My view of this charming Hungarian capital came into focus as I watched archival film at a theater in the Jewish museum adjacent to the stunning old synagogue. Although the film was grainy, the pictures it presented didn’t look much different from what I’d seen out on the streets a few moments before. The buildings were mostly unchanged and the trams were a tad more streamlined, but there wasn’t anything anyone who left in 1956 – or perhaps 1926—would have found particularly jarring.
This is the first city we’ve visited where that’s so. It is marked by classic four-story buildings, often with extensive decoration that would be impossible to duplicate today, arrayed along wide boulevards – an arrangement that lets the sun through (not that there was any on this bleak December day) that cannot be duplicated in the urban canyons of New York or Chicago. The city seems comfortable, perhaps also complacent.
Pleasant visual surprises abound including the ice skating rink I discovered while trying to get a picture of the neighborhood railroad station. Our other stops have often been a view into the future. Budapest shows how the past still works.
The synagogue guides talk about the 100,000 Jews – half of them observant – who still live here, a very modest echo of the much larger prewar population. Listening to their story, I came away a bit more sympathetic with the idea of holocaust-based Judaism, although I remain convinced that this emphasis on the sad past is not the basis for a successful future.
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