Jewish Journal

The heart and the drive

by Tom Teicholz

July 3, 2008 | 11:33 am

Hatschek Bela.

The very sound of my great-grandfather's name brings a smile to my face.

In Hungarian, last names go first, so although Bela was his first name, he has always been Hatschek Bela to me -- all one name -- a legendary figure in our family, a celebrated forebear about whom my mother and grandmother told stories.

He was famous for being the first man in Hungary to own a car, and my grandmother kept a clipping from the Royal Hungarian Automobile Society with a picture of him seated at the controls of his Benz with a little girl on the rear rumble seat. Beneath the photo was the caption in Hungarian, German and French, proclaiming "Hatsek Bela le premier automobiliste Hongrois sur son voiture Benz en 1895."

The picture always fascinated me. My great-grandfather sits at the control of his open-air Benz looking, with his dark beard and mustache, like Sigmund Freud, smoking a cigar and wearing his homburg tilted at a rakish angle, as well as a suit -- perfectly tailored to show his starched white cuffs. I also loved looking at the little girl sitting at the rear of the vehicle, gazing at the camera like a little doll in her pinafore and large hat -- that was my grandmother, Adrienne, whom I only knew as an old woman.


My grandmother and mother used to tell stories about Hatschek Bela. From their stories, I took him to be debonair, slightly eccentric, with a healthy sense of humor.

Regarding the famous Benz, the story told in our family is that, one day, Hatschek Bela left on a trip. He disappeared for a few weeks, without anyone really knowing why or where he was going. When he returned, he did so with the vehicle -- transported on a train in its own car. But wait -- there's more: Hatschek did not return alone. He brought back a mechanic from Germany, as well, to care for it.

The car was a curiosity in Budapest. The most famous apocryphal story about Hatschek Bela and the car involves no less grand a personage than Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph. As the story goes, the emperor was visiting Budapest. He was standing on a balcony reviewing a parade when he heard a loud explosion -- he hit the deck, fearing it was an assassination attempt. But someone said, "Don't worry, that's just Hatschek Bela in his car."

I once tried to research this story. All that I could confirm was that the Emperor Franz Joseph did visit Budapest as part of the 1896 celebration of 1,000 years of Hungary's nationhood. However, it does seem possible that the emperor would be reviewing crowds, and that there would be a parade, and that the car would be shown off in some fashion.


Hatschek Bela died when my mother was just a child. But she remembered him as handsome, always well dressed. And he was vain. He was interested in new inventions. He was fond of having family portraits taken -- there is a story that he gave one to my grandmother. Inscribed on the back, it said: Who are these people?

My grandmother, Adrienne Hatschek Saar Morvai Bogner (she married several times), was the family archivist. She kept a leather portfolio filled with yellowing documents that held the birth, marriage and death records of her family. When she died, it passed to my mother, who really wasn't all that interested. But I was. So the portfolio came into my possession.

Here's where my research began. One day, several years ago, I sat down to sort through the documents that charted our family tree. From the crumbling yellow pages with handwritten entries, the story of my family emerged.

I learned that Hatschek Bela was born Oct. 25, 1858, in Budapest, the son of Max (Miksa) Hatschek and Julia Boscovitz Hatschek. His father, Max, was a medical doctor, an optician. They lived at 13, Palatinus, in Pest -- an address in the center of the city.

On July 4, 1886, a 28-year-old Hatschek, who by then had become an optician like his father, was married to Gizella Back. She was just 17, according the marriage certificate, the daughter of Fulop Back and Jeannette Reitzer Back. They were married at the Dohány Temple in Budapest (Budapest's largest temple, akin to Temple Emmanuel in New York, or Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles).

My mother always claimed that her great-grandfather, Fulop Back, had been rashe kol (head of the Jewish community in Budapest), and that he was a great rabbi. However, when I visited the Jewish Community Center in 2003, a list of Budapest's rashim kol does not include a Fulop Back. Furthermore, on Hatschek Bela's wedding certificate Fulop Back is listed as a merchant.

I found two possible explanations: The list of rashim kol in Budapest's Jewish Community Center does list a Jozef Boscovitz, who was president of the Jewish community between 1851 and 1858. As Hatschek Bela's mother's maiden name was Boscovitz, perhaps her father was rashe kol and my mother got the sides of the family wrong.

Another is that Fulop was related to Joseph Bach (1784-1866), an important Talmud teacher from Old Buda. He was the first preacher of the Jewish community of Pest, and the first to preach sermons in German rather than Yiddish.

In any event, this was the marriage of two members of Budapest's rising Jewish middle class. The evidence is that Dr. Mayer Kayserling married them at the Dohány Temple.

"Jewish Budapest: Monuments, Rites, History" (Central European University Press, 1999), explains that the Dohány Temple, which had been consecrated in 1859, a year after Hatschek's birth, was symbolic of the rise and self-importance of Pest's Jewish community and their intention to be fully integrated members of the Hungarian nation. The Dohány is a magnificent Moorish-style edifice that can hold 3,000 visitors, where Budapest's version of Reform Judaism, called Neolog, was observed. Although the Dohány had a rabbi, Samuel Kohn, who delivered sermons in Hungarian, they also had Kayserling, who joined the temple in 1879 and was a German Jewish scholar. As subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the majority of the congregation still preferred their sermons in German. Kayserling remained with the Dohány until his death in 1905 -- long enough to see Hatschek Bela in his automobile.

The documents reveal that both Bela and his father, Max, were opticians, a fact that intrigued me. Turning again to "Jewish Budapest," I learned that one of the important early prominent figures in Budapest's Jewish history is Ignac Hirschler (1823-1891), a famous ophthalmologist. He was elected president of the Hungarian Jewish Congress in 1868-1869, was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, as well as a member of Hungary's Upper House of Government and president of the Jewish community.

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