By
Madeleine KandoMy family is originally from Hungary. That is where I was born, but soon my parents moved to France. Then, when my brother, twin sister and I were in our early teens, we moved again, this time to Holland. We quickly forgot how to speak Hungarian, but never lost our French.
We adapted well to our Dutch life. My mother had divorced her second husband and tried to make a living on her own. We entered puberty with a vengeance and partied day and night. One week-end blurred into another, all ending up in the bathroom, vomiting our guts out.
Decades later, when I was already a grandmother myself, I found an old letter, written by my grandfather. It was written after one of his infrequent visits to the West, infrequent enough for us kids to see him as a quaint old man, speaking perfect French, with a Hungarian accent. The letter has no date, but it was addressed to us and must have been written during that period, when we were partying as if there was no tomorrow. My mother, a photographer, was trying to work on the third floor of our flat, an impossible feat considering the loud music and drinking that was going on downstairs.
The letter is written in French, but not just your daily variety. It is clear that the writer is a highly educated man. He not only spoke and wrote French, but translated hundreds of works from Greek, Latin, Russian, German and English. Behind his highly stylized prose, the sadness and desperation of an old man is as clear as a bell.
It is a lamentation of a concerned father, trying to talk some sense into three semi-delinquent teenagers, who were literally abusing their mother. It is a plea that obviously fell on deaf ears. ‘Grand-père’ as we used to call him, knew this even as he was writing it. He knew he was fighting a lost battle. I don’t think any of us read the letter at the time. Many years later, as I read this letter, the helplessness of a father trying to protect his daughter is palpable.
This father’s anger towards his grandchildren, is tempered by his natural temperament to try to ‘reason’ with us. As you well know, reasoning with teenagers whose hormones are raging through their veins is an impossible task. But he tries to make us understand that our behavior no only affects an exhausted, overworked woman, but also damages our own development.
Will there come a time when I write such a letter to my grandson Marshall? Will he become abusive of his mother? There is little chance of that. My daughter is not a single mother. I will never have to write a plea to ‘reason’ with Marshall. He will never be allowed to behave like we did. His father won’t let him.
The way we behaved are the tragic consequences of a family caught up in the whirlwind of a post-war world. Victims of uprootedness. Ata, my mother, willingly left her home and the protection of her own parents, for reasons which are still not clear to me. Had she not left, would we have been less of a burden to our mother? Would my grandfather have been there to scold us, pull us by the ears and tell us that a mother should be respected, not ‘used’ as a dish rag? Maybe ‘grand-père’ was too gentle a soul, too reasonable and of a different generation, to even admit to the indecency that puberty can spawn.
But not only did we miss out on having had grandparents that would have protected Ata and put us in our place, we also missed out on an incredible intellectual legacy that these grandparents of ours could have passed on to us.
The superb choice of words in this lamentation, written in French by a Hungarian who never actually lived in France, is astounding. How can I not be impressed, even as I am the cause of his fury?
How can I myself, not lament the loss of so much intellectual wealth? Ata’s parents lived during a period in history when thinking was revered, when the use of words reflected the true depth of a person’s thoughts.
But I don’t want to stray too far from what this story is about, which is the love of a father for his daughter.
Fathers are an enigma. They love, they hate, they think. But mostly they are there to protect. That is what this old man, this revered grandfather of mine was trying to do. And he failed. That is what this letter is. An apology to Ata, an apology to the world that a father was not able to protect his child. leave comment here
We adapted well to our Dutch life. My mother had divorced her second husband and tried to make a living on her own. We entered puberty with a vengeance and partied day and night. One week-end blurred into another, all ending up in the bathroom, vomiting our guts out.
Decades later, when I was already a grandmother myself, I found an old letter, written by my grandfather. It was written after one of his infrequent visits to the West, infrequent enough for us kids to see him as a quaint old man, speaking perfect French, with a Hungarian accent. The letter has no date, but it was addressed to us and must have been written during that period, when we were partying as if there was no tomorrow. My mother, a photographer, was trying to work on the third floor of our flat, an impossible feat considering the loud music and drinking that was going on downstairs.
The letter is written in French, but not just your daily variety. It is clear that the writer is a highly educated man. He not only spoke and wrote French, but translated hundreds of works from Greek, Latin, Russian, German and English. Behind his highly stylized prose, the sadness and desperation of an old man is as clear as a bell.
It is a lamentation of a concerned father, trying to talk some sense into three semi-delinquent teenagers, who were literally abusing their mother. It is a plea that obviously fell on deaf ears. ‘Grand-père’ as we used to call him, knew this even as he was writing it. He knew he was fighting a lost battle. I don’t think any of us read the letter at the time. Many years later, as I read this letter, the helplessness of a father trying to protect his daughter is palpable.
This father’s anger towards his grandchildren, is tempered by his natural temperament to try to ‘reason’ with us. As you well know, reasoning with teenagers whose hormones are raging through their veins is an impossible task. But he tries to make us understand that our behavior no only affects an exhausted, overworked woman, but also damages our own development.
Will there come a time when I write such a letter to my grandson Marshall? Will he become abusive of his mother? There is little chance of that. My daughter is not a single mother. I will never have to write a plea to ‘reason’ with Marshall. He will never be allowed to behave like we did. His father won’t let him.
The way we behaved are the tragic consequences of a family caught up in the whirlwind of a post-war world. Victims of uprootedness. Ata, my mother, willingly left her home and the protection of her own parents, for reasons which are still not clear to me. Had she not left, would we have been less of a burden to our mother? Would my grandfather have been there to scold us, pull us by the ears and tell us that a mother should be respected, not ‘used’ as a dish rag? Maybe ‘grand-père’ was too gentle a soul, too reasonable and of a different generation, to even admit to the indecency that puberty can spawn.
But not only did we miss out on having had grandparents that would have protected Ata and put us in our place, we also missed out on an incredible intellectual legacy that these grandparents of ours could have passed on to us.
The superb choice of words in this lamentation, written in French by a Hungarian who never actually lived in France, is astounding. How can I not be impressed, even as I am the cause of his fury?
How can I myself, not lament the loss of so much intellectual wealth? Ata’s parents lived during a period in history when thinking was revered, when the use of words reflected the true depth of a person’s thoughts.
But I don’t want to stray too far from what this story is about, which is the love of a father for his daughter.
Fathers are an enigma. They love, they hate, they think. But mostly they are there to protect. That is what this old man, this revered grandfather of mine was trying to do. And he failed. That is what this letter is. An apology to Ata, an apology to the world that a father was not able to protect his child. leave comment here
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