ABSTRACT
The village in which I was born and lived the first 15 years of my life in Northern Hungary was a small agricultural community of about 3500 people. Socially and culturally, the 40 Jewish families in the village were totally separated from their peasant neighbors. The Jews constituted the “middle class”: the doctor, the pharmacist, the baker, and several shopkeepers. At the time I was growing up, in the 1930s and 1940s, severe anti-Semitism closed the doors to all universities for Jewish boys and girls. Not only was attending a university an unattainable dream, but so was attending a college preparatory high school (gymnasium). All schools were parochial in Hungary. There were only four Jewish college preparatory high schools in the whole country and only one, in Budapest, was for girls. My two brothers, who were three and five years my senior, attended college in a gymnasium in the city 40 kilometers away from home.
