As Reilly and I go “night nights”, I think about the woman on the left (my uncle’s right side). The photo was taken on July 22, 1989, just before her 76th secular birthday. My parents’ marriage didn’t last, perhaps to her relief in some ways. Had I known that, that would’ve helped. What I do know is that she did what multiple women before her (even her in-law mother, with whom she had differences) did; and what’s lasted well beyond my parents’ marriage and divorce (and also beyond my dad’s second marriage and divorce) is that even though our family is still recovering from a lot of brokenness, she held our family together as much as she could do so.
That she held our family together still makes an impact, especially as I’m writing just past what was her father’s 150th secular birthday (June 7, 2026). The more that I think about it, the more that I realize that her impact was part of why I got into genealogy, for instance. I knew that I wanted to find out if I’m Jewish, and I could’ve been content with knowing that her husband was. Her part of my family history therefore contributed to my wanting to find out what I didn’t even expect that I would find out. I thus came to additionally find out, for example, that she treated me and her grandson with disabilities as human beings and as family members because she knew what being mistreated both within and outside of the family was. She knew the heart of a stranger because our ancestors had been strangers in all of the world, including in Ancient Egypt and in 19th-Century-CE Budapest. She felt the generational effects and the personal effects that the generational effects affected.
She wasn’t a daughter of “Michael and Anna Monka Trudnak”, but of hidden Jews Mihály Nagy Trudnyak (the only and “illegitimate” son of Mihály Trudnyak and Mária Nagy) and Anna Munková (the surviving daughter Anna of Sámuel and Rosalia Korschová Munka). Only later would “Michael Trudnak” be Anna’s husband and their daughter’s father, as Mihály‘s own parents refused to marry in any church even as the Austrohungarian authorities kept persecuting and pestering them; whereas Anna would pass for her previously-baptized sister, and be sent from Újpest to join Budapest-born Mihály Trudnyak in the United States. After a few older daughters came before her, the “daughter of ‘Michael and Anna Monka Trudnak’” would perfectly acceptably get the name of her younger paternal aunt (Mária Nagy, b. 1842 CE) as well as a maternal grandaunt (Mária Korschová Saxová, b. in the 1860s CE). Both were presumably alive by then, although neither name honoree (as far as I know) received the honor of meeting her namesake (Given, as I later found out, that Jews in the Hungarys originally used minhag Sefardi, Michael and Anna presented no conflict in their use of a secular name for “Miriam”. As they were also Ashkenazi Jewish, they also named her for both of his grandmothers—the maternal one of whom certainly did not get the honor of meeting her name honoree, as she died before her daughter Aloysia Nagy Libich died in 1901.).
Bu the way, I don’t exactly know what she’d think of Reilly Rosalita being partially a namesake of her maternal grandmother and of her sister Rosalie (Rosalia Munková’s double name honoree as well as Rosalia Duday Nagy’s name honoree). I can only hope that she’d understand and take it in good humor (which she probably would) when she’d be told that Reilly helps to hold me together on an individual level.
יהי הזיכרון של מרים בת מיכאל וחנה לברכה.
