‘Anyu’

Before getting to the substance of this eulogy, I would like to thank all of you who are here today, whether to pay your respects to my mum or to give support to me and Judy in what is a difficult time for us.

At the same time, I would also like to acknowledge those friends and family who cannot be here today, whether because of ill health or distance, or the combination of those two factors. I am particularly conscious of the difficult time my mum’s sister Ewa and her husband Mietek are having not being able to be present today; but there are many others, including my dad’s sister Zsuzsa, who are taking my mum’s passing very hard. I find it difficult to speak today, but want to do it, if only for their sake.

My mum, or ‘Anyu’ to me, had four distinct stages to her life, defined by the countries she lived in, but also what she did during these periods.

She was born in September 1936 in Dabrowa Gornizca, a smallish town in Silesia, in the south of Poland. Her father was what you would now call a small business person; her mother a teacher, as well as a luminary of the Polish Scout movement. My mum had a significantly older stepsister, Halina, and a slightly older sister, Ewa, with whom she was inseparable.

My mum was just about three years old when Germany invaded Poland in what was the beginning of the Second World War. The war lasted for six years, and my mother’s early childhood was spent in considerable poverty and deprivation, and things did not necessarily improve to any great extent in the years immediately following the war.

Whether by reason of things being somewhat chaotic at the time or not, my mother managed to accelerate her schooling: it took her one year to catch up with her sister Ewa so they could attend the same class; then another year with Ewa to finish high school when she was 15 years old. In the meantime, in 1950, my grandmother Janina died of leukaemia. My mum and Ewa were devastated: they absolutely adored and idolised their mother. When a couple of years later my grandfather proposed to marry another person, who by the way was a thoroughly delightful and decent woman, both Ewa and my mum decided that they were not going to stay at home. Ewa went to Warsaw to study medicine, and my mum to Moscow, to the Lomonosov University, to study philosophy.

This was the start of the second stage of my mum’s life. Although I never knew how seriously to take this, she claimed to have chosen to study philosophy because she did not know what the word meant. While I do have my doubts about this, I cannot exclude the possibility that this was true. The fact is that when she decided to move to Moscow to live apart from her family and to go to university, she was not yet 16 years old and she did not speak Russian.

My mum and dad met in Moscow, having been enrolled in the same course. They ultimately married in June 1956, and my brother Gyuri was born there in 1957. After finishing the university that year, my parents moved to Hungary.

This was the start of the third stage of my mum’s life. I was born in 1958, in Budapest. Not entirely surprisingly, Anyu did not speak Hungarian at the time. Nevertheless, she was one of the main sources of my (and Gyuri’s) early language acquisition skills. Some people did wonder why Gyuri and I called grass ‘little trees’; and, retrospectively, I do blame my mum for never having properly acquired the skill of addressing people in the strictly formal way, but if truth is to be known, for a very long time I had no idea that my mum spoke Hungarian with an accent. I became somewhat suspicious once I had learnt to read and noticed that she had difficulties in choosing the right vowels for some words. Of course, Hungarian is a phonetic language, and in retrospect it does make sense that, with all the extra vowels my mum had to cope with in speaking and writing Hungarian, she occasionally stumbled writing the words as she heard and spoke them.

In any event, by 1960 my mum’s Hungarian was good enough to secure a job as a sociologist at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where she worked essentially in a research capacity, and became a co-founder of the Hungarian Institute of Sociology. In 1973 my parents, together with some friends and colleagues, lost their jobs having been singled out by the regime of the day as appropriate targets to get the message out to members of the local intelligentsia who may have been tempted to engage in some form of dissent.

Following a period of harassment from the authorities, our family left Hungary in 1977 and, after a brief sojourn in West Berlin, in 1978 we came to Australia where my dad had been offered a tenured position at Sydney University.

So started the fourth, last, and longest, stage of my mum’s life. Unlike on previous occasions, she at least had some familiarity with the language spoken in the country she was moving to. To the best of my knowledge, she did not have any specific experience as an educator, but not long after our arrival, she obtained some work, I think originally as a tutor, at UNSW, which later led to bigger and better things. Others, who are in a better position to address this topic, will no doubt say a few words about her work as an academic. For my purposes, it is sufficient to note that she worked as a Lecturer and later Senior Lecturer at UNSW until into her 70s.

While I do not want to dwell on this too long, after May 1986, my mum was working as a full time academic while caring, with my dad, for my brother who suffered a catastrophic brain injury during a football tournament and required 24-hour care. The mental and physical demands of doing so for such a long period were, to say the least, considerable. My mum not only carried the lion’s share of these tasks, she did so ceaselessly and tirelessly, without a single word of complaint, always making sure that Gyuri knew that this was not a burden to her, that being with him and helping him was something she wanted to do. No wonder Gyuri always said Anyu was ‘No. 1’, ‘the best’, ‘the first’, ‘extraordinarily good’.

And she was all that.

No doubt I am biased, but my mum was a beautiful person in all senses of the word. She had a natural charm, charisma, an easy-going attitude, a lightness of heart, a beautiful and easy smile. She could and would make a room full of people come to life just by being herself. She was bold, she was sassy. She was loud. She could be opinionated and occasionally pushy. But she was always, always, unapologetically herself.

She was a great host. It did not matter who you were, or what business led you to her house, once you stepped inside, coffee, chocolate biscuits, fruit, nuts, wine, whiskey, in various combinations depending on the time of day manifested themselves, and you had little hope of escaping without doing your bit.

In our family, she was the person who defined holidays. She was the keeper, and regular inventor, of traditions. We all knew our roles in the carefully choreographed Christmas celebrations, the agenda for birthdays, the painting of eggs at Easter time. We sometimes pretended it was almost an imposition, but in our hearts we loved it. Anyu allowed us to be childlike, to take real pleasure in those simple things, and in being, and spending time, together as a family.

She was a mother not only to Gyuri and me, but to all animals that happened to cross the threshold of her house, whether accidentally or otherwise. She formed a genuine personal relationship with these animals, and loved and nurtured them with the same care and attention she gave Gyuri and me. They trusted her and were loyal to her in a way and to an extent that always made me jealous.

She was resilient to a fault, she was brave beyond words. She faced adversity front on and refused to bend. Truth be told, I was occasionally embarrassed by her demands on doctors, nurses and carers, but she would not compromise on the well-being of Gyuri, and later my father. If you were dependent on others, if you were unable to look after yourself, you wanted her in your corner.

We lost my dad in October last year, and Gyuri died at the end of December. I was incredibly worried about my mum, but she held herself together mentally, and even appeared to improve somewhat physically. After being unable to leave the house for a fairly long time because of the demands of looking after two totally disabled persons, she came with me to doctors in the hope of sorting her health out.

At the end of January this year, she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, and given a prognosis that turned out to be reasonably accurate. She decided not to have treatment, the prospects of which appeared to be dubious at best, and which was likely to lead to her feeling more unwell. As usual, she made this decision with very little hesitation, and never second guessed herself.

I would love to believe that somehow, somewhere, she is with my father and my brother now. But all I know is that she is not with me, not with us, anymore.