Return of the prodigal father and son.

It was half a century ago that World War II ended. And the recent cerebrations and remembrances have led my mind back to the trip to Eastern Europe I took some months ago with my father, climaxing with a visit to Hungary, to Budapest, to the very building in which he was born. My father was returning home, for the first time, 64 years later.

I fully recognized the emotional volatility of a trip like this, but I hoped there would be a rich payoff if we experienced it together. And hell, we'd get Prague and Vienna as part of the pack age.

I felt a special affinity for Prague, the warmth of its people and its story book melange of architectural styles. Especially compelling to me was the Jewish quarter, where 360,000 Jews were forced to live, to suffer pogroms, and to bury 12,000 of their people virtually on top of one another in a two acre cemetery that is interlaced with monuments like haphazard stone teeth.

The beauty and emotion I experienced in Prague had been intensified by my lack of sleep, thanks to my father's being a world crass snorer. Growing desperate, I took my skinny Hotel Diplomat mattress (Bush and Clinton may have stayed there but not in our room) and bedded down in the tub.

We got by without throttling each other, thanks to ear plugs for me and a diplomatic night of drinking at U Fleku, a former monastery from the 1400s and now a beer hall, where we both got giddy on borovishka, a liqueur made with twenty herbs and potent enough to stun an ox.

My father, Doctor Andrew Schreiber, is 76 years old and, while he looks the handsome picture of tanned and robust health, walking up steep inclines to Czech castles proved not especially agreeable for him. Neither did other aspects of our trip, which he let the tour director and anyone else within hailing distance know about in a distinct fashion. To describe it as objectively as possible, Dad was taking his American standard of living and imposing it on Eastern Europe. He was, in a word, cranky.

He did not care for the brusque demeanor of some people in Austria, even using the word Nazi with a somewhat alarming regularity and loudness, I thought. But I reminded myself of where the man had come from--a Hungary be sieged by the virulently anti-Semitic nationalist movement the Nyilas (nee loash) or Arrow Cross. His father, a wine merchant, had to become an Orthodox rabbi to get an entry visa from the U.S. State Department, so as not to be a burden on the economy.

My father and the rest of his family arrived in the United States on Christmas Eve, 1929, just in time for the Depression. Yet the colorful holiday lights of New York harbor provided such a thrill that he turned to his mother and remarked, "I'm impressed. Look at all the trouble they went to for us"

I'm the one who is impressed now by the man who, as a boy, had to use his soccer skills to kick his way out of attacks by anti Semitic Hungarian toughs. My father is a man grounded in accomplishment--from getting into the prestigious Art Students League at City College in this teens to winding up in Who's Who in America, having started the special education program for schools in California.

I therefore tend to go easier on him, even when he complains out loud about the lack of ability in a male singer in period costume who is not doing justice to Mozart. As a few Viennese turn back to look at us, I shrivel in my seat at the ornate and overly expensive Hofburg Konzerthall.

But a previously unseen awe came over my father as we first entered Budapest from its southern border. He took immediate note of my comment that the district was most ironically named Rubin. It was the maiden name of my dear mother, to whom he had been married for 35 years, until lung cancer took her in 1985.

Everything about being in his birth place seemed laden with meaning. The minute I turned on the television in the Hotel Helia, MTV was playing "Some times Always," a song by the group Jesus and Mary Chain which contains the lyrics: "You are a lucky son.... i You went away but you came back."

And that feeling of luck or fate--really a collision of feelings--over whelmed my father as we stood in front of 43 Acacia Street, in the ruined inner city of Budapest. We sadly surveyed the crumbling facade of his former residence, the exposed wires, chunks of missing sidewalk, the czarnok or market where he and his best friend Sandor ran from the bullies who meant to break open their heads. I asked him if he wanted to go up to the third floor and ring the bell of the apartment where he had lived.

He shook his head somberly. "If I go in there," he said, "it'll break my heart"

I gently guided him to a restaurant across the street, where we composed ourselves over some tea. But on the walk back to the Elizabeth Street Metro station, he ruminated on the graffiti, the abandoned buildings, and the certainty that most of his childhood acquaintances must have perished in the Holocaust. Even stopping by the New York Kavehaz, its elegant, dark wood fin de siecle interior still used as a period film location, did not sway my father from his own conscience, his own doubts.

"How is it," he asked me with to tally uncharacteristic vulnerability, "that I survived? Why was my father the one in our neighborhood who decided to go to America? I don't under stand why I wasn't one of the ones who died."

"You can't question fate, Dad." I put my arm around his strong but now bowed shoulders. & "You can only be thankful" I smiled at the gentle joke that came to mind. "And believe me, I sure am thankful"

His mood later improved, as he drank both his wine and mine during an enchanting, nighttime Danube cruise and, around midnight, stood with me on the wind swept Citadel, overlooking the lights of the entire city.

Wisely, we saved something positive for the end--a side trip of our own to the quaint artists' colony of Szentendre (Saint Andrew) on the outskirts of Budapest.

Andor was not only Dad's Hungarian name; it was the name of the cabbie who drove us in search of the summer home in which my father had lived. There were no street names in those days, and all Dad had as a guidepost was the memory of the Catholic church that had been down the street, which he'd painted as a boy. Andor said there were three churches in town but only one was Catholic. And sure enough, after walking up the road from the house of worship, my father stopped in front of a little white cottage with green trim and a chicken coop. Someone had stenciled a heart on one of its stucco walls.

"Brad, this is it. This is my house" As

I took pictures, a wizened old man emerged from the house, and I told Dad to talk to him in Hungarian. He re fused, but I was adamant. "We've found your home and the guy who lives here is staring at us. How many chances are we going to get to do this?"

They traded stories and information with gusto for a half-hour. There was elation on the part of my father when kindly Bela Panisz confirmed there used to be a walnut tree on the ridge above the house.

I asked my father to translate the conversation as Andor drove us back to the village to shop and dine. I had squabbled with my father, had seen him out of breath, angry with the mechanics of the tour and pained by his recollections of his youth in Budapest. I strained to find something that would make him feel good about our taking the trip. I asked him about the walnut tree.

"Gypsies would camp out under that tree" His eyes were happy and far away. "I would sit outside at night and watch them sing and dance and play violins around their campfire"

The positive memories of his youth came back with my prodding, starting with that missing tree; those Gypsies; the artesian well with Roman inscriptions; the cherry, apple, and peach trees; and Liska, the family goat. And as we sat in an outdoor cafe, on a charming, curved, cobblestone street in Szentendre, listening to church bells chime in the distance, my father whisked away, with one sentence, the embarrassing comments, the lack of sleep, the hills he couldn't walk, his devastated Acacia Street, the guilt of surviving. He said: "I wouldn't trade this experience for anything I have"

I know now something I didn't know when we began that trip. I think my father went with me to his birth place not so much for a vacation as to reconcile himself with his past. And we wound up attaining something considerably more than both of those things.

I am a lucky son.

Brad Schreiber is an author of humor books and poetry. He also writes theater and film criticism for the L. A. View and the Los Angeles Reader and has had several plays produced.