Pulitzer Read online

  By the time of Joseph’s birth, the Pulitzers had been in Makó for three generations. Their ancestors were among a migration of Jews from Moravia in the 1700s, drawn by the promise of greater tolerance and a better economic life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like many other Moravians, they fit easily into a Germanic culture. Hungarian landowners, eager for the services of merchants and tradesmen, enlisted the newcomers to market the products of their estates, creating a symbiotic relationship that enriched both the Jews and the nobility. Over the years, the only connection the Pulitzers retained to their Moravian roots was their name. Since Ashkenazi Jews had no tradition of using surnames, the family adopted “Pulitzer” after the village of Pullitz they had left behind, in order to meet the legal requirement for a hereditary family name.

  In Makó, the Pulitzers prospered, benefiting from the town’s growth into an important provincial market center. Joseph’s great-grandfather Baruch Simon Pulitzer, the earliest known ancestor in Makó, sold rawhide and later grain. Unusually for Jews at that time, he owned his own house, and he was one of the leaders of the Hevrah Kadisha, which helped arrange burials in Jewish congregations. His son Mihály, Joseph’s grandfather, met with even greater commercial success. He took wool and grain from Makó to market in Pest, the rapidly growing city in the north adjacent to Buda, and returned with an array of consumer goods such as spices, sugar, grapes, cloth, candles, and playing cards. Mihály was soon paying some of the highest taxes among Makó’s Jews and even lent money to members of the city council.

  When Joseph’s father, Fülöp, was old enough, he joined the flourishing family business, eventually establishing his own store. Tall, bearded, with chestnut hair, blue eyes, and a pronounced hooked nose, all traits he would pass on to Joseph, Fülöp cast about for a wife. As the third in line of wealthy tradesmen, Fülöp could have easily found one among his town’s women. Instead he broke with tradition and proposed to Elize Berger, whom he had met on his frequent business trips to Pest. A sophisticated city woman, Berger complemented Fülöp’s social and financial position in Makó. The tall, dark-haired young Berger was soon “regarded an enviable woman in the society of our little town,” according to one of the Pulitzer children.

  The couple made their home across the street from Makó’s marketplace in a two-story L-shaped house, considerably larger than many in town. A carriage entrance graced the front of the house, and stables extended perpendicularly from the rear. It was in this house that Joseph was born on April 10, 1847.

  Following Jewish custom, Joseph received his Brit Milah, or circumcision, eight days later. The Hungarian Jewish community, into which Joseph was welcomed, was no longer that of his forebearers. Support for Orthodox Judaism was waning in Makó and in other towns that fell into the cultural orbit of Pest. In these places, Jews such as the Pulitzers were joining a reformist wing of Judaism known as Neolog. It sought to abandon many of the strictures of Orthodoxy that clashed with the growing desire among Hungarian Jews to assimilate. Neologs, for instance, removed the mehitza—the lattice barriers hiding women congregants—though women remained seated apart from the men; and these reformists also brought the bimah (somewhat akin to a Christian altar) from its traditional place in the center of the synagogue to the front. Joseph’s Judaic life would be less isolated from Christian life than that of young Jews growing up elsewhere in Europe.

  Nonetheless, as Jews the Pulitzers remained decidedly in the minority in Makó. Only 6 percent of the population was Jewish. Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and Calvinists dominated the city. Members of each faith lived in distinct neighborhoods that divided the town like wedges of a pie, each piece anchored by a place of worship. The tall steeples of the Calvinist and Catholic churches soared high above the flat landscape, and the pealing of their bells carried for miles. It took only a glance to know if one had wandered from the Christian neighborhoods. They were well laid out, with large houses erected by prosperous farmers who could afford to live away from their fields. The Jewish neighborhood, on the other hand, had evolved more haphazardly, with crooked streets and dead-end alleys. The synagogues were small and humble. Joseph would not be more than a few years old before he would have learned his place in the social order of the town.

  In 1848, the year following Joseph’s birth, a political tsunami of revolutionary fervor swept across Europe, disturbing the order of life even in isolated Makó. Its epicenter was Paris, where a mob chased King Louis-Philippe from his throne and established the fragile but democratic Second Republic. From France the revolution spread to Italy, Germany, and all corners of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Hungarians saw this moment as a chance to establish their own state. A new government led by the nationalist Lajos Kossuth took power in Pest and established a free press, taxed the nobility, and unshackled peasants from centuries-old feudalistic practices. Jews supported the revolution in large numbers. In return, the government granted them legal emancipation. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. By the summer of 1849, what little was left of the rebellion was in retreat. Kossuth himself spent a night in Makó, just a few days before Austrian troops entered the city, and then he fled to the United States.

  Despite the revolution’s ignoble end, the Pulitzers clung to their ideals. Two of Joseph’s uncles had served in the revolution’s national guard, and his father’s store had supplied the troops. (Wisely, his father also supplied the Austrian occupiers, avoiding retribution.) The uprising cemented the Pulitzers’ identification with nationalism. Although they were Jewish in religion, they regarded themselves as Hungarians in nationality and sentiment. Like most Jews, they came to view their social and economic fate as inextricably linked to that of the nation. In his diary, Joseph’s younger brother Albert neatly inscribed a poem by Sándor Petöfi, the revolution’s poet laureate, who perished in one of its battles. “Rise Magyar, your country calls!” it began. “The time for now or never falls! Are we to live as slaves or free? Choose one! This is our destiny.”

  The end of the revolution had personal consequences for the Pulitzer children. “The Hungarian language, Hungarian manners, Hungarian traditions, were all under a ban. People would hardly dare to speak Hungarian in the lowest whispers,” recalled Albert. “And thus it came that the native babble of my childhood was soon a stranger to me.” School life was also altered. The new government-funded Jewish grammar school in Makó that Joseph briefly attended was tinged with secularism and less Orthodox than older schools, diminishing even farther the importance of Judaic traditions.

  There was nothing modern, however, about discipline in the Pulitzer household. The children learned early that “the Hungarian child never answers his father back,” Albert said. When disciplining his three boys, their father terrified them by recounting the Roman historian Livy’s tale of Titus Manlius who decapitated his own son for defending the family’s honor in battle because he had not first sought his father’s permission. For serious infractions, Fülöp banished the offender to the stables for the night, without dinner. Elize, however, frequently smuggled out food from the kitchen.

  In the spring of 1855, Fülöp decided to follow his father’s and brother’s footsteps and move his family to Pest. Thousands were making a similar trek, leaving Hungary’s small towns for the economic opportunity and political freedom of the big city. Officials granted the Pulitzers’ application to move, and Fülöp and Elize sold their house to one of the city’s judges, closed the store, and set off to the north by wagon.

  For eight-year-old Joseph, the city of Pest at the end of the two-day journey was an astonishing sight. A cityscape as imperial and as majestic as that of Paris or Vienna unfolded before him as his family joined the procession of wagons navigating the cobblestone boulevards. Instead of the monochromatic Alföld of his youth, Joseph was surrounded by stone or brick buildings reaching four, five, and sometimes six stories high, many stuccoed in pastels with intricate, curlicue plaster cornices.

  Unlike Buda, which had developed around the royal court’s massive pala
ce on a hilly perch across the Danube, low-lying Pest was the creation of merchants and artisans. As a result it was maturing into one of the most strikingly beautiful cities in Europe. Large boulevards, lined with majestic examples of Italian architecture, flowed across Pest like paved rivers from each huge square to the next, dividing the city into well-defined neighborhoods.

  The Pulitzers’ wagon made its way to the Golden Stern Inn, two blocks from Joseph’s grandparents’ house at the center of the city, where Jews had been permitted to live for eighty years. At first, only a few “tolerated Jews” had been able to rent apartments and maintain shops whose doors had to remain closed and which were barren of signs or window displays. But in subsequent years the laws were liberalized. By the time the Pulitzers arrived, approximately one-fifth of the city’s population was Jewish. Not only had Pest become the center of the nation’s economy, music, literature, art, and politics; it was now the center of Hungary’s Judaism as well.

  The move to Pest proved to be an economic boon for the family. Within a year, Fülöp’s business made enough money to be considered for incorporation and he was invited to become a member of the Commercial and Industrial Chamber of Pest. Increasingly wealthy, the family moved into a flat closer to the Danube, in the portion of the quarter regarded as the neighborhood of the Jewish bourgeoisie. The buildings there reached deep into the interior of each block and contained inner courtyards ringed with balconies that led to one- and two-bedroom apartments.

  Because of the family’s elevated social position, the parents sought to educate their children for a city trade. The eldest boy was consigned to a school of economics in Vienna, Joseph was sent to a nearby trade school, and Albert was dispatched to a boarding school. After a while, the family turned to tutors. Joseph mastered German and learned to speak French. He was a difficult pupil, however, and displayed a volcanic temper. According to Albert, Joseph once chased a tutor out the window (one assumes on the ground floor) when the tutor made the mistake of insisting on teaching mathematics rather than entertaining the youth with war stories from history.

  If Joseph didn’t take well to formal instruction, he succumbed to the pleasures of reading. The Pulitzer flat was filled with books, as the parents used their increased wealth to indulge their literary passion. Elize’s favorite novelist was the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose works had been translated into German. In particular, she loved his novel The Pilgrims of the Rhine. (He later became notorious for having penned the line “It was a dark and stormy night.”) Both Joseph and Albert adopted their parents’ habit. “As a child I used to devour books which were far beyond my age,” recalled Albert, who had the more romantic mind of the two brothers. Among his favorite authors was the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, known as the “German Plato.” Joseph considered philosophy of little use and instead favored works of history and biography.

  For Joseph, Pest was an education equal to books. Whenever he crossed the city’s largest market to visit his grandparents, he saw and learned about life from all parts of Europe. It was a Babel of tongues and a panoply of apparel colors, a striking contrast to the drab peasant costume of his birthplace. Here, merchants and buyers from Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia, Austria, and Germany plied their trades on a city square of covered stalls acres larger than anything Joseph would have seen in Makó.

  Leaving the market, and nearing his grandparents’ home, Joseph entered a tranquil street with neoclassical buildings whose inner courtyards housed gold- and silversmiths, jewelers, and spice, fruit, and textile dealers. There was no mistaking that those who lived in this portion of the Jewish quarter had done well. Grandfather Mihály’s success as a merchant earned him the description “the rich Mr. Pulitzer” among his neighbors. “He lived in a house of his own,” said Albert, “a rare distinction in large Austrian towns where often twenty to one hundred families occupied flats or apartments in the same ‘rent palaces.’”

  A short stroll in the other direction from Joseph’s home led to the banks of the Danube River, an irresistible draw for any young boy. For upwards of a mile, riverboats from distant European cities tied up to the embankment on the Pest side of the river, where the current was less swift. There they unloaded goods from distant lands. Like the market, the Danube River revealed a tantalizing promise of a world beyond.

  Any exploration of the city that Joseph undertook was unfettered by his being Jewish. There were few other major European cities of the era where Jews were freer or more integrated into society. The cosmopolitan pageant of Pest’s wealthy paraded by Joseph’s home as carriages ferrying nobles, wealthy merchants, priests, and city officials came down the boulevard abutting his street. In the evenings, the city’s elite dashed to balls, where the well-to-do displayed their equality with the ruling classes of other nations. And when not at balls, the elegant crowds gathered outside at the theater, opera, and casinos only a few blocks away. At first, only the wealthiest of Jews who had converted to Christianity were able to enter this world. But by the time the Pulitzers came to Pest the imperative to give up one’s faith had greatly diminished. In fact, the Jews of Pest had their own thriving social, economic, and cultural institutions.

  The wealth, success, and prominence of the burgeoning Jewish quarter was symbolized by the construction of the Neolog Dohány synagogue, about five blocks south of Joseph’s neighborhood. Almost a block in area, it rose to become the largest synagogue in the world, seating 3,000 congregants. The sanctuary was divided by arches from the nave, like the apse of a Christian church, and the bimah was located in the front. An organ and two pulpits were installed, both unheard of in synagogues until then. It required religious finesse to get around the Jewish prohibition against playing musical instruments on the Sabbath: a Christian was hired to play the organ. The synagogue was soon called the “Israelite cathedral” and became an architectural display of assimilation.

  Like the synagogue’s architecture, Joseph’s religious instruction in Pest renounced the strict observance of what were deemed antiquated religious laws; also, this instruction was less concerned with the careful study of the Torah. By the time Joseph reached his teenage years, being Jewish remained a part of his life, but no longer the center of it.

  Despite having secured a place in the upper echelons of Pest Jewish society, the succession of deaths continued to haunt the Pulitzers. Before leaving Makó, they had lost two of their children. In Pest, five more died. Because they were living in a prosperous urban setting where infant death had become rarer, the loss of these children was harder to bear than before. The deaths in Pest included their eldest son, who succumbed to tuberculosis, ending their plans for him to take over the family business. Death’s grip on the family did not end here. On July 16, 1858, Fülöp died. Only forty-seven years old and at the peak of his business success, he also had contracted tuberculosis.

  Four years older than Albert, Joseph understood more fully the extent of the calamity. He had been nine when his older brother died, ten when his younger brothers and sister died, eleven when his father died, and thirteen at the death of his last sister. Albert, in contrast, was not yet nine when the last sibling died. Under the best of circumstances, Joseph would have felt guilty for having survived. But in his case, he responded in other ways as well. The deaths led to an obsession with his health that would remain with him until the end of his life. Every ailment, no matter how small, was accompanied by an underlying fear that he was dying. Further, he developed a phobia of funerals. Even when his closest friends died, Joseph would refuse to attend their burials, and, pointedly, he would not attend the funeral of either his mother or his only surviving brother.

  As an additional cruelty, his father’s death created a financial nightmare. In his will, Fülöp instructed that his estate be divided among his surviving children, with his wife as ward of the shares. But Fülöp’s prolonged illness had depleted his savings. By the time the executor sent ten florins to the Jewish hospital and to a poorhouse, about the price of
an eimer (pail) of wine, there was almost nothing left.

  “Thus was my mother,” said Albert, “left to provide for her boys and one daughter, alone and unfriended.” Since she had no business experience, it was only a matter of time before the enterprise went bankrupt. Within six months their property was seized by authorities for failure to pay taxes. The family limped along. Elize did her best to earn an income and to keep paying for the education of her children. “What efforts she put forth to give us a thorough education,” said Albert. “How she deprived herself of all that she held most dear to her comfort and well being!”

  Financial relief appeared in the form of a marriage proposal. Max Frey, a merchant from the southeastern Hungarian town of Detta, won Elize’s consent but not that of Joseph or Albert. It’s common that a child’s longing for a dead father triggers a rejection of a substitute, even a well-intentioned one. In Joseph’s case Frey’s entrance into the family, or what little was left of the family, increased his sense of loss and solitariness. Years later, writing an intimate, confessional letter, he conveyed the toll from the deaths and the remarriage. He described himself as “a poor orphan who never even enjoyed as much of a luxury as a father.”

  Frey’s romantic interest in Elize may have also threatened Joseph’s intense devotion to his mother, the one remaining vestige of childhood. Pulitzer transformed his love for his mother into a more abstract reverence, so that photographs of her took on an iconic quality. Those who became Pulitzer’s friends during his young adulthood were continually shown a locket-sized illustration of his mother that he kept with him at all times. The illustration remained so important to Joseph that late in his life, when his eyes were failing, his wife commissioned an enlargement of the portrait so he could see it.