thing.
* * *It was an accrual of experiences, not a sudden recognition, that led me
to divorce Béla. My choice had something to do with my mother—
what she had chosen and what she hadn’t been allowed to choose.
Before she married my father, she was working for a consulate in
Budapest, she was earning her own money, she was part of a
cosmopolitan social and professional circle. She was quite liberated for
her time. But then her younger sister got married, and the pressure
was on her to do what her society and family expected of her, to marry
before she became an embarrassment. ere was a man she loved,
someone she met through her work at the consulate, the man who
had given her the inscribed copy of Gone with the Wind. But her father
forbade her to marry him because he wasn’t Jewish. My father, the
celebrated tailor, ĕt her for a dress one day, he admired her ĕgure,
and she opted to leave the life she had chosen for herself in favor of
the life she was expected to live. In marrying Béla, I feared I had done
the same thing—forgone taking responsibility for my own dreams in
exchange for the safety Béla provided me. Now the qualities that had
drawn me to him, his ability to provide and caretake, felt suffocating,
our marriage felt like an abdication of myself.
I didn’t want the kind of marriage my parents had—lonely, lacking
in intimacy—and I didn’t want their broken dreams (my father’s, to be
a doctor; my mother’s, to be a career woman, to marry for love). But
what did I want for myself? I didn’t know. And so I erected Béla as a
force to push against. In place of discovering my own genuine purpose
and direction, I found meaning in ĕghting against him, against the
ways I imagined that he limited me. Really, Béla was supportive of my
schooling, he paid for my tuition, he loved talking with me about the
philosophy and literature I was reading, he found my reading lists and