I have known Joseph "Joe" B. Juhasz for just over a eleven years. Actually, the exact date I first met him was August 8, 2011. I had just moved to Denver. My friend and roommate Scott Sworts had been a student of Joe's (Joe called his long-term pupils his "children") and first introduced me to Joe's work. About a year prior to meeting Joe, Scott had sent me Joe's writings on Psychology Today, which he would later be removed from posting owing to a controversial post about "better dead than sad." Scott and I had lunch with Joe that fateful day in Boulder. The first thing Joe said to me when Scott said, "This is Patrick and he's like one of my children," Joe would shout, "Goddamn, a motherfucking grandson!" (He has many actual grandchildren, but an intellectual grandchild appears to be rare, I suppose). Over the years I have had the opportunity to get to know Joe better via his "Putty Club" group discussions, we also taught architecture at Community College of Denver together for a couple of semesters, and some off and on conversations throughout the years.
Realizing that Joe is not exactly young, I felt it was necessary to just sit down and have a talk with him. One day Joe will pass from this world — he won't die, he will just go home. Joe is one of those strange souls, someone so original, so inimitable, you don't imagine they will die. He will just move onto something else that isn't this petty mortal coil. He just came down here for a lifetime to slum-it-up. So to interview him on his life and works, it seems time is of the essence. On a cool afternoon at Joe's home in Boulder, Saturday, September 17th, 2022, Joe and I had coffee and we talked. At this time, I was mostly interested in his early life, because one could spend thousands of hours talking with Joe. There is plenty out there on his later life, but it seems more critical to know his early life first. Over the years of knowing Joe, I have gotten tidbits of info about his life in Hungary, escaping persecution, immigrating to America, but I have never really heard his early life narrated. And as is Joe's usual style, he interjects commentary, interpretations, personal perceptions, et al into the overall narrative. You don't just get the facts when you talk to Joe; you get an education in American and European culture, history, and sociology. The following is what Joe told me:
Joe was born Juhászi József Borisz Brúnó Béla Arnold Frigyes. In Eastern Europe, the last name comes first. So his Western name is Joseph Boris Juhasz. All the accents get dropped. His name is as much a part of his identity as any other characteristic about him. As I recall some years ago Joe said the spelling of the name Juhász was a kind of Hungarian shibboleth. Juhász is Hungarian for "shepherd," so the deliberate misspelling of the name called attention to one as an outsider. His father was born Haas Vilmos (Western: William Juhasz). Joe's eldest brother was born Haas Ferenc (Francis Juhasz), his second oldest brother was born Juhasz Laszlo (Lester Shepherd), and Joe was born Juhászi József. The changes in spellings were attempts by Hungarian hospitals and government to designate them as not actually being Hungarian. The reason for this was their Jewish heritage.
Joe's father was of a long line of wealthy German-Hungarian Jewish high bourgeois. His mother (Mary Christianus Juhasz, Eastern: Christiánusz Mária) was quarter-Jewish, with her maternal grandfather being Jewish, and was similarly of high bourgeois background. This is complex for Joe's Jewish identity. Jewish custom is matrilineal, so one's Jewish heritage comes from the mother. Though his father was fully Jewish, to Jewish communities this did not matter. Even his mother was not considered Jewish, as her Jewish heritage came from her grandfather, so neither her nor her mother were considered Jewish. As I remember Joe describing years ago, mother is fact, father is myth. In other words, there were people who saw you come out of your mother, so there are eyewitnesses that your mother is your mother, but there are no eyewitnesses for the father. Even DNA proof is still another "story/myth" without eyewitness account that your father is your father.
However, to gentiles this did not matter, as they collectively considered both the father and the mother in establishing the extent to which one is Jewish. Effectively, Joseph and his brothers (to crib a Thomas Mann book title) was considered five-eighths Jewish, period. The boys were "aware of [their] topsy-turvy status," and "became victims of [their] contradictory identities," Joe says.
Joe is the youngest of three boys by many years. His middle brother, Lester, was born 27 September 1929, whereas Joe was born in Budapest on 30 January 1938. The reason for the gap was that his parents were separated, but not divorced. His father had been in Belgium for "a long stay," and would return to Budapest in late 1936. He and Mary would end their separation and she would become pregnant at the age of 40. They had previously planned to immigrate to Canada, but with Joe on the way, they abandoned these plans. Joe tells me "they felt stuck in Hungary." William had already converted to Catholicism, yet in spite of this, Hungary was becoming more intensely anti-Semitic, and was beginning a process of restricting Jewish civil rights. And let's be clear, Joe Juhasz is a Holocaust survivor. They remained in Hungary throughout the Holocaust, with increasing severity of anti-Jewish legislation, culminating in genocide in 1945.
Public schools in Hungary would not reopen until the fall of 1945. As as result, Joe began his formal schooling a year late (age seven, rather than six). He would complete elementary school in the spring of 1948 and was subsequently admitted into the Piarist Street Gimasium — i.e. Gymnasium, which is term used in Germany, Hungary, Austria, et al to denote higher primary schools that prepare students for university. His elder brothers had attended this school. He was initially eligible to attend a Catholic school, but in the Catholic schools became nationalized in the summer of 1948, so he started secondary school at Piarist Street Gimasium.
In November 1948, Joe's father and eldest brother were smuggled out of Hungary to Vienna. Joe, his middle brother, and mother were "left behind" in Hungary, along with his eldest brother's wife and children. Joe uses the term "left behind." He describes it — in his own words as "paranoid" — as something like a hostage situation. His father and brother were permitted to leave, but someone had to be "left behind" to ensure a tie back to Hungary, and Austria had the father and eldest brother as hostages as well. On December 26th, Joe, Lester, and Mary would be smuggled out of Hungary to Vienna in the trunk of American diplomat Steven Koczak's 1947 Plymouth (this event is actually recounted in Anna Koczak's memoir, A Single Yellow Rose, 2012). Joe is now 10 years old, and he describes this time as being "literally in the Vienna of The Third Man [film, 1949], a city of spies, devastation, and double-dealings." In the spring of 1949, Francis would smuggle his wife and children out of Hungary, and they and the rest of the Juhasz family would successfully reach the American Occupation Zone of Austria. Here, Joe is briefly enrolled in the fifth grade of a Hungarian language school in Salzburg. There in Salzburg, Francis and his family would move into separate quarters, and then later immigrate to America on their own.
In 1950, William, Mary, Lester, and Joe would move to Rome, Italy. During this year in Italy, the family would spend a considerable amount of time with the family of Sándor Márai in Naples. Joe would not attend school or receive formal education during this year. Later in the year, Lester would immigrate to America and eventually receive a full scholarship to attend Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. In March 1951, William, Mary, and Joe would immigrate to the United States.
Joe and his parents would reside for a few weeks on the Upper West Side of New York City and then move to 88-11 34th Avenue, Jackson Heights, Queens. Shortly thereafter, Joe spends the spring of 1951 to the summer of 1952 in Fort Ord, California, where his eldest brother was teaching Hungarian in the Army Language School (today known as the Defense Language School) in Monterey, California. Joe recalls it being a hybrid environment at the "axis" of "Carmel, Monterey, Fort Ord." Fort Ord is a military base, and Monterey was still "a little Steinbeckian," and Carmel was "already an artist colony." Joe and his older brother would wander through this California that included The Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch by Henry Miller, as well as the San Francisco of the Red Diaper Babies.
This is typical of Joe. Films and novels oftentimes frame his description of things. For instance, the first time I interviewed Joe about his friendship with Douglas Darden, I brought him a slow-cooked goat leg from my goat stock. I birthed, raised, slaughtered, and processed this goat myself. So Joe asked if this goat was a Pan or a Satyr (he was a Satyr). When Joe describes his memories of Darden, he described him in terms of the poem in Nabokov's Pale Fire: "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; / I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I / Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky." The name of Joe's discussion group, Putty Club, comes from a Hungarian children's book called The Boys of St. Paul Street, from which the term "putty club" has become a Hungarian idiom for a group that exists to maintain pointless rituals. Such is Joe.
So here in California, Joe is experiencing the end of the Steinbeck era of immigration to California as an agricultural paradise, but also frequently met with hostility to outsiders. But the area is well settled and established at this point, hence the existence of Fort Ord, a military presence. The essence of "paradise" in the area is evident in Miller's book title, namely the oranges that grow in Hieronymus Bosch's Paradise of Earthly Delights. The Steinbeckian essence of the Californian paradise, the immigration of peoples from the Midwest, is indicative of one aspect Miller's book, but also the isolation and solitude felt at Big Sur, which today is still very isolated, not to mention he sent his French buddy away to Monterey. At the same time, there was an entire generation in San Francisco that grew up in households that were sympathetic to communism (red diaper babies). It is a strange mixing of peoples and cultures and politics in the area. It is this mixing and dialectics that Joe is experiencing in formative years of his life as an immigrant himself, but also one that is anti-communist.
In the fall of 1952, Joe would return to Jackson Heights and start sixth grade at St. Joan of Arc Primary School. He would not graduate there due to an intercession of a close family friend, Robert A. Graham, where he would be admitted to Xavier High School in the fall of 1954. Xavier High is a Jesuit military high school in Manhattan. While there, Joe describes himself as "an icon of the successful immigrant." He would be the New York State Debate Champion in his junior year. He letters (i.e. gets his varsity letter) in swimming all four years at Xavier. He was the editor of the school literary magazine. He was an officer in the Xavier regiment. He was a National Merit Scholar and a GM Scholar. Et cetera. His resume there is quite extensive.
Xavier was at the boundary of the Greenwich Village scene of the 1950s. He was a marginal participant in that world, as well as an active member of the Catholic Workers movements on the Lower East Side, while commuting back and forth to the conservative world of Jackson Heights. Through his father he is also closely associated with the vigorous literary and scientific Hungarian community in New York, which at that time was "committedly anti-Communist." There was also an individual of some renown in the New York Broadway scene (Joe could not remember his name), with whom Joe would be in his employment in the summer of 1956, which put Joe at the edges of the Broadway theater scene of the 1950s. Throughout the rest of that man's life, Joe would receive fourth row center tickets to the opening night of most Broadway shows. Joe it appears has kept every single playbill from these broadways, as his bookshelves, which line his entire home, is littered with numerous playbills over many decades.
Joe would become an American citizen during his senior year of high school. At the same time, in October 1956 the Hungarian Revolution would take place. Joe would make patriotic recordings for Radio Free Europe during the Revolution. In the end, in spite of the Truman Doctrine the US did not intervene on behalf of the "liberated" Hungarian government. Effectively, when Harry S. Truman was President, he pledged and Congress would later support that any nations under threat of communist control and was fighting to maintain or institute democracy, the US would provide financial and military aid. This did not happen in Hungary. The revolt would be suppressed and the Soviet Union was able to recapture Hungary. This event was formative to the entire Juhasz family who were and had been committed to Western oriented interventionists. In the spring of 1957 a flood of liberal-minded Hungarian refugees came to the US. As a response, Joe taught an English class — while still in high school — for these newly arrived refugees.
In his senior year, Joe would receive a number of scholarships to university and he makes the decision to not attend a Catholic university. In spite of his disappointment with America's response to the October-November Revolution, he remains a committed assimilated American and in preference to academic scholarships (e.g. a full-ride to Columbia University or MIT) he accepts an ROTC scholarship to Brown University, which he enters in the fall of 1957.
Brown University during the years of his attendance (1957 to 1961) still had much of that "frat boy" culture of the traditional "Ivies" (i.e. Ivy League). In fact, although he didn't hide his Jewish heritage, Joe would become a member of Delta-Tau-Delta Fraternity in his sophomore year. Joe describes Brown at the time as an equal number of "gentleman's Cs" and "overachievers" — albeit the term "gentleman's C" does not carry the same meaning today as it did in the 1950s (back then it designated someone who did not spend all their time getting straight A's, i.e. is not at university just to excel in academics; today the term designates someone who is of wealthy background and as a result gets a passing grade, a C, though they did not earn it).
At Brown, just as at Xavier, Joe was a star debater. He and his close fraternity brother Colston Chandler decided to go to a nearby high school, Hope High School, to start a debate club there. Joe and Chandler founded the Hope High School Debating Society, and it is in this club that Joe would meet his first future wife, Suzanne Hecht. Suzanne is a renowned author of dozens of books, and though she and Joe are divorced today, she still goes by Suzanne Juhasz owing to the fact she has published so many books under that name.
Joe initially entered Brown University to study engineering. Freshmen weren't required to pick a specific branch of engineering, but nonetheless at the end of his freshmen year he would switch to psychology.
At this time, Joe began to get tired. We had meticulously talked and combed through his early life over a few hours. I was wearing out and clearly Joe was as well. So we finished our coffees and decided we would pick back up and discuss his young adulthood at a later date.
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