21. Hungary

“The Paul Street Boys” by Ferenc Molnar.  Translated from the Hungarian by Luis Rittenberg.

I had wanted to read this book ever since it was recommended by a Hungarian colleague.  It is, I was told, the childhood story with which all Hungarians (and many Italians) grow up; a classic tale of boyhood loyalty and schoolyard battles, with a thinly-veiled reference to the Garibaldini.  My curiosity was piqued.

Published in 1906, the plot of the Paul Street Boys is straightforward: a gang of school children in Budapest, who play in an empty plot of land on Paul Street – the grund – must defend their playground from a rival gang of Garibaldi-esque red-shirts.  Along the way there are skirmishes and incursions, traitorous deceptions, great acts of bravery, despair, redemption and tragedy.

When we meet the boys in school at the beginning of the novel, and follow them to the grund, I couldn’t help being reminded of Stefan Zweig’s account of his schooldays (at a similar period in the Austro-Hungarian empire): “School, to us, meant compulsion, dreary boredom, a place where you had to absorb knowledge of subjects that did not seem worth knowing, sliced into neat portions.”  If school is prison, then the grund is freedom: a small strip of land, flanked by woodpiles and a lumber yard which represents, for school boys, the perfect place to play:

“Could there be anything more ideal as a playground?  Certainly, we city boys aspired to nothing finer.  Truth to tell, we could not imagine anything better or more suited to Indian games.  The Paul Street lot was a beautiful piece of flatland; and that made it highly desirable as a substitute for the American prairie.  The back section, the lumberyard, was all else; it was the city, the forest, the rocky mountainous region; that which we wanted it to be on any given day.”

This sense of childhood enjoyment is conjured well; the world is viewed differently when you are a child, adult land becomes repurposed as the backdrop for whatever you imagine.  Such spaces are important when you’re young, they become your own world from which outsiders – be they grown-ups or rivals – are often forcefully excluded.

But “Paul Street Boys” seems to take this one step further, for the boys in the gang, the grund becomes more than just a playground, it is described as the “fatherland”, their hearts swell when they think of it, tears come to their eyes when they consider the prospect of losing it, it becomes an entity much bigger than themselves for which they would gladly fight (and die).  Consider the fleeting thoughts of a gravely ill character, Nemecsek, towards the end of the book: “His tiny head was troubled by the dreadful thought of not seeing the grund again.  Gladly would he leave all earthly things behind, if only he should not have to leave the grund, the ‘precious grund’.”

There’s a simple morality, and emotional manipulation, which inevitably draws you in.  “For goodness’ sake Nemecsek,” I found myself thinking at one point, “why not tell the Paul Street Boys of your bravery with the red-shirts in the Botanical Gardens? Otherwise they’ll think you are a coward and a bounder!”  It’s that kind of thing.

The leaders of both gangs are brave and just.  Boka, the leader of the Paul Street Boys, is a good friend and good General, leading with the consent of his men.  Feri Ats, of the red-shirts, is fierce but fair.  The war is honourable, and fought with chivalry and derring-do, which must have seemed fantastic to the young readers at the turn of the last century.

Reading this in the week my country was thrown into political turmoil, it was difficult not to think of some of the prominent politicians in my own country who – in their knowing appeals to nostalgia and public school bonhomie – seek to embody some of the boys’ own adventure inherent in this book. But the week of protest, condemnation and controversy in my country should show us that schoolyard heroism may not translate well into the complications of the adult world.

The nationalistic tone – a love of homeland embodied in the grund – and the overt militarism of the war between the two gangs can make this an uncomfortable book for many modern readers.  While it is a story of loyalty and honour, of great friendships and youthful innocence, it is hard not to read it as a glorification of something we’ve come to see differently following two world wars and decades of dictatorship in Europe.  We encounter poverty and tragedy, but we are not encouraged to reflect on the consequences of the battle, or ask whether it was all worthwhile.

“The Paul Street Boys” is a book of its time, and we’d be wrong to think of it as anything else.  But, if this is a story of childhood innocence, told before the onset of a turbulent and tragic century, then us modern Europeans should know better and reflect with a more adult eye.  Many of the boys who read “The Paul Street Boys” in the early 1900s would, just a few years later, be fighting in the First World War.  This book may have lead them to expect epic and honourable campaigns, rather than the horror of mass slaughter; they may have expected to have leaders like Boka, and instead got the senile officers of “The Good Soldier Svejk”.  There might still be things to learn from books like this today, but there are also things to forget.  While we might enjoy a bit of escapist schoolboy heroics, we shouldn’t be afraid to grow up.