A box found among the ashes of a house fire launches Linda Ambrus Broenniman on a quest to discover the truth behind her family’s biggest secret—that her Catholic father was actually Jewish and the history of her family, as she had known it, was a lie.
In The Politzer Saga, Broenniman tells the story of her search for truth as she pieces together the astonishing story across eight generations of her Jewish ancestors, the Politzer family, whose remarkable lives were almost lost to her father’s secrets.
Broenniman’s findings are remarkable, riveting, heart-wrenching, and inspiring. She tells the story of a family tree dating back to eighteenth-century Hungary, eight generations. Each story, a life, of real people who lived, struggled, suffered, thought, and made decisions that affected others. Written like a fictional family saga, the story is rich with characters who come to life with luminescent clarity, making readers forget that they were actually thoroughly researched and not the figments of someone’s vivid imagination.
Beyond the personal stories, the book is a wonderful history lesson about a place and a people. Among her family members, Broenniman discovers highly accomplished and respected artists, doctors, business owners, freedom fighters, art collectors, and musicians. They are individuals successful in their personal endeavors but frequently broken by war, uprisings, religious persecution, unthinkable treatment, and irrational torture. The survivors needed to scratch and claw merely to live another day. Some of them served royalty. Some of them were killed by the Nazis.
Today, The Politzer Saga, a permanent exhibition, resides on the third floor of the Rumbach Synagogue in Budapest, Hungary. The exhibit is composed of 10 lyrical and artistically rendered seven-minute films about eight generations of the Politzer family based on the stories in the book. But readers can go deeper and discover the source material in Broenniman’s amazing narrative.
What did you think when you received the mysterious box that was full of family secrets? You knew that the box existed, but you didn’t know what it was.
I wasn’t sure it really existed. That was part of the problem, because my mother had told me that it existed. But I had looked for it everywhere and could never find it. I just assumed that it didn’t exist. And then when my parent’s house caught on fire, my sister was just bringing everything she could out. She was worried about the water damage from the firemen. My sister didn’t realize she had so many things, she didn’t realize what she had. She put the box in a closet and didn’t find the box until five or six years after the fire. It coincided with the time that I decided I was going to look into my family’s history.
Then she sent it to me. It was overwhelming. It looked like a regular moving box, it was very musty and smelled like the scent in an old attic. Inside were a lot of documents and I had no clue. They were mostly in Hungarian. And I didn’t know what they meant. It was a little bewildering because I didn’t know what I was going to do at that point.
But you realized that you had found something important.
Yes. I always had in the back of my mind somewhere I’m going to find this, but to realize that maybe this is what my mother had been talking about years ago, and I was really going to find the truth, was exciting and overwhelming.
You already learned about your heritage in 1990. But finding the box triggered the real research process. How long did it take to find everything out about your family?
It took me basically 33 years.
How did you start your research?
At first, I tried to use Google Translate and all the translation software, and I realized very quickly that that wasn’t going to work. First, the translations weren’t very good, but I needed to find someone to help. I found my father’s diary from when he was twelve years old. At that point, I really had to find someone to translate it. But I realized I needed more than that. I needed somebody who could help me understand the context. Through a friend of a friend, I found a woman named Anna Bayer who lived about a half an hour from where I was. She is a Hungarian expatriate, but she still has a house in Budapest, and she usually spends the summers there. I went to her house, we sat down in her living room and started to go through the folders. And as we did and she told me what they were, we were both just in total amazement. One of the biggest things that
and he wrote a letter asking for exemption from all the Jewish restrictions, because they had been forced to move to one of the so-called Yellow Star houses. He asked for an exemption and to be allowed to move back to his house and so on, and his request was granted! We found out later from another book that András (Gyekiczki – ed.) had found. But by that time, it was too late. To get back to Anna, she was a great help. I didn’t know anything about the Yellow Star houses, I didn’t know what they were. When she started putting everything in context, she said, you really need somebody who can do this research right. Anna suggested a few people, but she said the best person would be András Gyekiczki. She immediately sent him an email, and that’s how I met András.
You were raised as a Catholic. How did it change your spiritual life when you discovered that you had Jewish roots? Have you adopted Jewish traditions in your everyday life, even just symbolically?
That’s a great question. It has so many layers to it. We went to church every Sunday, both my parents were very religious, even my father who had converted in 1939. Even though we went to church, religion just didn’t take with me. I appreciate the traditions and the culture around it, but religion just isn’t a big part of my life. Thinking of what my Jewish relatives have been through, I’m so proud of them. The experience of learning the truth and coming to understand their values and the traditions has been just amazing for me. I have a very close friend, Yona, who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She has encouraged me for 30 years to look into and understand my family. When I finally started doing it, we became even closer than we were before. She helped me explain the meanings and histories of Jewish traditions. I just admire and love the culture and everything about it. I’m very spiritual, and I believe in a god, but I’m just not that religious.
Among all these remarkable figures in your family, is there anybody whose story is especially close to you or who inspired you the most?
That’s a hard question. Probably Rachel’s story. To think about somebody in the 1700s who was that educated and strong-willed. It’s just amazing.
To read Rachel’s and other family members' stories, please visit The Continental Literary Magazine.
