other household expenses. By this time this was not a real marriage and indeed, within a short time he moved out altogether.
Years later I learned from Jancsi the source of his income: he had established contacts with chemists who worked for the US Army, and since they had government jobs and worked in army laboratories, they could not publish their patents under their own name. Herman Salzer, the chemical engineer, without ever setting foot in a laboratory, within a short time after his arrival in the United States had a number of patents under his name. Gabi received a cut from the income. Even now, I cannot imagine how a man who spoke practically no [[WP:English| English] was able to come up with this scheme and how he was able to maintain contacts with genuine chemists. Obviously, he could not have foreseen such a scam already in Austria, but he came well prepared.
Jancsi by this time for perfectly understandable reasons conceived great dislike for the man. I, on the other hand, got along with him well. In fact he spent more time talking to me than to talk to anyone else in the family. He was not much for reading, he did not well understand television, and he hated to do nothing, so on occasion, when he had nothing better to do, asked me to go with him to pubs, which I was glad to do. I too had a great desire to get out of the house and do something, whatever it was. So I would go with him and listen to his tales, by this time not believing a word. He talked about women and about sex, how to prevent conception and such things. He enjoyed the role of an older man advising a neophyte. Although I had little practical experience in these matters, I had enough book learning to know that he was taking a lot of nonsense. But still, it was amusing to go out with him. And, stingy as he was, he still paid for my beer. Although I was only twenty at the time and the legal age for drinking was 21, no one ever asked my age.
Once again I put on my Jewish hat. The Gams family had been helped by a Jewish charity organization and it was through this organization that I could find a job. So, obviously I had to be Jewish once again. A day after my arrival I was taken to meet Mrs. Stern. She lived in a suburb, in a large and fancy house. Getting there by bus took us an hour. She was a buxom lady in her mid-sixties, who left Hungary in the twenties, but spoke perfect Hungarian. She was obviously a pillar of the local Jewish community. I well understood that under the circumstances it was polite to praise America and to say how impressed I was by the opportunities offered in this country. I doubt that my style and my excessive intellectualism won her over. Nevertheless she must have considered it to be her duty to help a poor Jewish refugee. Within a week I was working.
I was hired by a Pepsi-Cola bottling firm. I came highly recommended as a Princeton student and there was some talk that I would work in a supervisory capacity. It must have taken only seconds for my boss to realize that I was the wrong person for the job. Although by this time I could have discussed the causes of the Hungarian revolution in fluent English, the kind of language that was used in a factory was new to me. Nor did I have any idea about the business, how to deal with people in a factory setting, etc. I was embarrassed, and must have made a pitiful impression. I just hoped to get through the day, and then the week and then the couple of months I had to work here. So, what were they to do with me?
In the afternoon they put me on a forklift: I was to place cases and cases of Pepsi on a truck that delivered them to businesses. I was not asked and, unfortunately, I did not volunteer to tell anyone that I had never in my life sat behind a wheel, not of a forklift, but even of an ordinary car. The results were predictable. I started the machine, but did not realize that it was in reverse, and so backed in with full force to wall-high cases of Pepsi bottles. The commotion can easily be imagined: I must have squashed dozens of cases and broken hundreds of bottles. People were rushing in from other rooms to see what happened. How could I be so foolish? What was I thinking? I was too embarrassed to explain that I was incapable of doing what was asked of me. Instead I would just try to do what I could and then face the consequences.
The consequences, in fact, were not too bad. I was, of course, taken off the forklift and have never again in my life sat on one. The owner of the place, a Jew, was a friend of Mrs. Stern and so I was not fired right away. My duties in the following weeks consisted of helping to load the trucks by hand, going out with the driver and help to unload at various stores in the city, and fixing the wooden cases in the cellar, by hammering them together which were falling apart. The loading and unloading was extremely strenuous. I was weak, totally unused to physical labor. Omaha was suffering from a heat wave, the like of which I had never experienced. The temperature went over 100 degrees day after day. It was a humid, miserable heat, only rarely relieved by a thunderstorm.
I was getting the minimum wage that was a dollar an hour, but I got a dollar and a half for overtime. Since I was extremely anxious to earn money, I was working ten or even twelve hours a day. I would leave the house at seven in the morning, get on a bus, which left only once in every ten minutes, change to another bus and start to work at eight, often staying at the plant until early evening. I took sandwiches from home that I had made myself, and ate them alone at noon. I felt dreadfully tired every day and sorry for myself. Rightly or wrongly I perceived hostility from my fellow workers. Princeton obviously did not impress them. We had no common topics. One morning I asked my fellow worker as we were repairing the wooden cases:
"How much money do you earn?" "None of your damned business" – he responded, ending the conversation. At the time obviously I did not know that in America such questions are out of bounds. In Hungary such an inquiry would have been considered a friendly opening.
I lasted exactly four weeks in that job. Monday morning a foreman came up to me as I was hammering: You are laid off. You can go home. He spoke softly, obviously embarrassed. After all, people don’t enjoy firing miserable creatures such as I was. I knew the word “fired”, but I did not know the expression “laid off”. So, for a moment looked at him, not comprehending what he was telling me. The idea of going home, of course, was a pleasant one, but when I understood what was happening I was deeply humiliated. I must have done my job very poorly and my employer run out of patience.
A week later I found another job, but that lasted only for a couple of hours. I was hired in a second-rate restaurant that was open all night. I was to be a boss boy for the night shift. This was far worse than working in Princeton in the student cafeteria. There was simply no stopping, no chance for siting down. I carried the disgusting greasy dishes with left over food to the kitchen, and wiped tables. I knew that the minimum wage at the time was a dollar an hour, but I did not know that the law did not apply to restaurants. So, when I found out from my fellow boss boy that the wage was only 40 cents an hour and that the waiters did not share their tips with us, I decided to leave immediately.
My next job lasted longer: a day and a half, or, more precisely, a night and a half. A grocery chain hired me to load trucks at night. Started at ten in the evening and worked until six in the morning. At two a.m. we had a coffee break. I simply could not do the work. I went home in the morning, as it just dawned of the hottest day of the year. At two o’clock in the afternoon it was 109 degrees. The house, of course, was not air-conditioned. I could not sleep during the day at all. I went back to work at ten, but by midnight I felt that I simply couldn’t go on. Once again, I was out of a job.
By far the best job I had that summer, which lasted for an entire week, came in mid August. By this time Jancsi had also been fired and we were looking for work together. We saw an ad for draftsmen and decided to apply. We pretended that in Hungary we had worked in this capacity. This was an act of desperation. We reasoned: after all, what can they do to us? Even if we work for a couple of days, we will pick up a little money. In fact we lasted a week. Interestingly, this too was a night job. The task was to copy drafts. This is the kind of work which completely disappeared with the arrival of the Xerox machine. This was not bad at all. Although I am not good in that type of precision work, I thought I was not doing too badly. I appreciated the job and this time I was trying hard. I thought at the time that Jancsi was worse than I, making a greater mess. We were hired together and fired together.
During the entire summer I earned no more than between 200 and 300 dollars, most of which I used to buy food, movie tickets, stamps, bus tickets, etc. I was not returning to Princeton with enough money. Obviously I would have to work more during the next school year than I did in the previous one.
Since neither Jancsi nor I had a job any longer, we could wonder in the streets when the weather permitted, when it was not too awfully, unbearably hot. It was possible to walk ten or fifteen blocks east and get to what was considered to be “downtown”. Downtown, a perfectly featureless few blocks consisted of a few office buildings with banks in the bottom, a movie house, playing, of course, only American films, a couple of department stores, with depressing store windows, a number of churches and nothing else. From the West the stench of slaughterhouses and feed lots wafted over the city, and I suppose this was the only way to tell that you were in Omaha and not in another undistinguished mid-Western town.
Whatever social life I had was through Jancsi. The small Hungarian community of Omaha that had helped the newly arrived refugees split into two unequal groups: Jews and the Christians. What distinguished Jews was that they by and large loved America, deplored the Nazis and ex-Nazis in the Hungarian community and, in general, had a rather hostile attitude to the old country. By contrast, the Christians were bitterly anti-Communist and as far as they were concerned there was not much to choose between an Imre Nagy or a Janos Kadar: they were both communists and that was enough to know about them.
At this point people to overcome their loneliness, to find their way into a new society, sought out the company of those who were in a similar situation. So, it was fairly easy to get to know the Hungarian community. One evening I went with Jancsi to a “Hungarian dance evening”, something I would have never done in Princeton or New York. The organizers clearly came from the patriotic Hungarian community: we listened to the national anthem, the room was decked with red white and green flags and people danced the “csardas”. Jancsi on this occasion picked up a girl, Mary Ann, who knew no Hungarian since she grew up in Omaha. Her parents came to the United States in the 1920s. Mary Ann was not exactly ugly, but she was plain, large and had rather course features. I always admired Jancsi’s talents in getting girls, though it was clear to me that he was not particularly choosy and was more interested in quantity than in quality. Amazingly, to me at least, he did not really need language to communicate. He certainly was not shy. Being rejected did not push him into despair.
Next Saturday we were going on a double date. Mary Ann had a car, an old Chevy, and she brought her friend. We went to a drive in movie. This was my first “double date” and my first drive in movie. The girl, I think her name was Lois, was pretty, rather small, and quiet. I do not think we exchanged ten sentences. We were watching two Harry Belafonte films, I think both of them took place somewhere in the tropics. Lois and I were sitting in the backseat, and I knew enough that I was supposed to put my arm around her, which I gladly did. After the first film ended, Jancsi told me that he would like to change places with me. I did not particularly mind.
So it was Mary Ann who became my girlfriend. She was an earnest girl, who just finished high school, and worked as a secretary in a real estate office. She quickly let me know that she preferred me to Jancsi, whether that was because I was already advertised as a Princeton student, or because I spoke English better, or because she genuinely preferred my less forward style, I do not know. I did represent in her mind sophistication, education, and the big, outside world. This was the first time that my exotic background was actually an advantage. The first time that someone did not feel sorry for me for not having grown up in America. I rather enjoyed playing the sophisticated, world-weary traveler, and made only transparent attempts to hide my distaste for American provincialism.
Mary Ann was a nice person and I got to like her. This was the first time that I regularly saw a girl without thinking for a moment that I loved her, or could possibly be interested in her in the long run. I realized that I was taking advantage of her and suspected that if she did not have a car I would have been less interested in spending time with her. I did try not to mislead her, even to the extent of talking, rather tastelessly of my great love in Hungary. We exchanged some rather chaste kisses, but attempted to go no further. Since it was still the repressed provincial America of the 1950s, my shyness perhaps was not as striking as it would have been later.
Mary Ann wanted to better herself; she was fascinated by the world outside Omaha, which she had not seen, in her short life had never gotten further than neighboring Iowa. She talked with great enthusiasm of the gramophone records of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven that she had bought under my instructions. She decided to take evening classes and indeed, in September, after my departure, enrolled in sociology and psychology classes at Creighton University. During the following few weeks while I was in Omaha I saw her regularly and met her parents. They were simple people who came from a little town in Eastern Hungary. He had served in the First World War on the Russian front and was captured, where, perhaps strangely, acquired a liking for Russians. He obviously loved to talk about his war experiences, no doubt these were the most dramatic days of his life.
Although not much waiting for me back at Princeton, in early September it was not difficult to leave Omaha. After all, I knew that my stay in Omaha was something temporary and I would have to find my place in a university environment. It lowered my self-esteem that in my attempt to earn money, to work at a real job I had failed.
Mary Ann drove me to the airport. I was trying to hide my pleasure and excitement at leaving as we were going toward the still primitive Omaha airport. Mary Ann waved to me as I was approaching the plane and I saw a tear in her eye. I was touched.[[Category:Princeton University
