Journey to Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family

Norman Ravvin is an assistant professor of English at the University of
New Brunswick. He is the author of Café des Westens, Sex, Skyscrapers,
and Standard Yiddish, and A House of Words.

Journey to Vaja is a detailed and carefully constructed portrait of
Jewish town and country life in the Hungarian region south of the
Carpathian Mountains. Unlike many memoirs written by Canadian sons and
daughters of families largely destroyed by the Holocaust, Naves’s book
is almost completely concerned with prewar life. The war haunts her
narrative, but without playing a major role in what she has to tell.

An unusual amount of documented and remembered information came to hand
when Naves set to work on her memoir, and she is able to trace her
family history back to the last quarter of the 18th century. This
recovered history, along with the fact that her family stayed put within
one Hungarian county up to the outbreak of World War II, allows
Naves’s family history to double as an informal ethnography of the
Szabolcs County on Hungary’s eastern frontier. As she traces the
gradual improvement of her ancestors’ fortunes, she also draws a
portrait of the Hungarian nobility, of local farming culture, of the
slow modernization of Hungary before the war, and of the ambiguous
relationship between mainstream Magyar culture and its minorities.

Hungarian-Jewish life before the war is less familiar than that of
Russia or Poland, and Journey to Vaja reminds us that stereotypic ideas
of “shtetl” life rarely account for the variety and idiosyncrasies
of village life across the vast provinces of Eastern Europe. The
patriarchs and matriarchs described by Naves have their own distinct
character, shaped by their region, by the peculiarities of
assimilationist strategies in the Austro-Hungarian empire, and by
immediate historical events. Their traditionalist urges are confronted
by the empire’s decay, World War I, Jewish immigration from Poland,
the Russian Revolution, and the early stages of industrialization. Naves
does an impressive job of using these broader historical movements to
mirror her family history. In this way, she offers readers a clear
picture of the rootedness of Jewish communities in Hungarian society in
the 150 years preceding World War II.