When Ava Fodor returns to New York from Paris, she leaves behind her budding romance with Pierre and turns her attention to another man: Zsolt Fodor, her father. He's a penniless Hungarian poet transplanted to New York in the wake of the failed 195...
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As rare birds go, my father was the rarest. I found almost everything about the man fascinating except that he had no money. The parts that weren't fascinating were embarrassing, but in a fascinating sort of way. When he spoke, he waved his hands in the air in wild gestures while describing something in not just half-broken, but fully-broken English. After his audience kenned that he was actually saying something interesting, he would take them on a wild ride of trying to decipher what his point was, while dodging a flying arm or elbow.
"Romain Rolland did not just write Jean-Christophe. He WAS Jean-Christophe. His genius as a writer was in his vision as a nyelvművelők. The zseniális of his work was the tisztaság of his jövőkép. He was the Szent Ferenc of his age—a direct antitézisnek to Henry Miller," he'd expound, stray fingers pointing up in the air or closing and opening in utterly non-understandable eloquence.
There were several obstacles to figuring out what my father was saying. Language was one of them, reference points another. I could barely understand what he was saying about ninety per cent of the time since I'd first met him at age sixteen. I chalked this up to my own lack of command of Hungarian—a language indecipherable to any but Hungarians and those who live near them—but it wasn't just that.
It was hard to say whether the context or content of what he was on about most of the time was more inscrutable. Either way, I learned a lot once I waded through it all. Romain Rolland? Jean-Christophe? Somehow these names hadn't come up in my intellectual history classes in college. If I'd majored in literature they might have, but everyone there had said comparative lit was one of Yale's toughest undergrad majors. Within the first few weeks of my freshman year, I'd figured out that I wasn't among the top tranche of brainiacs amongst my Yale peers. So I'd majored in history—Yale College's most popular major, a safe choice.
The first time I accompanied my father to a Hungarian social gathering I realized I was not the only one who didn't understand most of what he was getting at. Most of the Hungarians present didn't appear to either. His fellow countrymen sat spellbound in front of him, absorbing in respectful or perhaps stunned silence, his magnificent oratorio accompanied by the pounding of the table before him, followed by dramatic hand and finger movements.
Afterward, people came up to me and said, "Your father is a great man," shaking their heads admiringly. I didn't dare ask why, because that would indicate a lack of confidence in the greatness of my own father, reflecting poorly upon my paterfamilial pride. I had no idea what was so great about what he was saying, but I did know that the way he made me feel when he was saying it was truly great when it wasn't embarrassing. It was like trying to catch a sunbeam.
"I am Père Goriot. At your service, mademoiselle," he greeted me the next time we met at his apartment.
"Hi, Papa. Drop the Père Goriot thing. It doesn't work for you," I snapped, as I pushed past him into his miniscule Upper East Side Yorkville apartment. Something on the stove smelled heavenly. I needed to find out what it was right away.
