When My Nephew Tried to Burn Down My Father’s House

How a brat became a hero through an act of courageous rebellion

My father’s family emigrated from Hungary to Venezuela after the rest were gassed by the Nazis in Auschwitz, shot into the Danube by Arrow-Cross fascists, and deported to Siberia by the Russians. Witnesses to pure evil, Holocaust survivors either went the Victor Frankl route and searched for meaning, or turned into assholes. Laszlo Spitz did the latter.

“If I wouldn’t be Jewish,” dad would boast at the dinner table, “I’d be the world’s biggest Nazi!” That might sound like hyperbole, but his rants went beyond the rallying cry of a Semitic Dirty Harry, and became public service annoucements to his own family. The louder he shouted them, the more they came to be true. His misogyny was outdone only by his racism.

In Caracas he played both out by dating only European women, eventually meeting and marrying my mother, a Hungarian-Romanian divorcee with a teenage daughter. He immediately terrorized both to the point my half-sister asked why she hooked up with this maniac. “He’s the best lay I’ve ever had,” our mother candidly explained. Sex sells, and she bought.

Laszlo was also in his early thirties, and doing well for himself. Unable to complete a coherent sentence, he was instead a master draftsman since high school, when the Wehrmacht “recruited” him to work in an office where he met Adolf Eichmann. His own father dying of tuberculosis after the boat ride over, Laszlo had to grow up fast, starting a furniture factory.

Ever since watching Hollywood movies in Budapest, Laszlo wanted to look like Errol Flynn, and live in America. He sported a mustache well, bought a 1956 Ford Thunderbird convertible, and landed a buxom redheaded wife with whom he partied in Havana and Miami Beach, but couldn’t get a visa. The horror, in Caracas he was also surrounded by dark-skinned Latinos.

Sixteen years after leaving Europe, and only a few months before his first and only son was to be born, Laszlo finally got his papers. In retrospect, emigrating again would be the biggest mistake he ever made. Not only did he sell a successful business he couldn’t emulate in the States, but his fun and fantastic wife plummeted into a spiraling postpartum depression.

I was born in Chicago, making me an anchor baby of sorts. Laszlo went from business owner to factory worker, Marianne turned into a complete basket case, while her daughter wisely remained with her own father in South America. From there everything went even further downhill, but that was the world I grew up within, the only frame of reference I had.

My mother never got over her mental illness, and my father never stopped being an asshole. Grandmother Olga helped out when Marianne was institutionalized, her roommate Squeaky Fromme allegedly drawing a portrait of her. Despite it all, I somehow made it to high school. Most families are dysfunctional, our family dysfunctional in its own creepy way.

Kids don’t question parents until their teens, when biologically we’re programmed to leave the cave, breed, then die. Thanks to civilization we now live longer, and adolescence is experienced as a phase, rather than a final destination. Just shy of that teenage tipping point, I tolerated my father because I literally and figuratively didn’t have any hair on my balls.

Juan, my nephew visiting that summer from South America, was several years younger than me, yet didn’t feel bound by that restraint. Laszlo wasn’t his blood relative, further reducing the survival benefit of not going apeshit. Who could blame him? The kid was outraged by what he saw and I had long taken for granted, never knowing anything different or better.

Laszlo had a binary style of communication: silence or rage. Literally and with zero exaggeration, I grew up in a household devoid of conversation. My father didn’t speak to my mother, and my parents didn’t speak to me. The only exchange of information or emotion was in the form of weekly explosions, when Laszlo got triggered and screamed at us. Rinse, repeat.

Enter our visiting South American relatives. Laszlo disliked my half-sister for being the spawn of another man, and hated her for in turn breeding with a native Venezuelan — and a communist revolutionary no less. To rub it in, Juan’s middle name was MEL, an acronym for “Marx, Engels, and Lenin,” as if the Universe had sinistrally conspired against my poor dad.

Our passive-aggressive toxic household of avoidance and aggression thereby became an openly hostile jungle of race hatred, culture clash, and personal animosity. Accustomed to Laszlo’s peccadilloes, my mother, sister, and I rolled with it as same-old same-old, while Juan, new to this amazing shitshow, was having none of it. The runners were soon on their mark.

Being an insufferable brat helped Juan’s cause. He was the kind of kid who threw a fit if he didn’t get what he wanted when he wanted it, an attitude that cofirmed Laszlo’s opinion that the boy was genetically polluted. Juan of course picked up on my father’s sniveling contempt, and channeled it into more shenanigans, creating a feedback loop with an inevitable end.

“Look what I found!” my father shouted in Hungarian, his voice echoing between the suburban Chicago houses. I remember the look of terror on my mother’s face, something baaaad must have happened. “This!” he yelled. “This is my thanks for taking care of everyone — including that little snot-nosed half-breed negrito punk of a lazy Latino communist degenerate!”

Everyone was outside, standing flush with a portion of the wall where a tiny bonfire had just been extinguished, matches discarded, tinder glowing, ash discoloring brick, wisp of smoke still rising. My half-sister held my nephew close, shielding him from Laszlo’s wrath. Wow. As futile as it was bold, Juan tried to burn down my father’s house. Why the fuck didn’t I think of that?