How the Jewish mystical path can be a legitimate way to find harmony in our daily lives

The Liszt Institute, the Hungarian Cultural Center in New York, and the Hungarian Consulate General organized a writer-reader meeting. The writer that the American audience could meet was Patricia Eszter Margit, a Hungarian writer, and journalist living in New York. The topic of the meeting was the writer’s novel “The Jewish Bride”.  This book shows how the Jewish mystical path can be a legitimate way to find harmony in our daily lives. The novel’s main character gives a response to the dilemmas of 21st century Eastern European Jewish identity.  I note the significance of the novel is shown by the fact that the well-known Barnes and Nobles sells the book in the United States in Hungarian.  The author, Patricia Eszter Margit, is a graduate of Columbia University, where she studied fiction writing in the Creative Writing Department as a Woolridge Fellow. In connection with the meeting, I talked to the writer and asked my questions. I would like to share the writer’s answers with readers.

You are of Hungarian descent and live in New York. What else do you want to tell readers about yourself?  

I’m a feminist religious Jewish author from Budapest who settled in New York 15 years ago after living in Israel, the Netherlands, and France. I’ve always been curious about the big questions in life. My mother was a journalist, and I was a child reporter on the national radio at the age of eight. I edited the school paper all the way through high school and majored in Journalism in college, so it wasn’t a surprise that I landed my very first job as a journalist at Népszabadság, (used to be the largest circulation daily newspaper of Hungary), including two years as a junior foreign correspondent in Israel. Later I worked as a correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the Jerusalem Report and edited several English language publications, including The Budapest Times as well as Diplomacy & Trade.

After my return from Israel, I started writing my first novel, The Jewish Bride, as an explanation to why I became religious – which was then, in the nineties, a road less traveled. I workshopped the book at Columbia University’s Creative Writing program. In the meantime, Jew-ish has become trendy in Hungary. As an example, when I started seeing my hairdresser Betty in Hungary in the nineties, she was a punk along with her boyfriend Akos, who would do the hair coloring. When I returned to Hungary a few years later she was all barefoot, dressed as a Buddhist. The last time I returned home, a full-on dressed Chassid walked in. It turned out, it was Akos, the hair colorist, who decided to convert to Judaism!

My family also had a big secret, and I always wondered what that might be, but these things were simply not discussed as openly. My grandmother was so traumatized, she wouldn’t even utter the word ‘Jew’ aloud ever. When I first traveled to Israel to study at Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, I remember she was shaking like a leaf at the airport. 

We looked Jewish and all our friends were Jewish, our family was intermarried, so I assumed I was Jewish too. Later, when I wanted to immigrate to Israel, I learned that I wasn’t Jewish, according to the Jewish laws. The big family secret was our aristocratic origin dating back to the 13th century, which was also a major taboo during that time. This seemed to be like such a major question in my life. Eventually, I eased up about the whole religious thing. 

You wrote your first novel, which was a remarkable success, as it has already been republished in Hungary by Libri, the largest book publisher and is even available in the USA through Barnes & Noble.  This novel is the "Jewish Bride" What is your book about?  

“The Jewish Bride” is a ’zeitgeist story’ of the remaining 100,000 Hungarian Jews, who slowly started discovering their identity since the 90’s despite increasing anti-Semitism. The novel’s main character is Sarah Dallos, an assimilated Jewish university student from post-Socialist Budapest, who sings in a feminist punk band. She is a 3rd generation Holocaust survivor with no Jewish identity. While Sarah’s grandparents’ Jewish identity consisted of denial, her parents’ generation kept the fear, Sarah’s generation had nothing left. The word "Jew" became an empty word void of all meaning and sentiments to those who were stigmatized, yet she had a strong yearning for that unknown, lost world.

The Liszt Institute, the Hungarian Cultural Center in New York, and the Hungarian Consulate General organized a literary reading meeting where the book “The Jewish Bride” was presented to the American public. 

Sarah completes her spiritual journey in Israel; she embraces her heritage, reconnects with her roots, and finds true love. I was trying to bring my readers into that hidden world, in which the search for identity is an ongoing process. While Sarah gives a unique response to the dilemmas of 21st century Eastern European Jewish identity – each of her friends and family members chooses their own, different paths, giving different answers to the same existential questions so important to us all.

I have heard that an English translation of the book is being made. Does that mean it will also appear in the US?

Since I have been working as an interpreter and translator these past few years, it was only natural that I translated the book into English. I am currently looking for a publisher for the international market. I hope to see the book in many other languages as well and since it's very story driven, I think it would make a terrific movie as well.

Where do the stories of the novel come from?

The novel is dominated by fiction, with some actual, real inspiration mixed in there. I wrote the novel in the first person not because it reflects my own life, but because I wanted to create a closeness between the readers and the narrator. I used my insights as a sociologist when describing different social groups, and due to my experience in journalism, I applied reporting elements in my literary work. 

I also used inspiring stories of actual historical figures. Sarah, the main character investigates her grandfather’s story – he disappeared without trace during the holocaust and her father grew up an orphan with a lot of question marks. When Sarah enters the Chassidic world of Satmar in Jerusalem, she is astonished to learn that her grandpa is well known in that community as a miraculous rebbe, who committed acts of bravery and inspiration during the Holocaust. This character was modeled after the Klausenberger Rebbe, whom no one knows anything about in Hungary even though I think his life could serve as a true inspiration. There has been a disconnect because of the shoah, a lot of the knowledge has been lost for three generations, but now we have the opportunity to reintroduce some of it.

The book thus deals with Jewish and women’s themes. Understandably, a female author writes a female topic with a female eye, but please explain why you, who do not come from a religious Jewish family, as I know well, thought you were writing about the identity of Judaism?

I have always been a spiritual seeker and I believe that there is a well of wisdom in Judaism. Despite of growing anti-Semitism, there has been a Jewish renaissance in Eastern Europe where even people with almost no Jewish background are re-connecting with their roots. Even the former leader of the "Jobbik" (it is a neo-Nazi party in Hungary) has made ‘teshuvah’. This word means that this neo-Nazi leader returned to his Jewish roots. 

When I first became religious, a Hungarian rabbi asked me why I was going to synagogue if I wasn’t originally from a religious family. He said there are four types of people usually in his community: First, the people who were born into it, Second, the people who are looking for more business connections, Third, the people who are lonely and don’t have any friends, and last, fourth, the people who have serious psychological problems. He was wondering which category I would put myself into. I felt sad that this is how he saw people and I responded to him: who wouldn’t want more friends, who don’t have problems, and who doesn’t want more business? But I asked him, whether a fifth category existed? A group of people wanting to practice their faith, connect to a higher being, want to learn about the larger connection in life to live a more fulfilled life of service? ‘Oh, I see’, he responded sarcastically ‘You are one of those artists, keeping your head in a purple cloud!’ I felt so sorry for this rabbi, but luckily my overall experience has been positive: I’ve been able to heal some of my own traumas of the past through my spiritual practice. Being an observant Jew is like doing yoga exercises: it is a routine that aims to keep people in a state of gratitude and mindfulness. The elements of the routine itself don’t really matter as long as it’s positive.  

How could you categorize your novel, as a Jewish book or women’s literary fiction? Is it a coming-of-age story? What was the deciding factor? The Jewish or the woman’s point of view? 

The Jewish Bride could be categorized as women’s literary fiction: it describes the story of Sarah in three parts based on her three love affairs. But there is a ’feminist twist’ to this story: there is no prince on a white horse, Sarah doesn’t need to be rescued by men. The Jewish Bride rescues herself and becomes sort of a bride to her faith, to all things Jewish. The Belgian, Sarah’s first love, is a non-observant mathematician interested in numerology; Baruch Simcha is a Californian, hippie musician living in Jerusalem; Avraham is a religious natural healer, Hungarian ex-Hassid living in Safed. Sarah, the main character, goes through two disastrous, co-dependent relationships until she realizes that she needs to rescue herself in order to attract the right relationship into her life. She tries many different ways to find herself: yoga, meditation, traveling, and psychotherapy until she finds her path in Jewish mysticism. This book shows how the Jewish mystical path can be a legitimate way to find harmony in our daily lives.

 The novel is based on your own experience, isn’t it? I ask this because the words, the expressions in your novel came from typical Hungarian Jewish language, and from the Russian language, as well, like Kisangyalom, gombóc, and Babka. Is it coming from your roots?

I grew up in a mixed family with strong Jewish belonging, but a very empty identity. I was already grown-up when I wanted to move to Israel when I realized that our family stories had several different versions. I almost went crazy trying to find the truth. In the meantime, I realized: I don’t care about the past so much; I felt my tribe, so I converted. This really troublesome process took seven years, but I never regretted it.

People say Communism has done even more damage to the Jewish community than Nazism. There are two full generations whose life completely lacks a dimension. Our grandparents were traumatized by the terror of the second world war. Our parents were traumatized by the big secrets and the unspoken stories. My generation has absolutely nothing left of their Jewish identity, except for an affinity, a feeling of belonging and a feeling of lack, some sort of a yearning for something else, that is hard to describe.

What do you do when you’re not authoring a novel?

After a decade of journalism in Hungary, I gravitated towards non-profit administration and marketing. I worked as a Press Secretary at the Prime Minister’s Office of Hungary and I helped launch several organizations, including the National Committee for UN Women in Hungary with Klara Dobrev, the former first lady of Hungary currently Vice-President of the Parliament of Europe. 

I was highly active in the feminist movement, I represented Hungarian women at the UN’s Committee on the Status of Women several times, When I moved to the US, I worked at organizations such as the 92nd Street Y, JCC in Manhattan, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Romemu, or the Jewish National Fund. In the meantime, I founded Art Kibbutz, a Jewish artist residency program that hosted four hundred artists from 29 countries and all over the US these past ten years in New York. Since COVID I’ve been working as an official interpreter and translator, serving the Hungarian community in the US at the judicial system, police, medial, literary, financial, governmental, and scientific settings. Recently I also edited a non-profit training manual for diaspora community organizational leaders along with the honorary Consul of Florida and have been regularly invited to train these organizations in management.

Do you have any writer ars poetica? 

I find the Aristotelian narrative linear structure too masculine, too one-directional, and one-dimensional: the only way is forward. I was experimenting with a more feminine, Kabbalistic narrative structure. The Kabbalah believes in more circular progress, it says that similar situations keep on recurring until we solve them, therefore the time and space continuum is not simply linear, but rather evolves in circles, if things get worse, we are still progressing towards perfection.

During the three parts of the novel, the narrator’s voice, and tone as well as her insights deepen. The style of the novel’s main character changes from a slangy coming of age story style to more traditional literary vocabulary, symbolizing changes in Sarah’s character. 

The three parts of the novel have similar structures with returning elements according to the cyclical nature of the Jewish tradition. I constructed the three parts of the book based on the Kabalistic sephiroth (also called the Tree of Life) and the three relationships portray different aspects, including Gevurah (judgment), Chesed (kindness), and Tiferet (harmony). According to Judaism situations and issues keep re-occurring until one could solve them, throughout the novel Sarah faces ongoing challenges with her friendships, sexuality, the holocaust, terrorism, supernatural events, and death. 

I am working on a new novel, and I have several book ideas that will have a different ars poetica - it is important to keep on exploring and evolving both intellectually and artistically.