Hungary links the origins of the Satmar Hasidic sect to the family’s inherited memories of Europe. It appears not as a single, settled home but as a place carried forward through names, songs, and stories of wartime survival: the hometown that gave a community its name, the Budapest remembered in Bubby’s music, and the setting of Zeidy’s annual account of serving in the army during World War II.

Geography and the Satmar Name

Satu Mare, whose Hungarian name means Saint Mary and whose Yiddish name is Satmar, is described as a city on the border of Hungary and Romania. The author’s note traces the sect’s name to the rabbi from that city. During World War II, Hungarian Jewish lawyer and journalist Rudolf Kasztner saved the rabbi from certain death; the rabbi later emigrated to America, gathered many other survivors, and formed a Hasidic sect named for his hometown. Other surviving rabbis likewise named their sects after the towns they had left, preserving the memory of communities destroyed in the Holocaust.

The author’s account places that naming practice within a wider postwar return to Hasidic heritage. Survivors in America resumed traditional dress and Yiddish, while many opposed the creation of the State of Israel because they believed genocide had followed assimilation and Zionism. Rebuilding through reproduction was also central: growing communities answered the destruction of European Jewish life by seeking to replace those who had perished. In this history, a place-name from Hungary becomes more than a marker of origin; it carries the memory of a lost world into a community remade in America.

Budapest in Bubby’s Music

Hungary also survives in Bubby’s recollections of Budapest, voiced in private moments in the kitchen. When Zeidy is away, she hums wordless tunes while preparing food, identifying them as a Viennese waltz or a Hungarian rhapsody and describing them as music from her childhood. The remembered city enters the household through melody rather than through a detailed account of her past.

Her singing is constrained by the rules around women’s voices. Women are not permitted to sing openly, and Zeidy discourages music except on Shabbos, invoking the destruction of the Temple. Bubby sometimes plays a cassette of wedding music on an old tape recorder at low volume, ready to switch it off at the sound of someone approaching. Against those restrictions, her tunes from Budapest are a small, guarded continuity with a life that predates the household’s present rules.

Zeidy’s Wartime Hungary

Once a year, on Passover, Zeidy recounts his time in the Hungarian army during World War II. He uses humor to draw the children in, recalling the incongruity of being assigned to cook for an army when he could barely warm his own soup. His story then turns to the conditions beneath the comic opening: he prepared three meals a day, secretly kept a kosher kitchen, and, when he could not manage the cooking, traded kitchen maids’ work for his own cleaning. Prayer was scarce, and safe places to pray rarer still.

Food makes the wartime account concrete. With no flour for matzo, the soldiers ate potatoes instead, half a potato per person, dipped in saltwater. Zeidy’s annual retelling connects that deprivation to the Passover story of persecution and freedom, whether the oppressor is understood as the Egyptians or the Nazis. He warns that freedom can disappear at any moment by God’s decision. Hungary thus enters the family narrative both as a remembered homeland and as the setting of a story through which Zeidy teaches the children not to take their present freedom for granted.