Adapted from a presentation at the American Hungarian Educators Association
Annual Conference
University of California - Berkeley
May 2009

My mother and I were having lunch together one day when I asked her how her parents met. She told me that at a village dance in Hungary, my future grandfather was dancing with a young woman, when he noticed another young woman standing on the edge of the dance floor. He asked his dance partner "Who is that girl with the pretty blue eyes?" She answered that the girl was her own sister. My future grandfather danced the next dance with the girl with the pretty blue eyes, and that was that.

My grandmother's rejected sister lived not far from us when I was a small child. Because she never married, I began to wonder what her life must have been like if she had fallen in love with my grandfather, even though he married someone else, which is how The Other Sister began.

Growing up in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in a mixed neighborhood filled with three generations of Hungarian, Polish and Italian families, my cultural givens included paprika as the only necessary adjunct to salt and pepper on the spice shelf; waking up to the smell of sautéed garlic on Saturday mornings; and dumplings in all shapes, sizes and fillings as both comfort food and ethnic haute cuisine. Other aspects of normal life in my neighborhood were that Italian grandmothers always wore black; Polish and Hungarian grandmothers always wore flowered-print dresses; all grandmothers crocheted doilies or embroidered pillowcases or sewed aprons; all cooked superbly; not one could read an English-language newspaper. My grandparents listened to the local radio station play Hungarian violin music, and they subscribed to Magyar-language newspapers, which is why I know how important those papers were to them and to the other people in the Hungarian neighborhood.

Sadly, my grandfather died when I was a little girl; my grandmother lived until I was in college. My grandmother and I were as close as we could be, considering her broken English and my inability to speak more than a word or two of Magyar-and I mean that literally: igen, nem. My mother and my aunt were bilingual, which came in handy any time there was family gossip. As a budding writer eager for material, I found this exceptionally frustrating. But, as so often happened in the 1950s, my parents made the decision not to raise us in a bilingual household. The "melting pot" had absorbed us. Yet we celebrated Independence Day not only with hot dogs and hamburgers, but also with szalonna bread. On Thanksgiving, we had the quintessentially American turkey dinner-always with fresh and smoked kolbász on the side.

When I started writing The Other Sister, I had two pieces of information: the story of how my grandparents met, and the variety of cherries they grew in their yard in Highland Park, New Jersey, when my mother was a little girl. When I started my research for the book, I was living in Maryland, so I began by coming back to New Jersey to visit the libraries at the American Hungarian Foundation and Rutgers University. Later, when I was teaching at the University of Delaware, I was able to continue my research there. This was just before the Internet became a household word, and several years before the World Wide Web put so much information on our computer screens. I have pages of smeary printouts from microfilm records, because I needed to learn about life in the first half of the 20th century. How much did a living room sofa cost in 1911? What did women's hats look like in1920? Which baseball teams were playing? Which movies? All the details of everyday life, I had to look up.

One of my favorite references was Children of Ellis Island: This Side of the Rainbow, written by Yolan Varga in collaboration with her brother Emil (New Brunswick, NJ: I. H. Printing, 1988). This book helped me in two ways: it described in beautiful detail how different life was in America for the immigrants, showing me that things I took for granted in my childhood-like a sheet of linoleum on the kitchen floor-were minor miracles to factory workers like my grandfather. It also reminded me of a shopping trip I once took with my grandmother, which I was able to recreate in a scene in The Other Sister:

Margit paused before the door of the poultry shop and took one last deep breath of fresh air before stepping inside. A small bell rang over her head as she opened the door, where she stood for a moment to let her eyes adjust to the dimness. Before her, on either side of a central aisle and as high as the top of her hat, were stacked rows of wooden cages. Each cage held three or four fowl: white spring chickens and brown ones, fat capons, a few ducks, and in one corner a solitary tom turkey who by himself filled one large cage. Feathers swirled around her feet as Margit walked slowly past the cages, peering in to find the birds with the brightest eyes and the cleanest feathers. Chickens clucked and squawked as she passed, holding her skirt so it wouldn't brush against the grubby cages.

At the end of the aisle was the store's counter, and beyond that the back room where the birds were decapitated, dipped in boiling water, and plucked. (The Other Sister, 19-20)

When I read that scene during the book's launch at the American Hungarian Foundation, more than half the audience told me they had experienced the same thing. My sister later said, "Grandma took me to the chicken store, too!"

Without resources like Children of Ellis Island, and the newspaper ads and articles that helped me understand life in New Brunswick before 1950, I would have had a hard time creating the sense of culture and community the book depicts. My grandmother was dead long before I started the book; my aunt and mother passed away before I had finished. Neither one ever saw a copy of the manuscript. My first reader was my best friend Catharine Cookson, whose mother's maiden name was Juhasz. It was Cathie who named one of my characters, the day she was telling a family story and exclaimed, "Everyone has an Aunt Zsuzs." Sadly, Cathie, too, never saw the finished book. She died of breast cancer in 2004.

The fast pace of contemporary life is not conducive to the culture I grew up in. It takes hours to make rétes, kifli and kalács, or homemade egg noodles for soup, or that Easter cheese that hangs from the kitchen faucet all night, dripping whey from its cheesecloth wrapping. It takes time to sew a pretty border on an apron, to embroider a pillowcase, to crochet a queen-sized blanket. It takes time to make a family memory, time to fill a scrapbook, time to sort through your dead mother's pots and pans, her clothes, her doilies.

It takes time to write a novel, too, but writing it brought me closer to my grandparents' generation. I knew these women as old widows who scrubbed the sidewalk in front of their house and called out "Jo, reggel!" when they came to visit. But years before I was born, they were very young and very courageous, leaving all that was familiar to travel to a strange new country. Their church, their language and their newspapers helped bind them into a community. Their hard-working hands created a home in which they raised their family, who in turn raised families of their own. I am proud to be their descendent, and I hope that The Other Sister will always honor them.