The Sabbath World by Judith Shulevitz Read Free Book Online

Freud. So where did he get his material? From Jewish patients, of course, and, I can’t help suspecting, from himself. Like all the early analysts, Ferenczi was given to autobiographical reflection, and considered himself as good a subject of clinical study as anyone else.
    Actually, I don’t think it matters much whether he was talking about himself or someone else. Ferenczi’s patients, it turns out, were a lot like him. They belonged to the first generation of Hungarian Jews to be admitted to Hungarian schools and universities—luckily for them, at a moment when these institutions happened to be unusually good—and granted free access to the professions. Historians refer to them as Hungary’s golden generation. Some of them transcended the confines of Hungarian (one of the world’s most difficult languages, and little read outside the country) and achieved world renown; among them were the composer Béla Bartók, the playwright Ferenc Molnár, the journalists Theodor Herzl and Arthur Koestler, the sociologist Karl Mannheim, the literary critic and philosopher Georg Lukács, and Ferenczi himself. The parents and grandparents of this generation had made their way to Budapest from poorer and more pious regions. They had kept their accents and many of their customs,even when they joined reformist synagogues that made rituals optional. (Through out the nineteenth century, Hungary had a large, dynamic reform movement, called Neolog Judaism, that had much in common with the Reform Judaism prevalent in America at the same time.)
    The poets, painters, and thinkers among them, critical of capitalism and the damage wrought on the countryside by industrialization, wrote and painted nostalgic visions of the villages of their (or their parents’) childhood, but they had no desire to follow the religion practiced in them. They disliked the authoritarianism of faith; they cherished the newfound freedom of reason. The sight of black-hatted Eastern Jews, or
Ostjuden
, made these children particularly nervous. “My father, who otherwise never went to temple and certainly never prayed, once a year took me to some secret ceremony,” reads one anxious passage in the memoir of the poet Béla Balázs, Ferenczi’s contemporary. Balázs was talking about Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. “There were only men there whom I did not know and with whom my parents did not socialize. With white sheets on their shoulders, they wailed and beat their breasts. But what was really frightening for me was that my father too donned such a white sheet, which was edged with black stripes, and dressed like them, he joined and entered this alien and secret alliance.”
    So maybe it’s not enough to say that Ferenczi’s patient associated fish with his parents having sex or that he had an existential dread of being off the workaday calendar—though those things seem plausible, too. Given how a young Jew of his time would have felt about the Sabbath, you can’t help but suspect that the boy would have had to fight his way to his family’s Friday-night dinner table through a storm of emotions: the disgust felt when your parents practice rites you deem primitive; the guilt inspired by such disgust; the alienation you feel when you don’t know whether to be loyal to your family or to the outside world. No wonder he threw up. No wonder he found himself on Ferenczi’s couch. The question is why Ferenczi, who must have had firsthand experience with the same internal Kulturkampf, never entertains the possibility that the Sabbath itself (rather than Sabbath-relatedsexual activities) could have been the source of the boy’s distress—or at least Ferenczi never utters the thought. But maybe the mental picture of a Sabbath table made Ferenczi a little queasy himself.
 5. 
    I T WASN’T JUST THE TIMES that changed in the shift from Ferenczi’s parents’ generation to his, or from my grandparents’ to mine. Time changed, too. We tend to