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2. Dictatorship of the Proletariat – The 1950s

Just a small addition to the 1940s: Pista once saved my
future family-making ability when he fetched me from the fence
of the barn at the last moment, on an occasion when I was
taking a leak facing the pig sty between two fence boards, and
the sow misunderstood my intentions or maybe took this as on
offense, and rushed towards me.
The mini-farm slowly vanished, shops opened up once
again. Sometimes there was butter on the shelves, “vaj” in
Hungarian, and around this time was it decided that the
expression of “butter toast” (“vajas kenyér”) should be one
term, a monosyllable, since workers were already familiar with
this expression, whereas “zsíros kenyér”, “bread with fat / lard”
term in separate words because it meant nothing to them
anymore. The question whether this neologism remained in
practice, or if it had been true at all, remains a mystery of
modern Hungarian linguistics.
The family managed to escape eviction. A “dokument”
existed, written by the Russian commander, which said that
they were given three German soldiers as hostages, thus my
father and grandfather saved a lot of lives on that day, but we
never had to show this piece of paper, actually got lost. Many
people went in and out of our house. One could look at it as a
place giving shelter to many.
In 1951 after the first term of the first grade at
elementary school with the first school record in my pockets –
the relevance of which I only realized when hearing about my
elder sister’s superb school results, – I realized that one of my
first knocks in life had happened. The following day my
elegantly dressed father coming out of the bathroom asked
about my school report with a patronizing look in his eyes, and
seeing the mediocre performance I had achieved, a sad
expression for a lifetime appeared in his eyes that his son would
not be a genius. Despite not realizing what it all meant at that

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