Blue Genes Read Free

States).
    Before World War I, Nagyvarad was the biggest city in eastern Hungary. That’s where Samuel was born in 1865. Nagyvarad is in Transylvania—Dracula country—and was tossed back and forth between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Romania for decades, depending on who won which war.
    Like most Hungarian Jews, Samuel’s family were Reform Jews, which meant occasional attendance at synagogue. At the turn of the century, Hungary had a fast-growing economy, and Jews were to be found in every aspect of business and commerce. In Budapest, every fourth person was a Jew.
    Hungarian Jews were preeminent in math and fencing, but in Nagyvarad they were famous in other arenas as well. They taught, they discussed politics, they thought about the big picture. Samuel’s family owned a café, so it was natural that he, even at a young age, joined his elders and sat in cafés, talking big talk. Aunt Judy said, “Father belonged in a café. He had all the qualities to make him popular there: he drank, he smoked, he laughed, he sang, he told endless stories with dramatic flair, he played cards; he teased the girls—young and old—and the girls, young and old, liked to flirt with him.”
    One of Samuel Lukacs’s nephews was Paul Lukas, who became a famous actor, playing Shakespeare in Budapest when he was in his early twenties and later migrating to the United States. He, too, was popular with women, and in the 1920s barnstormed in small planes across the United States as he took work in both Hollywood and New York. Cousin Paul won an Academy Award for his portrayal of an anti-Nazi hero in Lillian Hellman’s
Watch on the Rhine
and was on Broadway in numerous plays, including
Call Me Madam
with Ethel Merman. Tony and I used to go see him and have dinner afterward. There was some dissent about him in the family, since he had converted to Catholicism back in Hungary, but he was too talented to ignore. Besides, it was thrilling to have a famous person in our family.
    At one of the dinners that Dad, Tony, and I shared with Paul and Daisy (Paul’s alcoholic Hungarian wife), Dad asked him if he preferred movies or plays. Holding out his huge hands on either side of him in a dramatic pose, Paul said, “If a movie is here” (he clutched the putative film in one fist) “and a play comes along” (he opened the film hand to let the movie go, and grasped the “play” tightly in the other), “then I’d take the play.” Even then, at the age of twelve, I remember thinking, he’s putting on an act. I bet he’d take a film if it were more money.
    Shortly after he turned twenty-two, Lukacs Samu met a young woman with whom he had a brief romance that broke off when the girl’s parents discovered the dalliance. Which was why he precipitously left for the United States. Entering during the waning decades of the nineteenth century, he encountered Ellis Island but passed through successfully because he had some distant relatives here who could vouch for him. He remembered the experience, however, for later he took a job interpreting for some of the immigrants who aspired to live in the United States. He used the many languages he had picked up in that muddled part of Europe into which he had been born: Serbian, German, Romanian, Czech, French, and Yiddish, among them.
    My Hungarian grandmother, Anna Jacobs, born in 1872, spoke German at home because that was the common language in her part of Hungary.
    She had come to the States when she was three and learned how to be a seamstress from her mother, who was an expert at it and supported the family. Granny, as we called her, was diminutive and beautiful—so beautiful that in her late teens she took to modeling. She and her three sisters and brother lived with my great-grandmother in an apartment that opened onto the back of a Hungarian café. I think it was the one that Samuel Lukacs ran for a brief time. At any rate, Anna met him there when she was twenty, and they married in 1892.
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