We had little to go on when my sister, Terry, and I took off for Hungary, to reverse the journey our grandparents had made when they’d come to America in the early 1900s. We had some family stories, a couple sepia photos, and an application for U.S. citizenship filled out by our grandfather, Louis Wass.

What would we find? It had been more than 100 years since they’d lived there. Two world wars and borders that changed three times had probably destroyed every trace of them.

Yet it seems that many are feeling the urge we did—to visit the country of our ancestors. I wanted to see the forests, walk along the Danube, smell the air, and search the Jewish cemeteries for familiar names. I wanted to taste the foods I associate with my childhood: matzo ball soup, stuffed cabbage, chopped liver, apple strudel. And I wanted to hear the language my grandparents spoke together and with Hungarian friends, who had names like Farkass, Gac, and Boczn. I never expected that satisfaction would come from a sensory experience in an unforeseen spot.

I had adored my Grandpa Louis, a big-hearted, playful, small yet strong man who made each of his grandchildren feel cherished. He often drove me home from school; when kindergarten let out, he’d be standing on the grass, arms wide open, and yell, “One, two, six!” — the signal for me to run to him, and he’d swing me in the air.

Grandma Rae was more timid, nervous, and shy. We were astonished to learn that at sixteen, she’d begged her parents, “Let me go to America. Please! I’ll send back money.”

I knew I had to visit Hungary, but the timing had never been right. Then fate intervened. Last winter, while at a ski camp in Deer Valley, UT, I met a woman, Susan Green, who’d grown up in the very town my grandfather had been from—Debrecen. Susan, a small, blonde dynamo of 59, spoke with an accent like that of my grandparents. She said she and her husband, David, were organizing a trip to Hungary for their friends in Utah, “to show them my home country.” She invited me and Terry and, wonder of wonders, the dates worked for us both.

The week before leaving, I dug up the only document I had, the application for citizenship filed in 1915 by Louis Wass. I scanned his info, stating he was 5’4”, 126 pounds, had blue eyes, brown hair… Then I stopped. For birthplace, he’d written, “Nyirmartonfalva, Hungary.”

He’d always said he was from Debrecen! I googled Nyirmartonfalva and, after a delay, it popped up: a village of about 2000, 13 miles east of Debrecen.

Susan arranged for an interpreter to take us to the village the day after we arrived. It was overcast and drizzling, with forest on either side of the road. The only vehicles we saw were trucks carrying cinnamon-colored logs in neat stacks.

Reaching the village, we stopped the first woman we saw, riding a bicycle. Our guide, Nora Erdei, a lovely young woman who speaks near-perfect English, asked if any Jews lived in the town now. The bicyclist shook her head. “A long time ago, there were Jews,” she said. “One family, the Sterns, had a large farm, but they all left around 1943.” Why? I asked. She shrugged. “I don’t know. It was before I was born.” I was thinking, maybe they sensed danger and fled?

She urged us to go to the city hall. When the mayor, Mihaly Kover, learned why we’d come, he walked us through the village. Wearing a red and white checked shirt and jeans, he said there’d been a Jewish cemetery in the center, but under Communist rule, it was razed and a school built on top. No graves or markers remained, which was upsetting.
We asked if he’d known anyone named Vass, the Hungarian form of Wass. “It sounds familiar,” he said, “but…no.” He took us to meet the town’s oldest residents, a couple in their 80’s.

It was chastening to realize they were not much older than I; they’d been about ten when the Jews left.

The man said his house was built where a Jew had lived. “When we built it we found some of the old structure. It had a dirt floor.” He said the family who’d lived there had a kitchen garden and a shop next-door, one of three shops owned by Jews on the street. “The wives ran the stores while the men were traveling, trading for goods to sell,” he said.

“Was there tension with the Jews?” I asked the oldest resident.

“No,” he said.

“Why did they leave?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Did any come back?”

“No.”

We walked to the school that had once been the cemetery, and found, beside it, a rude slide and swings on a scrubby field. Terry and I stood in the center of the field.

She teaches T’ai Chi Chih, and we did some of the movements, raising our arms in unison, sensing the energy and thinking of the souls—our tribe—whose bodies had moldered underneath.

Back at city hall, the mayor gave us a book they’d made about the village. We couldn’t read it, but it contained scores of photos from earlier times, when the homes were dug out of the earth. Later they were built of wood with thatched roofs, which periodically burned down and were rebuilt.

We knew our grandfather had been apprenticed to an upholsterer at about age 12. He must have gone to Debrecen then, for no furniture was made in the village. Our grandmother, living in a squalid part of Budapest, was sent out to work, cooking for other families, when she was 10. Both had six or seven siblings, some of them half siblings. It was common for men to have several wives, because the women worked hard, had numerous kids, and died young.

The book revealed what I’d longed to see: the kind of homes they’d lived in; the roads they’d walked, along with chickens and sheep; the clothes they’d worn. In the photos, the women had drab scarves tied over their heads, and the kids in school were barefoot. On the inside cover, a map showed “Jewish Hill” and the “Stern Farm.”

That night, we joined our group for an opulent dinner at our spa-hotel near Debrecen. Five of us were Jews and six were Mormons, but everyone wanted to hear about Nyirmartonfalva. When I said we’d been told the Jews “all left in 1943…” Susan interrupted: “That’s the wrong word. You think, every one of them decided to ‘leave’ at the same moment? They were deported.”

Jews in the countryside, I learned, were the first to be deported to Auschwitz. Hungary had refused to turn over the Jews in Budapest, but in 1944, Germany took over the country and did the job. Because it was late in the war, more survived than from other countries and today, Budapest has the second largest Jewish community in Europe. (after Paris)

The rest of the tour, for me, passed in a blur of dramatic architecture, river and plains, statues and castles, Jewish suffering and renewal. I was enchanted by a drive through the Hortobagy, a vast grassland that’s a UNESCO world heritage site, where people raise unique breeds of sheep and pitch black horses.

I was gaining a sense of how locked-in the country is, surrounded by Austria, Croatia, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Russia, none of them traditionally welcome to Jews. As the holocaust intensified, where could they escape?

Budapest is a more fabulous city than photos can suggest. The architecture makes the jaw drop—a mixture of Gothic, Ottoman, Baroque, Italian Renaissance, and Art Nouveau. Our guide told us, “Hungary has been on the wrong side of every war. The losing side.” So it’s been occupied by many other countries.

We visited the Jewish Community Center, whose mission is to resurrect the community, gathering up people who’ve been hiding their identity for decades. Zsuzsa Fritz, the director, who’s 54, with curly red hair, said, “I grew up with three generations living together, and I didn’t know I was Jewish until I was 16. There was nothing in our home to indicate we were Jews.” When her father passed away, she said, “I noticed all the people coming to the funeral were Jews. They’d been silenced by the Nazis and then by the Communists.”

Michael Paley, a rabbi from Boston who now lives in Budapest, said, “The trauma of the holocaust is still alive.” There are visceral reminders: a wall of the ghetto that still stands; a line of bronze shoes along a stretch of the Danube, where Jews were ordered to remove them, then were shot and pushed into the frozen river.

Rabbi Paley said that new generations are growing up “without that fear.” While the government of Victor Orban makes anti-Semitic statements, he said, “It’s mostly rhetoric. I’m never afraid to wear a yarmulke in Budapest. In Paris, I’m afraid.”

A major theme of our tour was food, food, food. Susan Green had planned it to be a five-star experience, so there were three course lunches and dinners that lasted three or four hours—every day. It began to remind me of the French film, La Grande Bouffe, where friends decide to gorge themselves to death on fine cuisine. Each of our dinners began with an hors d’oeuvre plate that included whole goose liver with fat and onions (no chicken liver anywhere), and sometimes duck necks and cracklings, described as “fried fat.”

The apotheosis was dinner at the New York Café, which claims, justifiably, to be “the most beautiful café in the world.”

Opened in 1894, closed during the wars and resurrected, it was a gathering place for artists and writers. The rooms evoke New York City’s gilded age, with frescoes on the ceiling, Murano glass chandeliers, gold, marble, and wrought iron balcony railings in Art Nouveau designs. Our table was set with silk napkins and purse hangers at each lady’s place. For every course, a team of waiters each brought out two plates, forming lines behind us. At a signal, they all set the plates in front of us in one choreographed swoop.

Is it possible, we wondered, to have too much of a good thing?

For the soup course, green pea puree was poured from small silver pitchers into our bowls, which contained four peas and one tiny quail’s egg that had been deep-fried. My main course was listed as “Butternut squash pottage with dill ice cream.” But the plate contained nothing resembling ice cream. It had yellow foam, a green sauce, and two porous beige squares. “What are those?” I asked the server.

“Sponge.”

Sea sponge? I asked. It looked like something pulled from the sea.

“It’s like a sponge cake,” he said.

Sponge without the cake.

The most delicious meal for me came in the village of Holloko, which I’d never heard of and reminded me of colonial Williamsburg. The homes had been restored to look like they did in the 18^th century, with people clad in traditional costumes. One woman prepared and served us lunch, setting up a table that filled her entire front room, painted pink. She brought out bowls of chicken soup, with slender noodles and pieces of carrot. I took a spoonful and…Eureka!

It tasted exactly like the soup my grandmother made, my mother made, and I learned to make. Simmered for hours, the clear golden liquid was infused strongly with the flavor and aroma of chicken. It was like Proust with the madeleine. I was back in my grandparents’ dining room for Rosh Hashana, with our whole family sitting in folding chairs around the table that filled the room. The sense memories continued: after soup there was chicken paprikash with tiny dumplings, and for desert, strudel made with fresh cherries.

Mike Peterson, a prosperous Mormon businessman, said it was the best meal he’d had in Hungary, and the house reminded him of his grandmother’s. Susan Green said it was “common Hungarian food.”

Yes! That’s what I’d longed for, come here to taste. That’s what our immigrant grandparents cooked, and what made us feel connected, as if by a golden thread, to past, present and future.

I felt awe, and said a silent thanks to our grandparents who, alone and in their teens, had the courage and resourcefulness to make it to America.

The trip was complete.