By Susan Faludi, 2016

As a human being I believe in every person’s right to choose whatever identity feels most comfortable, as long as it is not hateful to anyone else. As a daughter I would have been utterly confused and traumatized by having either my mother or my father choose to transition to the opposite gender. Although I don’t think of their marriage as particularly happy, I am grateful that my mother never chose to become a man and my father never chose to become a woman.

Susan Faludi lived through the dislocating experience of her father’s transition to womanhood. This beautifully written memoir of that family history caught my eye on the bargain table at my neighbourhood Chapters for a couple of reasons. I am fascinated by the history of Eastern and Central Europe and even more so by stories about parents and children. This book about Faludi’s relationship with her Hungarian father, who returned to live in Hungary after the fall of the Iron Curtain, appeals on both these levels.

Susan Faludi tells the story of her father’s life and her fraught relationship with him. Her parent’s troubled marriage ended with such violence on his part towards her mother that Susan has not seen him for more than 20 years when she goes to Hungary to visit.

For the first seven decades of his life the man who has become a woman was Istvan (which I believe in Hungarian is pronounced Isht-van), Pista to his nearest and dearest. Istvan changed into Steven and then Steve when he moved to the United States in the 1950s. In this new country, he was an insecure caricature of an American husband and father, although a highly unusual one in his construction of marionettes, his enthusiasm for recordings of opera and requiem masses, and his fascination with The Ugly Duckling. He made the best he could of things in the States after finding out that his one true love—his reason for moving there—had just become engaged to an American.

When Susan reconnects with her father, Steve has become Stefi after a sex-change operation in Thailand and wants to relate to Susan girl to girl. This is, however, a book not just about name or sex changes but also about larger issues of shifting identities. It is about what is fake and what is real and how we try to know the difference.

As a Jewish boy, Pista used his wits and his luck and a great talent for deception to survive the Nazi takeover of Hungary. After the war, he made it to Denmark by shooting a movie of the good works of Danish Red Cross workers with a camera with no film. He got from Denmark to Brazil with a forged visa that looked more official than a real one. Worried that his birth year of 1927 would make him seem too old for a sex change operation, he forged a birth certificate that made him ten years younger. Then, to get a new Hungarian birth certificate recognizing the change in gender, he changed the date on the fake birth certificate back to the real one. He also fiddled with the dates and the content of the documents required by the protocol for gender change.

The document fakery was an extension of his work as a retoucher of photographs. He was a brilliant at Photoshopping before there was Photoshop, and worked for all the famous fashion photographers, making their subjects look even more beautiful than in real life. It was easy for him to remove a mole or whittle down a waist.

Born to wealthy Jewish parents after they had already lost two live babies, Istvan was mostly abandoned to the care of nannies. In this his parents were like many rich people but seem to have carried their emotional neglect of him to an extreme. His beautiful, glamourous mother constantly went out to the theatre and opera and had many affairs. In a picture with her small son on her lap, Susan describes her as looking down at the child “ . . . as if she isn’t entirely sure what his relation to her might be. My father, clutching a teddy bear, pivots away from his mother and stares into the camera.” In a chilling, almost unbelievable, act of neglect, neither parent made an appearance at their son’s bar mitzvah.

The family disconnectedness happened in an atmosphere of growing anti-Semitism. Hungary had been half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and as such a cosmopolitan society. Susan Faludi sets this anti-Semitism in the context of Hungary’s loss of more than two-thirds of its territory after World War I by the terms of the Trianon Treaty and the country’s transition from a multiethnic, multicultural state to one with a population more than 90 percent Magyar and intolerant of minorities, especially of the hardworking and wealthy Jewish elite. When the Nazis took nominal control of the country in 1944, Adolf Eichmann found it easy to round up the Jews for slaughter. Non-Jews were so eager to report on their Jewish neighbours that, in his words, “’Everything went like a dream.’”

Along with the virulent anti-Semitism, there was also a romanticization of Jewish women by the Magyar majority. Jewish women were seen as beautiful, alluring, and feminine. A number of prominent Hungarian Christian men had Jewish wives. Jewish men were juxtaposed in the reflected light of this beauty and glamour as sub-human monstrosities. When the Nazis took over, they easily identified the Jewish men by pulling down their pants. For Jewish women there was no such straightforward means of identification. By the end of the book it is clear that a desire for safety may have been part of Stefi’s motivation for transitioning.

The darkroom was of course the site of Steve’s photographic manipulation. I have never been in a darkroom but imagine it as a place that is usually dark or at least in shadow, with occasional small islands of light. For sure it is not a large airy room with sunlight streaming through the windows. Darkness is a metaphor for Steven’s life and the darkroom for the way he manipulates events and situations and sees them or tries to place them in a more favourable light. There is not a lot of light in the dark history of European Jewry in the 20^th century, but he attempts to find some or to present the past as more positive than it was.

Stefi attempts to find some light in her enthusiasm for fine coffee and delicious pastries, and in her obsession with clothes and make-up and other girlie things. In her seventies and eighties she wears frilly aprons at home. When she goes out, she always has the right purse and teeters around in the high heels that most people born female give up at a much younger age, just as Caitlyn Jenner now wears miniskirts that those of us close to her age who were born women stopped wearing decades ago.

This girlishness and stereotypical femininity do not sit well with Susan, a crusading journalist and ardent feminist. The daughter rejects Stefi’s suggestion that she do the most girlish thing of all—have a baby and thus carry on the family. Susan walks away from the medical appointment Stefi sets up with a specialist who supposedly could help Susan conceive in her fifties. The daughter regrets her long estrangement from her father but she does not regret her childlessness or the abortion she had in her twenties.

In spite of her obviously high intelligence, Susan is unable to learn Hungarian. In spite of studying the language and spending extended periods in Budapest, Susan never sees her father’s first language as anything more than mostly incomprehensible squiggles. Only a little more successful at learning Hungarian than at dressing in the folk costume her dad wanted her to wear to middle school, Susan does come to recognize in herself some of the morose sullenness she sees in Hungarians.

The character and the history of Steve/Stefi become somewhat clearer over time . Some of this clarity results from the time Susan spends with the woman who was her father. As well, Susan gets to know some of the extended family in Israel, the US and Switzerland. One of the relatives correctly states, “’The whole family is in bad connection.’” Fom a distant cousin she learns that his father used Istvan to spy on the boy’s mother and her lovers, hoping to use the child’s reports as evidence for divorce. In his will, though, the father left Istvan only one lira. Of all these relatives there is only one person—a cousin in Basle—with whom Stefi is on good terms. This cousin possesses extraordinary good humour, patience and forbearance.

Through these relatives Susan is able to confirm the truth of what had seemed one of her father’s most fantastic stories. She finds out that he did indeed dress up in an Arrow Cross or Hungarian fascist uniform and thus saved the lives of his parents (estranged but by chance in the same place). While wearing this uniform and brandishing an unloaded rifle he had no idea how to use, Istvan rescued his parents from a house where they were being held prisoner with other Jews on their way to extermination. He convinced the real fascists that he was taking the couple away to be shot but in fact took them to safety.

When Susan asks Stefi how he managed to pull off this incredible deception, the latter insists it was simple: “’I believed it. So they believed it. I took part in their game. If you believe you are whoever you pretend to be, you’re halfway saved. But if you act funny, if you act afraid, you’re halfway to the gas chamber.’” In the same conversation Stefi also says, “’I impersonate myself.’”

It is a testament to Susan Faludi’s skill as a writer that we feel her father’s pain but also feel the pain he causes. Susan succeeds in making this difficult and slippery character sympathetic if not actually lovable. The book ends with Stefi’s death in the women’s ward of a hospital. Before that she and Susan find a Reform synagogue in Budapest with a female rabbi where they attend services for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which is also known as the Pregnancy of the World. There are different kinds of birth.

And in an earlier visit to the synagogue that Istvan attended with his parents as a boy (and where he sat with his father and the other males to worship), Susan introduces Stefi to an official there as “my mother.”

To an extent this book resembles Finding Rosa by Caterina Edwards. Both books deal with the early loss or absence of parents and show how history casts a long shadow over the lives of ordinary people. However, Rosa comes across as a more sympathetic character than Stefi and the family she creates is more connected by bonds of love.

I found In the Darkroom so engaging that I will be on the lookout for Susan Faludi’s three earlier books.