Shabbat With Liberty

By Nicole Waldner

When our daughter was born I was living happily in Budapest. Even now it is with some surprise that I write "happily" and "Budapest" in the same sentence. My family originated from Hungary and they were all but annihilated by the catastrophe of Shoah.  Growing up on the other side of the world in Sydney, I was both repelled and fascinated by Hungary. After 1989, my father began to visit Budapest again. Having always been curious, I was also curious about Hungary and so I accompanied my father on many of his trips. In spite of myself I was fascinated by all I saw, whether it was ugly, depressing, maddening, absurd or exquisite. To me, the entire city had this aura of old, tarnished silver compromised by neglect, but with an odd beauty lurking just beneath the grime. On one of these trips I fell in love with Zoltán, a nice Jewish country boy, a rare gem indeed. Consequently this city that once so filled my family with terror is now also the city in which I found love and the place where my only daughter was born. On 30th August, 2007 Liberty arrived, double tikkun olam, if ever such a thing existed.

For the first two years of Liberty's life we lived in Újlipótváros, a traditionally Jewish middle class neighbourhood. Being Pesti, we walked just about everywhere in those days. On one of our many walks along the Danube and through the V district - the beautiful old city centre - pushing our sleeping girl in her pram, we began talking about how we would educate our children. From the beginning neither of us wanted to send our children to Jewish day school. It wasn't Judaism per se that we didn't want, it was any institutionalised religious education. We didn't want her heart to be broken by the horrors of Jewish history. We didn't want our tiny girl's mind tied up in knots by impossible questions of theology. Not yet anyway. There would be time for all that and we felt the right time would be when she could think rationally, and question.

As happy as we were in Pest, I always knew that eventually we would take Liberty, and her big brother Amir, home to Sydney and educate them there. On Liberty’s first birthday I discovered I was pregnant with twins!! The catalysts for our departure tap-tapped insistently in double time within me. It was January 2009. My first year home in almost a decade was tumultuous, physically and emotionally. Twins will do that to you, and more! It was not until Cyrus and Luis were weened nearly a year later that I began to slowly come to from the long fog of carrying and breastfeeding my baby boys. It was then that our Jewish family life began to take shape. I come from a big family. I am the third of four children, and today our immediate family numbers twenty, eleven of which are grandchildren, seven of which attend Jewish day school. Which leaves our beloved quartet, willy-nilly in the gentile kindergartens and public schools of Sydney.

Like all secular Jews of my generation I was raised in a house full of contradictions. I'd been given a liberal, urbane, worldly upbringing in many ways, but our home was also very traditionally Jewish. Shabbat every Friday, two Seders every Pesach, the Haggadah sung and read from cover to cover. There was Purim, Sukkot, Chanukah and of course Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We had a kosher kitchen, mostly, except for seafood and Chinese which were hushed into the garden on paper plates.  We all had our own seats at shul marked with shiny copper name plates. We attended Jewish day school with daily prayers, Torah and Hebrew classes. At school assemblies we sang the Australian anthem and the Hatikvah. This passion for tradition has always been driven by my father, who was raised orthodox but later in life loosened things up a little. As for my mother, I believe her passions, as mine, lie elsewhere. She is above all an aesthete and a sensualist. Born and raised in Marosvásárhely she had little or no Jewish education. Her mother's family were members of the obscure Székely Szombatosok from Bözödújfalu, Christian converts to Judaism who practiced a strange hybrid form of both religions. Despite all the tradition and ritual in my childhood, I don't think a single member of my family is truly religious. To this my father would say, “Faith and heritage are two different things.” Confusing, isn’t it?

At one of our earliest Shabbat dinners with my family, when Liberty still referred to them as parties, I watched my three year old niece repeat the blessing for the candles out loud. Afterward everybody congratulated her and her little cheeks flushed with pride. At the next Shabbat dinner I put my hands over Liberty's eyes and together we said the blessing. She asked for no explanation and I offered none. This was the start of her Jewish education. I felt satisfied, but my father was not. For him there is only one way to raise Jewish children and that is to send them to Jewish day school.

There began a series of difficult and unpleasant conversations between my father and I over our choice to send Liberty and the other children to the local public school. Voices were raised above a civil pitch, ugly words stung us all like cold sand on a windy day at the beach. One evening at my parents' house in the midst of one such storm Zoltán walked out. To escape the mess within he had to scale the security gate, jump over it and so away into the night. Everyone felt hurt and betrayed. Throughout this time my mother was uncharacteristically silent.

After months of arguments and acrimony, I found myself on a tour of The Emanuel School with Zoltán and Liberty too, who was now nearing her fourth birthday. I said to myself if it had to be a religious school it would be a reform one. Moriah College, the school I attended, is Orthodox. The Emanuel School is newer, smaller, slightly more pluralist, a favourite of mixed marriage parents, with even the occasional philo-Semite thrown into the mix. Liberty walked quietly between us, content to take in the new surroundings. At one point we entered a primary school classroom where a tall bearded rabbi was teaching the children about the art of Torah scribing. He wore a pristine tallit draped over his shoulders and waved a white quill in his hand, an exotic winged conductor before his miniature orchestra. I watched Liberty watching him. Her smiling face was animated and full of wonder.

Of all my children Liberty is the most literal. She obeys rules and immediately tells me when the others don't. She is fond of repeating things I say and then running to tell her brothers.

“Mummy said no jumping on the couch.”

“No Amir, Mummy said we're not allowed to eat the chocolate before dinner.”

She is my own little megaphone, my enforcer. She is also very fond of tidiness and cleanliness and perhaps this is why she never wanted to crawl. Even now she doesn't like getting her clothes dirty. So what, I ask myself, does all this fastidiousness and love of order have to do with a grand name like Liberty? Not much, so far. But the name Liberty fired my imagination from the first moment I saw it waiting for me in a name book back in the old country. There's never been a Liberty in my family before, but I wish I could say there had been. That there'd been one woman in our past who’d been named so whimsically, so ambitiously even. One woman who'd not been subjected to grinding poverty or unspeakable brutality. One who'd breathed a little more freely. Up until my generation such a woman has scarcely had the possibility to exist. It is still too early to know just how well Liberty will come to inhabit her name. In the event that it will prove an ill fit, there will be Luna, her middle name, which already becomes her, with her broad pale face, her shimmering round eyes, her constancy.

I remain uncertain about the direction of Liberty's Jewish education, but I see already that she has begun to lead me. She asks to go to shul with her cousins. She tells me how much fun she had at shabbes with the whole family, and “Mummy, when can we do it again?” She has started asking our friends when they visit if they are Jewish or not and she wants to practice the blessing for the candles so she will know it as well as her cousins.

Last Friday night we went to shabbat dinner at my sister's house. The long table was perched out over the quiet bay, the smell of the Pacific eddied in from the open windows. I put my hands over Liberty's eyes and she put her little hands over mine. We said the blessing together. A few minutes later when the warm challah was being passed around I said to Liberty, “Let's do the blessing for the challah.” She shook her head no, grabbed a chunk of bread and ran out laughing into the dark garden. ◊

“Shabbat with Liberty” was first published in the anthology Lányok, Anyák: Elmeséletlen Női Történetek II/

Daughters, Mothers: Untold Women’s Stories vol. II, Novella Könykiadó, Budapest, 2013.

The German edition Töchter, Mütter: Unerzählte Geschichten Jüdischer Frauen II, was published in 2017 by Novella.