Oldal 309 [309]
OCR
TOMÁS ABRAHAM However, this was not the case for my relatives who remained in Transylvania. ‘They were murdered by the Nazis. The paternal side of the family, the Abrahams, who lived in the towns around Cluj, disappeared without a trace. I have not been able to find out who they were. My great grandmother on my mother’s side was also murdered. I don’t even know her name. My parents taught me Hungarian and not German. My mother did not want me to speak German, due to the events that took place during the war, although she always read in German, and not in Hungarian. When my parents didn’t want me to understand something, they spoke in German. My memory retained a few words that weren’t very helpful later on in my job as a philosophy professor: “jaiss”, for hot, a warning so that I would drink my soup slowly, “fertig”, a signal that we could leave the table, “kistijand”, a protocol greeting that my father used with the ladies, “schluz!”, to indicate a task was finished... and a few more words. At twenty-five, my father decided that Stalinism didn’t offer him a stimulating future. He had a small factory that manufactured socks, a job taught to him by his widowed mother who had trouble just making ends meet. My mother came from a bourgeois family. She attended boarding school where she learned basic French and fell in love with my father at fifteen, who in his youth sat at the family table, giving private classes to his fellow classmates and others, like my mother’s brother. That’s how they met. My mother’s surname is Spitzer, which in German means pencil sharpener, or something sharp. In 1948, they left Romania, and on October 13‘ of the same year, they arrived in Buenos Aires. I was one year and ten months old and my parents were in their twenties. My parents didnt talk about Romania. Ihey were not nostalgic. I never heard the word “refugee” or “exiled” at home, we were immigrants, like millions of other Argentinians. One day, as an adult, I discovered that my birth certificate indicated “protestant”. I asked about the reason for this new identity, and my father explained that it was a diplomatic requirement because the quota of Jews that Argentina was willing to accept had been covered. It was a conversion ex officio. But I am Jewish, I have no doubts. The seal of identity is marked by my paternal surname, Abraham, the founder of monotheism, and is defined by history, because my birth was merely by chance. The randomness of birth is determined by genetics, because we are the product of an encounter between sperm and egg amongst millions of real missed encounters, but in my case, randomness is also verified by the fact + 308 +
