What a story! Superficially it's a tale of gender affirmation. But so much more. It's revelatory to hear how author Morris came to understand that sheWhat a story! Superficially it's a tale of gender affirmation. But so much more. It's revelatory to hear how author Morris came to understand that she was in the wrong body. But during the many years of what she calls her conundrum, she joins the army, travels widely, marries and fathers five children. Morris was the only journalist to accompany Sir Edmund Hillary's expedition to Mount Everest. There's a sequence on how she gradually made her news public, painstakingly it turns out, for Morris was highly social and the reactions of almost everyone are given. What the memoir reveals is how she handled the information mentally and emotionally, and came over the course of many years to act upon it. My only quibble with the book is the author's too frequently declarations of her happy life. Henri de Montherlant said "happiness writes white." Morris's many recapitulations on this theme are hardly reassuring. Certainly this is something she as a writer should know....more
For the most part harrowing, but with hilarious interludes, much needed comic relief. An extraordinary story of a extraordinarily complex person. I diFor the most part harrowing, but with hilarious interludes, much needed comic relief. An extraordinary story of a extraordinarily complex person. I did not expect the rich content here about the Hungarian portion of the Shoah, content I’ve never come across before in my wide reading. Late in life, journalist Susan Faludi’s father had sex reassignment surgery on the cheap in Bangkok. For 25 years they had been estranged. In 2004, the author got an email from her father announcing the news. They reconciled.
Besides the familiar, “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” rationale, which I by no means discount, Faludi analyzed other possible reasons in a review of sex change memoirs that she undertook at her local public library. She was looking particularly for something like: “‘Could I also be seeking womanhood to reclaim my innocence, be exonerated from the sins of my male past?’ Or ‘Could I be craving the moral stature that comes with being oppressed.’” She found nothing of the kind; that is, no real inner searching. So those seeking and getting sex changes, especially the male-to-female candidates, did not seem to particularly value introspection. If anything, they were, like her father, quite the opposite, and viewed their former manhood as something to be banished from further consideration. They are women now, they say, the male portion of their lives has been expunged, for some never to be talked about again.
The author runs into a neo-fascist mob, the Magyar Garda, on the streets of Budapest in 2008, which seems to mimic the pre-World War 2 Arrow Cross organization, which helped in the destruction of two-thirds of a population of 850,000 Hungarian Jews. “One of every three people murdered in Auschwitz was a Hungarian Jew. The Hungarian Holocaust, its leading historian, Randolph L. Braham, concluded, was ‘the most concentrated and brutal ghettoization and deportation process of the Nazi’s Final Solution program.’”(p. 231)
“‘With the deepening crisis of assimilation in the late 19th century,’ Hungarian historian Viktor Karády wrote, ‘all forms of modern Jewish identity became saddled with some kind of psychic disturbance.’ Karády enumerated the symptoms of that disturbance: ‘an aversion’ to the past (what my father called ‘ancient history’); exhibitions of extreme self-hatred ‘invariably directed against “archaic” Jews who rejected “progress”’ (what my father called those ‘Orthodox Jews in their awful getup’); and ‘grotesque forms’ of compensatory behaviors, including maximal conformism in public and self-presentation,’ ‘imitating Christian traits that turned out to be utterly improbable, pointless or misplaced,’ and ‘proclamations of chauvinist bombast’ (or what my father would call being ‘100 percent Hungarian’). The impossible contradiction of self-denial and self-presentation led to a terrible irony. ‘The need to pay constant heed to fitting in,’ Karády wrote, ‘paradoxically drove those engaged in such strategies of concealment to an obsessional preoccupation with identity.’” (p. 235)
As I read more about the savage process of the Hungarian Shoah, I find I am slowing down. Nothing here can be skimmed. Rather my impulse is to memorize the sad statistics I have before me: “‘What was unique about the German regime in Hungary,’ Hungarian historian György Ránki observed, ‘was that a relatively large degree of national sovereignty was left in the hands of the [Hungarian] government....’ With only a handful of SS officers in the entire country, the Hungarian officialdom would seem to have been in an even stronger position to counter German edicts, but right from the start it chose otherwise. When the SS and Gestapo arrested hundreds of prominent and professional Jews in Budapest in the first two weeks of the occupation—and interned them in the rabbinical seminary building where my father had attended elementary school—neither the parliament nor Regent Horthy protested.... Eichmann was startled, if pleased, by the occupied state’s willingness, even enthusiasm. ‘Hungary was the only European country to encourage us relentlessly,’ he said later. ‘They were never satisfied with the rate of the deportations; no matter how much we speeded it up, they always found us too slow.’ He had no objections, of course: ‘Everything went like a dream.’” (p. 244)
The author includes a depiction, also unique in my reading life, of the feminized male Jew through the ages. Ponderous contrivances of hate such as Oskar Panizza’s The Operated Jew are described in which many doctors labor to transform Itzig Faitel, “‘a small squat man’ with a gimpy walk, a ‘cowardly’ voice, contorted spine and legs, and chest puffed up like a ‘chicken breast’” (p. 277) into a fabulous goy. Things go, as expected, terribly wrong. “As the 14th-century treatise by Italian encyclopedist and physician Cecco d’Ascoli asserted, ‘After the death of Christ, all Jewish men, like women, suffer menstruation.’” This is followed with the best explanation of that notorious collective hallucination, the “blood libel,” that I’ve ever read, Norman Cohn notwithstanding.
Wait until you get to the video of the father’s sex change. The intrepid journalist doesn’t shy from a complete if general description of the penectomy, labiaplasty, vaginoplasty etc. I’m not giving a sense of the full scope of the book; for there’s a recounting of the sweet life of the Magyar golden age, which ended with the Allied partition of Hungary in 1920, when it was reduced to about 28% of its prewar size; much evasion of Nazis in occupied Budapest; improbable but corroborated acts of heroism; trips through a postwar Europe in ruins; a lifelong fascination with filmmaking; an early pseudo-business in film distribution with school pals. Then it’s shipboard to Brazil for five years which feels like paradise to the young Faludi because of its near race-blindness, and then a move to the U.S.A. where he has a female love interest which doesn’t pan out. Eventually he goes to work for Condé Nast in New York as a darkroom technician, creating Photoshop-type magic before the Photoshop era. His penchant throughout his life for “faking things”—passes, letters of introduction, photos, certificates etc.—should not be minimized. The ultimate erasure, that of Stephanie’s penis, meant that she could no longer be made to drop trou as a way of having her “impure” Jewish blood confirmed. And yet in recent elections she voted for the fascist Fidesz party, which takes special pride in its hatred of Jews. What was it Santayana said?
This book holds up next to classics of parental biography like The Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff. Narrative pleasures abound. The book tells many tales seamlessly and brilliantly....more
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