The Postcard
A snapshot of where we are for generations of the future.
Bakonyszentkirály, 1940. My great-grandfather must have held this postcard in his hands once. I found it by searching for his name, Jenő Kellner, on Google. The indexing wizards of Mountain View surprised me that day with a single buried link, maybe 10 pages of search results deep, to a Hungarian Ebay knockoff.
I knew less Hungarian then than I do today. That’s to say five mispronounced words at best, compared with something in the range of thirty to fifty now. (Ask me about one of my favorites, mulátsag, sometime.)
Google Translate failed me here. I couldn’t understand how to confirm what I’d found, whether it was still available, and how I’d get my hands on it even if I could eventually mumble through this strange family tongue of mine. I like to think the gods of luck are lovers of tricks, but they favor me when I need it. This was one of those times.
I was working then at Soho Haven. The pre-cursor to Projective Space, one of a few awesome coworking communities in NYC which I’ve been lucky to be a part of. The Hungarian Cultural Center was (and is still) on the fifth floor of that same building on Broadway between Grand and Howard where Soho Haven had its run. That’s where the next step of my search began.
After a wine and cheese party for a Hungarian author whose name I forget, I asked one of the staff members of HCC if they could help me read through the listing. They excitedly said “of course!!” and we arranged to meet up the next day. Once they’d verified for me that the postcard was what it seemed, could only be bought and shipped within Hungary, and was available for all of roughly eight dollars US, I turned to one of my few native Hungarian acquaintances living in NY at the time.
It was a longshot they’d know how to get past the next set of obstacles, and a sense of profound defeat started to creep in. But, I hadn’t counted on them enlisting their father and sister in the effort. Both still lived in the old country.
Three years later I’m sitting here now with this postcard on the table in front of me while I write this. Along with an excellent book on photography in Budapest on my bookshelf, that came as a bonus gift from the father.
Kellner was our original family name. Or, as original as any other in a confusing (maybe intentionally secretive) history I know too little about. I remember my grandmother telling me we changed our name to Kende during the war hoping to avoid Nazi attention. Years later, my own research helped me understand a simple version of why they might have thought that would work.
The name Kende belongs to one of the two original leaders in the pre-Catholic Hungarian dual-king system. The Kende and the Gyula. My family would have figured that’s about as Hungarian a name as it gets. Despite how rarely it’s used in modern Hungary, for some reason.
When I was 7, the talk we had in her hallway as she showed me the tattoo on her arm says enough about how well that idea worked out.
I’ve been told my family ran a network of inns for travelers and vacationers like the one in the postcard. They lost everyone and everything to the holocaust. After the war, my grandparents were able to rebuild to some extent, to escape only with my very young father and uncle in hand as they walked across the border into Austria after the failed anti-Soviet revolution of ‘56. Finding their way to New York, they made a respectable life for their new and much smaller family by opening a restaurant near Columbia University, The Green Tree.
I’ve met so many people decades later still filled with warmth when remembering those days. They knew me as that little restaurant brat who would steal sour cherry soup from the kitchen. (It was way tastier than any cherry milkshake you could ever imagine.)
I can’t say all that much has changed.
I’ll pause most days noticing in a moment how richly it feels like I’m coming full circle. My work and life blend into these continuously unfolding tastes. Food. Culture. Community. Mulátsag. That driven itch to overcome the borders of impossibility, small and large. It’s something about these stories we share between us that fill every day with expression, experience, and a slightly better understanding of where we might go next.
And, I keep coming back to this question throughout: Is pioneering—entrepreneurship—a thing that’s in our histories, or do we make our own way?
For me, the answer is always “yes”. With a vision of postcards to a distant future.
~
Postcard postscript: Can you imagine who your great-grandchildren will be in 2086? How will what you are doing today influence the myths and stories that drive them?
