State Fair by S.L. Wisenberg

Markus Tamas Goldstein and his wife, Veronika Renat Goldstein (nee Kellner), had a very small farm with a very small dairy on the outskirts of a very small town in Hungary. Their operation was an outpost of the Kellners’ farm. Markus came from a nearby family of longtime cheesemakers. Most of their neighbors were Hungarians, not Jews like themselves. The Kellners and Goldsteins hadn’t attempted to magyarize their names; after all, everyone in the valley knew they were Jewish. Markus and Veronika spoke Hungarian and German, but not Yiddish, which was to cause them slight problems later. Throughout the war despite privations and persecutions throughout the country, they were relatively safe in their valley, sheltered and liked by their neighbors, who helped out Veronika during the first months when Markus left to do his labor service. He was able to return to the farm and family after two years. He and Veronika continued to take care of their small daughter and to plant each spring and harvest in the fall, to feed and milk the cows. When they heard of the impending Nazi occupation in 1944, they brought their daughter Anna (and all their jewelry) to local nuns. Veronika’s family had delivered milk and cream to the convent for 50 years. 

Soon after, the Kellners and Goldsteins were shoved into cattle cars with other Jews of the region. Their parents and aunts and uncles were sent up in smoke; their siblings and cousins, numbered and sent to barracks almost as crowded as the train. Both Markus and Veronika were sent together to labor camps in Austria, where Markus worked on a state farm and Veronika was assigned to a munitions factory. Both were provided with enough thin soup to barely survive. Toward the end of the war both were sent on forced marches to yet other camps. When the war was over, they found one another. We’re so lucky, they would say to each other and cry. They knew better than to visit and try to reclaim the farms their families had owned. When they did return to the small town, they saw that the convent and adjacent church had been burned and there was no sign of the nuns. In nearby towns they fruitlessly looked for the Holy Sisters and their daughter. How ironic, they said to themselves and one another, that we’re the ones who are alive, and our daughter who was left in safety is missing. They told each other: Maybe she is still alive. And: It’s better that she disappears into the population than to have been suffocated by the half-dead bodies stuffed into the cattle cars. They mourned her as they continued west to a DP camp in Austria, where both half-expected to discover her, and then to a camp near Munich, run by the Americans. The couple combed through International Tracing Service lists to no avail. In both camps there were few young children. Instead, there were myriad East European Jewish adults who all looked old and who suspected them of not being Jewish because they didn’t know Yiddish. In an English class in Munich they gravitated toward the higher-caste German Jews and Romanians who also did not know Yiddish. Through a woman from Frankfurt they learned about a magnanimous businessman in Texas who was offering visas to Jewish refugees—refugees  was the word then, not survivors. We can farm and raise dairy cows, they wrote in a letter to him. We are both willing to work hard.

Which is how they ended up on the western outskirts of Houston in 1949, classified as agricultural workers on their visas. Markus became Tom and worked in a large mechanized dairy and Veronika kept her name, even the K, and was a seamstress for Foley’s downtown. She took the bus to work. At home, she started growing vegetables, berries, and herbs; making jam and pickles as in the former time. She hummed old tunes while she worked. She baked dark bread every week, and a big round challah for Rosh Hashanah. They had two children, Margy and Wayne, named loosely after Veronika’s mother and Markus’/Tom’s father. The children did not have Hebrew names but the family did go to High Holiday services at Beth Jacob in town. They drove, because, really, was any other way to get there? Veronika said. 

Tom bought two Brown Swiss dairy cows. He called them his hobby cows, and he grew to like them as much as his Simmentals back in Europe. By the late 1950s Tom and Veronika had American cows and American children and an American life. They practiced their English by talking back to the KPRC news and listening closely to the music lyrics on the radio. They also spoke as much as possible to their (non-Jewish) neighbors, especially the owner of the nearest grocery store, who gave them credit while doling out the cornpone wisdom of Will Rogers and Mark Twain, and when he was feeling higher-brow, Emerson and Schopenhauer. The grocer was disappointed that even though Tom knew German, he had never read the works of Nietzsche. He had, to the storekeeper’s delight, read Goethe. They discussed Young Werther.

The children were in grade school when the family started going to the state fair up in Dallas. Veronika entered her pickles and jams in competition and Tom might show a prized dairy cow. They never won, but sometimes they placed. Tom loved to chew the fat with the other dairy farmers and loved that expression, besides. The hulking Art Deco figures attached to the fair buildings frightened Margy. Wayne told her that the giant mechanical Big Tex, who spoke, was worse and would come and get her at night in the E-Z Budget Motel. One year she entered her cross stitching in textiles but didn’t place. Both she and Wayne joined 4-H in junior high and Margy took over the raising of the family chickens and making of desserts, often flaming. 

Every morning Veronika set fresh flowers or herb cuttings in a small vase in the center of the kitchen table, as her own mother had done. At dinner each family member described what figurative rosza and tövis, rose and thorn, they had encountered that day. The parents spoke Hungarian to each other but they continued to practice English as much as possible, and worked on losing their accents. They didn’t want their children to sound like foreigners. Tom began to collect joke books and would try out jokes on his family. You’re funnier when as yourself, said Veronika, and she was right. They had laughed so much more before he started spouting out what he’d memorized. So he stopped, to everyone’s relief. There was always a jigsaw puzzle on a card table and an open book of Mad Libs, which the family completed together. 

We have no relations so our friends must be so, Veronika said. They shared Passover and Easter feasts with neighbors and colleagues whom the children called aunt and uncle. The parents never stopped thinking of their lost young daughter, and lit a memorial candle every year on her birthday, January 15. There were too many others to mourn so they poured all their thoughts and sorrow into that one day and their one child. Sometimes she seemed like part of a daydream, not a real girl. Margy and Wayne knew about her and would ask questions. What did Anna like to eat? What was her favorite toy? The parents had no pictures of Anna but there was one photo of Margy in the living room, when she was two, that always made her parents gasp, internally if not externally, when they glanced at it. 

Over time the family watched their patchy, wayward semi-rural neighborhood become trim and proud, a destination for rich people to build extensive brick ranch houses that were shaded with tall trees. They move here so their children don’t go to the school with Negroes, Tom said, critical. The family read in the newspapers about a lunch counter sit-in at Weingarten’s supermarket and Veronika said, They had to pick on a Jewish store! Tom said, At least Weingarten’s doesn’t beat up on the students as in Greensboro! 

When it was no longer feasible to keep even his scant livestock, Tom sold his last cow as well as the land behind the house for what he knew was a pretty penny. He and Veronika turned to cheese making, which Tom had learned from his father. Tom studied the American regulations and machinery and after trial and error they made loaves of semi-hard Balaton in a rented space. Tom’s first customers were the owners of Alfred’s and Three Brothers Bakery, with whom he spoke German. In 1967 his cheese was written up in the Houston Post in a round-up feature on local East European delicacies, though most attention was on the history of the kolache in Texas. The reporter had introduced Tom to the newspaper photographer as a fifth-generation Hungarian cheesemaker. In Hungary, Tom said to the photographer, I am a Jew, all of the time. I have to come to America to be classed as Hungarian. The photographer said, Oh, can you turn a little to the right? 

Tom liked telling people that story. After the Post feature, he quit his job at the big dairy and took out a lease on a building and equipment. Margy and Wayne went to the new high school, Memorial, which they had watched being constructed and had imagined the wonders that would be therein. They called it new even though it was firmly established by the time they enrolled. Margy went to the prom in a green taffeta gown she designed and sewed herself, with her boyfriend Harry Weiss, who wore a tuxedo with a green cummerbund and bow tie. They were among the few Jews in 4-H. None of the other students seemed to notice or made mention.

After Wayne and Margy graduated Memorial, they lived at home and continued to help around the house and to tend what the family called Farm Goldstein, though it was now a suburban garden. Margy sold eggs and did alterations to save up to study design at the Pratt Institute in New York City. Both she and Wayne took night classes at U of H. Wayne started working in a men’s clothing store in Houston. He enjoyed the cranked-up air conditioning in the summertime, but also liked talking to the customers. He knew from his mother that a proper fit was important. He joined the Rotary and suggested to his parents that they go to services at St. Martin’s Episcopal, to get a leg up, as he said, on new customers. His mother was aghast. We wouldn’t have to believe, he said. She made sure that year that he stayed by her side during the High Holidays. There she introduced him to several men who owned clothing stores, and through them he was offered a job at Walter Pye’s Men Shop downtown, which was owned by a family that belonged to the German Reform temple.  

Margie and her mother planted Brazos blackberries near the raspberries, and the next year, when Margy was 19, she helped her mother make strawberry and raspberry jams and a new jam they called Berry-Berry. No, not like the disease, Margy told a skeptical Wayne. Veronika still made her pickles with dill from the garden, though this year Margy persuaded her to experiment leaving some jars out in the sun for three days and bringing them in at night, instead of boiling. The family rode to the state fair with their Balaton cheese in an ice chest. Margy was glad that she wouldn’t see Harry at the fair. He was too familiar, she’d grown tired of him. He was still raising chickens but was now at A&M in the middle of midterms.  He couldn’t be drafted because of asthma. Thank God her brother Wayne had a high number.

At the state fair in Dallas, Wayne went off to try the games of chance (he called them skill) and Margy had to go by herself to the roller coaster. The ticket taker seated her next to a stranger. She kept carefully to her side of seat but it was impossible not to lean against him as she screamed and screamed when the ride plunged downhill. My hair is frizzing out, she thought, but she said, I left my stomach back there, I think. The stranger laughed. He had a long face and sad dark eyes like Elliot Gould. His name was Steve Finkel, and he was a newspaper intern at the Dallas Times Herald. He was going to report tomorrow on the calf roping, whatever that is, he said, and this was his day off. He had never been to a state fair before. He was from New Jersey but said he felt like he was from New York City because he spent so much time there. He was in his senior year at the University of Maryland studying journalism. He had never heard of state fairs before Texas. She said, I bet Maryland has a state fair. I’m sure New Jersey has one. He said, If they do, I never heard of it. But it’s called the Garden State! she said. Margy showed him her favorite rides and they ate candy apples and argued about the giant Big Tex, who she insisted did not look like Howdy Doody. Then he looked around at the Art Deco buildings and the big bodies carved into them, and he said, What, did Hitler design this place?

She was quiet, and he sniffed the air and said, Is that smell manure or corn dogs? She said, Hitler killed all, almost all, of my family. They were stopped in front of the Fun House. He looked at her and said, I’m sorry. His voice had changed; it wasn’t light and all know-it-all like before. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I think—and it sounded like he was going to defend himself but he stopped. Why were they killed? He asked. Where? Did they help Jews?

And then it was, Are there really Jews in Texas? And, Can you keep kosher in Texas? He was astonished that she and her brother had been in 4-H. She told him about aiming for Pratt Institute, and he said, Out of sight! He wanted to write magazine articles, the New Journalism like Hunter S. Thompson, whom she hadn’t heard of. She decided she would go to the U of H library before class some late afternoon and look up articles by Thompson.

By the last day of the fair, the Texas Balaton cheese had come in second in its category, and Tom had accrued three new accounts, and had also spoken with a Neiman Marcus buyer, who talked about possibly ordering his product to make into cheese balls. Tom smiled because he knew he was supposed to, but the suggestion horrified him. Besides, Balaton was a semi-hard cheese, not a natural for a cheese ball. He asked the buyer, Do you know the famous Helen Corbitt? The man left and ten minutes later came back with the Neiman’s Zodiac Room chef in tow. She exclaimed over the tiny holes in the Balaton. Tom surprised himself by telling the renowned hostess about his grandfather and father’s ways of making the cheese. He even recited, without meaning to, the names of the family’s cows. Simin Tov. Mazel Tov. That’s from a wedding song. Pitypang. Dália. Those are flowers. He began to talk about his lost daughter and nearly broke down. Miss Corbett said, That is a very sad thing to overcome. Ah, you never overcome something like that, Mr. Goldstein, do you? He hadn’t mentioned losing his parents to Auschwitz.

The intern reporter Steve Finkel found secluded places at the fair where he and Margy could make out. She had French-kissed before with Harry, gone to second base with him and they’d dry-humped at Hermann Park, but this felt different, like her body was opening up and wanting. Steve asked her to come visit him in Dallas but she said, Where would I stay? She suggested he come to Houston to visit her but he said he wouldn’t have time off. She asked about his draft status, imaging him fighting in the jungle, and he said he had a low number. When she returned home, she told Harry about the rollercoaster (sans Steve) and about her father meeting Miss Corbett. Harry hadn’t heard of her. He had heard of Hunter S. Thompson.

One early evening in November Steve called Margy. It wasn’t long distance, he said, he was just down the street. He had decided to drive in from Dallas and had stopped at a gas station to use the pay phone. Stay there, she said. It had started raining but it was warm. She ran and ran down Wood Lane to him. How romantic this is, she thought to herself. They French-kissed and she felt that jolt again. 

After graduation Steve was offered a job at the Times Herald. Margy married him in a gown she created with her mother. It had lacy cap sleeves and an Empire waist. Instead of Pratt she enrolled at North Texas State in Denton and got a degree in fashion and design. She and Steve both flourished personally and in their careers. They had a boy and a girl. The family moved to Houston for better prospects. After the children graduated from high school Margy and Steve divorced for the usual reasons. One night Margy’s son called her excitedly from Cornell to say that they’d screened a film in his cinema class and had she ever seen State Fair from 1933, did she know that the children were named Margy and Wayne? He’d even looked up the spelling of Margy. You already knew that! Margy insisted. Your Bubbe and Tata took Wayne and me to the musical version when we were little and that’s when we found out. Uncanny, said her son, who had studied Freud the semester before. His mother said, When we asked them, they just kind of smiled at each other. It was too late to ask again–Margy and Wayne’s father was dead of kidney disease and their mother was lost in a senility of train cars and hunger and terrible smells. She would pick at lice she felt crawling on her and she scratched red marks all over her scalp. She spoke in long strings of language no one could understand, not even the other residents of Seven Acres who were from Hungary.   

After her mother died Margy finally moved to New York City and got herself hired as an assistant in a design firm. Her son and his family lived there, too. One night she read that  National Geographic was offering DNA kits to the public. She ordered one and convinced Wayne to do the same. He was still in Houston and was married with five grown children and six grandchildren. He owned a Western wear store with five branches. Margy and Wayne matched 35 and 46 percent with a woman who was named Anna and lived in France. She was 75; they had imagined her still as a toddler. Anna emailed them, saying she had left Hungary in 1956 with three other teens from her orphanage, and had lived mostly in Paris ever since. She had married a Jew. 

*

That first night, near Place de la République, Anna, Margy, and Wayne sat together in a small Vietnamese restaurant, which Anna had chosen after Margy told her that she was a vegan (except for cheese. She knew that was sentimental and irrational, especially after her father had sold the Texas Balaton company.). Anna’s face was intensely but sparsely lined and she had bright blue eyes, like Veronika’s. She looks like Mama more than either of us does, Margy thought, feeling peevish. Anna was striking. She had piled her gold and gray hair into a topknot and wore a gauzy scarf around her neck, like a European. After all, she’s been a European her whole life, Margy thought. Our grandmother or grandfather must have had blue eyes, Wayne said. Maybe both of them, said Anna. Both eyes? said Margy. Hannah and Wayne sputtered. All three kept looking at one another to compare features and watch for trademark gestures. Hannah said she’d had to use a friend’s address in Luxemburg for the DNA test, it’s compliqué —never to mind, she said. Which was one of their parents’ phrases. Margy started to say that and stopped herself. Instead, she said, Oh, there is so much–. Wayne got out a big envelope with copies of pictures of their parents. On her phone Anna showed them pictures of her family. 

The three stayed long past closing time and moved to a bar with sidewalk seating. It was spring, and Wayne’s first time in Paris and he kept looking around at passersby until Hannah scolded him. But there is so much–, he repeated. Anna said that Wayne and Margy must check out of their hotel immediately and come to home with her. Come to home, that’s how they said it, Margy said. Or thought. They had more red wine. They ordered tokaj, which none of them liked but took continual sips of. They tumbled over questions and answers, learning about dairy cows and catechism and the family Anna had imagined, and how she had had to pray on her knees on the hard stone floor, and what Big Tex was, and why fashion didn’t matter but seemed important, color and new designs meant something but they couldn’t say what, every culture has its art–look at the caves of Lascaux, then on to leather tooling on boots, children of course, marriage and romance, and what songs Veronika had sung, she had sung lullabies every night, Hannah said, and their father’s voice and then his cheese-making, a long discussion about cheese in French, English, Hungarian, German. Anna had learned a little Yiddish from her husband and thought it was funny that she knew more of it than Wayne and Margy did. There is too much, she repeated, standing with her glass raised. Egészségedre! Anna proclaimed, and then all three shouted, L’chaim! They downed the last of the too-sweet golden wine in one gulp. They laughed into the night.

S.L. Wisenberg’s fourth book, The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home, nonfiction winner of the University of Massachusetts Juniper Prize, will be published in March 2023. She edits Another Chicago Magazine and has recent work in Narrative Magazine, where her stories have won awards.

slwisenberg@sbcglobal.net

10 March 2023