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When I Was in First Grade My Father Ripped Up My Homework
And it was his greatest moment as a father and a guardian of my young mind
During the last dragging years of the Cold War, I was just entering grade school. My mom was American, but my father was a Hungarian immigrant. And he wasn’t just Hungarian, he was a Hungarian nuclear physicist fluent in English, Spanish, and Hungarian. He had family still behind the Iron Curtain whose letters were sent to us with words cut out of them by the secret police. The one time he went to visit family he was briefed beforehand by the CIA on how to evade an abduction and what to do if he was captured. My mother, who he had married before the rest of his family even had a chance to meet her, was instructed on this visit to dress and style her hair like the Hungarians and try to blend in as much as a nearly six foot tall redhead who spoke only a few words of the language could.
Later I learned that my father had received his prestigious education in America because having received secret information that the Russians planned to execute my grandfather, my grandparents grabbed my father and the accordion and bicycled across a minefield to freedom. An uncle driving me across the border between Austria and Hungary around the time of my 16th birthday pointed out above the wildflowers dotting the…
