The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History. Michael Blumenthal
go to in order to hold onto a man she loved . . . particularly if that man happened to be only a boy.
As for David Yogev, his sincere concern over his older son’s fragile and wounded ego was somewhat mitigated by the bemusement—and, indeed, admiration—with which he observed his friend’s daughter navigate, and escape seemingly unscathed from, the various romantic minefields that lay in her path. He had always been intrigued by rebels and anti-moralists—Raskolnikov had always been his favorite literary character, along with Julien Sorel—having long been one himself. This girl was not merely, he thought (a small but undeniable glimmer of paternal envy running through him) a marvelous conquest . . . she had hutzpah to boot. She knew what she wanted, or at least desired, and was determined to get it. How convincingly could a man like himself argue with that?
Clearly, his younger son, guilt and all, was hardly unhappy with these new amorous developments either. Hardly were his university classes over for the summer, but that he and Daphna set off for two weeks in Rome, the kind of “in your face” romantic interlude Sarah Yogev attempted to mitigate the effects of upon her jilted and fragile older son by taking him, along with her husband and their younger daughter, on a two-week vacation to Provence. A friend of theirs, an Israeli politician of some note, had recently purchased a marvelous mansion there, on a cliff directly overlooking the Mediterranean. At the very least, Sarah thought, she could offer her sensitive older son something “poetic” to offset the more fleshly pleasures his younger brother was so obliviously occupied with in Rome.
As for Daphna Flinker, the weeks in Rome with her young lover—and without the burden of her three children, whom she had left with their grieving father—were a welcome reprieve from the life she had, it seemed, so eagerly abandoned. They, of course, visited the Coliseum and the Pantheon; kissed in front of the Trevi Fountain; strolled among the labyrinthine alleys of Trastevere, and amused themselves at the rows upon rows of washing strung out from the apartments in Mama-Leone tradition. They picnicked in the Roman Forum, and, after making a compulsory donation to the monks who guarded it, discretely made love in the Capuchin cemetery. It hardly bothered them when their landlady, a former Benedictine nun who, they detected from the outset, looked disapprovingly upon what she accurately perceived as their difference in age, finally threw them out, finding the late-night sounds of their lovemaking a bit too much for her and her ailing husband to take.
Luckily for the young couple, there was a vacant—and, given their limited budget, inexpensively priced—room available at the Hungarian Academy in Rome, in the very precious Palazzo Falconieri at via Giulia 1, where a friend of Peter Vajda’s, a Hungarian-Israeli painter by the name of Sinai Sulzberger, had recently become Director. This allowed the young lovers to roam the very same corridors where such eminent Hungarians as the expert of Greek mythology, Károly Kerényi, the philosopher György Lukacs, the writer Antal Szerb, the poet Sándor Weöres, and the composer Zoltán Kodály—some of them even Jews!—had once walked. So that their second week—with those around them seeming to revel in, rather than being disconcerted by, the late-night arias of Daphna Flinker—passed even more happily than had the first.
Simon’s older brother, meanwhile, was enjoying the French coast and its many visual and culinary pleasures, and—surrounded by friends and family—his thoughts returned only infrequently to his former girlfriend. There were, after all, poems to be written, paintings to be made. The pleasures of the flesh had been intense, but brief. Nonetheless, a wound had opened within him—perhaps more a wound of repudiation than of loss, more one of wounded pride than of lost pleasure. For once, he had briefly triumphed over his younger brother—and, what’s more, on the amorous battlefield where his brother had reigned so supreme! But now, that, too, was lost, and he was forced to reassume his previous persona as the bedazzled genius who cared little for earthly pleasures.
The family returned from their Provençal journey, and the young lovers from their romantic two weeks in Rome, at virtually the same time, so that the Yogevs and what had by now become their “extended” family—including not only Daphna, but her three children, somewhat reluctantly repossessed from their increasingly depressed father—once again reconvened at Galilee for what had now unofficially become the “anniversary” of Daphna Flinker’s quasi-conjugal entry into the family circle—or, it might be more accurately stated, the family’s entry into hers.
Unlike the previous year, it had been a torridly hot summer, even for the Middle East, the Galilee being no exception, and some of the obvious tension that had by now more or less solidified between the two brothers was slightly dissipated by periodic sojourns to the lake for refreshment—mostly in groups of two or three, with the two young lovers, of course, usually choosing to bicycle on their own, leaving the children in the care of Sarah Yogev or her young daughter Katya, who, at the age of twelve, had already developed something of a maternal instinct. Few, if any, words were exchanged between the brothers, while their mother did her utmost to constantly extol the enormous pleasures of their trip to France, thereby hoping to assure that the ever-turning wheels of jealousy and envy would be lubricated in the other direction as well.
On the eve of the holiday itself, ever hopeful of some reconciliation between the brothers and of reestablishing an atmosphere of family harmony, Sarah Yogev proposed that they all go to nearby Tiberias for a staged Hebrew-language performance of The Tragedy of Man, the dramatic poem by the famed nineteenth-century Hungarian Imre Madach that had often evoked comparison’s to Milton’s Paradise Lost. With the exception of David Yogev, who opted to stay home and work on his newly commissioned bust of Yitzhak Rabin, and Daphna, who felt uncomfortable about leaving the children in the care of someone who entered all too easily into a state of artistic trance, the others reluctantly agreed. Neither of the boys wanted to further disappoint their mother, who had seemed more than a bit edgy and depressed of late.
Not that the Madach play—Etan, himself hardly in an elevated mood, thought to himself—was a particularly uplifting choice of entertainment. Taking place after Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden, in it Adam dreams the course of modern history, which only serves to fill him with despair. He, Eve, and Lucifer then take on different historical roles as they pass through ancient Rome, the Crusades, Kepler’s Prague, revolutionary Paris, and finally, a post-historical time when ecological disaster has nearly destroyed the world.
Once he has learned of the degradation that awaits humanity, Adam considers suicide, but when he discovers Eve is pregnant, places his faith in God and the future. In all the play’s scenes and anticipatory dreams, Adam, Eve, and the archfiend Lucifer are the chief and constantly recurring personae dramatis. As the play nears its end, Adam, despairing of his race, tries to commit suicide. But, at the critical moment Eve informs him that she is about to be a mother, and the play ends with Adam lying prostrate before God, who encourages him to hope and trust.
Etan had read the play several times—Simon, in fact, had read it as well, (albeit reluctantly; it had been assigned in his Central European Literature class) and looked upon the evening ahead with a dour countenance and a sagging spirit. But, he thought to himself, after all the obvious pain he had caused his mother and brother, going along was the very least he could do. What, after all, was a mere wasted evening in the greater scheme of things?
It was in this manner that Daphna Flinker and David Yogev, after Daphna had put the children to bed, found themselves alone in the Yogev’s large kitchen later that evening, enjoying a quiet supper of Norwegian salmon, potato kugel, and green beans, expertly prepared in advance by Sarah, and a fine bottle of Gewurztraminer from the nearby Golan Heights Winery, owned by a friend of David’s who had made his fortune in South African diamonds.
Daphna had always found David Yogev, even at seventy-two, an intriguing man. There was something terribly dignified about him, so cavalier, so—how else could she put it?—Old Worldly. He seemed to her like an aging Don Juan, a slightly pot-bellied Casanova, of times past. Lord Byron, had he lived to an old age, might well have come to resemble him. “L’chaim,” the older man toasted, clicking his glass against hers.
“L’chaim,” she replied, smiling. He was certainly still an attractive man—the kind of man who, no matter how advanced his age, still adored women—but now, against the candlelight alone with his older