CLCWeb: Comparative Literature
and Culture: A WWWeb Journal ISSN 1481-4374
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©
Purdue
University Pres
Steven Totosy de Zepetnek
And the 2002 Nobel Prize
for Literature Goes to Imre Kertész, Jew and Hungarian
Abstract: In his
paper, "And the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature Goes to Imre Kertész,
Jew and Hungarian," Steven Totosy de Zepetnek presents an introduction
to the recepient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, Imre Kertész,
and his work. Totosy places Kertész's work in the context of Central
European culture and within that in the genre of Central European Jewish
memoir literature. In Totosy's opinion the cultural and social relevance
of Jewish memoir writing today is of particular importance precisely for
the same reasons Kertész articulates when he says, "I am a survivor.
There are few of us left, we guard the memory of the Holocaust. We slowly
disappear and die. And we disappear" (13 October 2002). The relevance of
Kertész and his writing is acute because of the yet again growing
of anti-Semitism in contemporary Central and East Europe. The paper is
written with view of the lack of knowledge in the English-speaking world
about Kertész, Central Europe and Central European culture, Hungarian
culture and literature, and the history of the Hungarian Jewry.
1. In October 2002, Imre Kertész,
resident of Berlin and Budapest and Hungarian citizen received the Nobel
Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy's choice came as a surprise to
many and in various ways and observers of literary affairs including scholars
were taken unawares. In particular the English-speaking world, including
the US, knows little to nothing about Kertész and his work. For
example, the MLA: Modern Language Association of America, the principal
US organization of scholars working in the humanities and of academic institutions
in the humanities, had difficulty to find an expert who would be able to
field queries about the author. American and Canadian newspapers in print
and on the web contain scant and same-source information. The cavalier
attitude towards minor languages such as Hungarian prevails even with the
Swedish Academy: in the first version of the official web site about the
new awardee at The Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates
at <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/index.html>,
the material about Kertész contained several errors in the spelling
of names and in titles of books.
2. The title of my paper calls attention
to several matters I elaborate on in this introduction to Kertész
and his work. The Oscar-type intonation and the association with the event
of an award is tongue-in-cheek about the impending commercialization and
canonization of Kertész and his work. More important is the second
part of the title of the paper, namely "Jew and Hungarian": with this I
signal the fact that Kertész is -- by his own recogntion and by
obvious logic based in his history -- first a Jew who is at the same time
Hungarian and second a Hungarian who is first of all Jewish. This is an
important distinction with regard to Hungarian culture where literature
has always had a political and social function and not necessarily and
primarily an aesthetic one and where, as we can observe after the award
of the Nobel, Kertész is appropriated for the "glory of the nation."
3. Imre Kertész was born in 1929 in
Budapest into a Hungarian-Jewish family. About his family background, his
parents, his early schooling, etc., little has been published although
in some of his texts there are references to an unhappy childhood. As a
fifteen-year old, Kertész is caught in the worst of twentieth-century
history: after Hitler's army occupies Hungary in 1944 and with Eichmann's
final solution the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie (Magyar Királyi
Csendörség) and units of the Hungarian army begin to round
up and murder the Hungarian-Jewish population of Budapest, Kertész
is sent to the nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald.
In 1945 he returns to Hungary and finds work in factory assembly line work,
odd jobs, and later in the press office of the government's ministry of
the steel industry. In the 1950s he begins to write musicals and translates
into Hungarian the works of Nietzsche and Freud, and works as journalist
for the Budapest newspaper
Világosság. In 1951, when
the newspaper begins to adopt communist orthodoxy (as the country as a
whole), he is dismissed. From 1951 to 1953 Kertész does the two
years of obligatory military service after which he decides to devote all
his time to writing. As to employment and income, he makes money with translations,
a in some ways lucrative activity in Hungary during the country's communist
period. In this line of work, he concentrates on German-language authors
such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Elias Canetti, Joseph Roth, and Arthur Schnitzler,
and on translating the works of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund
Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Kertész shares a small apartment
in Budapest with his wife for years and lives under constrained and limited
circumstances. It is in 1960 when he begins to write his autobiographical
novel, Sorstalanság, and finishes it in 1965, with its publication
not until 1975. The book's reception was less than overwhelming although
by the 1980s Kertész's work is recognized as among the best of Hungarian
postmodern prose.
4. To date, Kertész has published
the following:
Sorstalanság
(1975;
Fateless,
trans.
Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson. Evanston: Northwestern UP,
1992. Steg för steg, trans. Maria Ortman. Bromma: Fripress,
1985. Mensch ohne Schicksal, trans. Jörg Buschmann. Berlin:
Rütten & Loening, 1990. Roman eines Schicksallosen, trans.
Christina Viragh. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1996.
Etre sans destin, trans.
Natalia and Charles Zaremba. Arles: Actes Sud, 1997. Mannen utan öde,
trans.
Maria Ortman. Stockholm: Norstedt, 1998). Sorstalanság
has
also been published in Spanish, Dutch, Hebrew, and Italian translations.
A nyomkeresö.
Két regény (1977; The Tracer: Two Novels),
A kudarc (1988;
Fiasko,
trans. György Buda and Agnes Relle. Frankfurt: Büchergilde Gutenberg,
2000. Le Refus, trans. Natalia Zaremba-Huzsvai and Charles Zaremba.
Arles: Actes Sud, 2001. Fiasko, trans. Ervin Rosenberg. Stockholm:
Norstedt, 2000).
Kaddis a meg nem
születetett gyermekért (1990; Kaddish for a Cild not
Born, trans. Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson. Evanston:
Hydra Books, 1997. Kaddisch für ein nicht geborenes Kind, trans.
György Buda and Kristin Schwamm. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1992. Kaddish
pour l'enfant qui ne naîtra pas, trans. Natalia Zaremba-Huzsvai
and Charles Zaremba. Arles: Actes Sud, 1995. Kaddish för ett ofött
barn, trans. Ervin Rosenberg. Stockholm: Norstedt, 1996).
Az angol lobogó
(1991;
The British Flag; Die englische Flagge. Erzählungen, trans.
György Buda and Kristin Schwamm. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1999).
Gályanapló
(1992;
The Galley Diaries; Galeerentagebuch, trans. Kristin Schwamm. Berlin:
Rowohlt, 1993. Galärdagbok, trans. Ervin Rosenberg. Stockholm:
Norstedt, 2002).
A holocaust mint
kultúra. Három elöadás
(1993; The Holocaust
as Culture: Three Lectures).
Jegyzökönyv.
Kertész Imre Esterházy Péterrel (1993; Notebook:
Imre Kertész with Péter Esterházy; Eine Geschichte.
Zwei Geschichten. Imre Kertész mit Péter Esterházy,
trans.
Kristin Schwamm and Hans Skirecki. Salzburg: Residenz, 1994.
Jegyzökönyv.
Meine Rede über das Jahrhundert. Hamburg: Hamburger, 1995).
Eine Zurückweisung
(Buch
und CD zum Brandenburgischen Literaturpreis 1995). Potsdam: Vacat, 1995.
(The Rejection)
Valaki más.
A változás krónikája (1997; Someone Else:
The Chronicle of Change; Ich ein anderer, trans. Ilma Rakusa. Berlin:
Rowohlt, 1998. Un autre. Chronique d'une métamorphose, trans.
Natalia et Charles Zaremba. Arles: Actes Sud, 1999).
A gondolatnyi csend,
amíg a kivégzöosztag újratölt
(1998;
A Thoughtful Moment while the Execution Squad Reloads; Eine gedankenlänge
Stille, während das Erschiessungskommando neu lädt. Essays,
trans. György Buda. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rohwolt, 1999).
A számüzött
nyelv (2001; The Language of Exile).
Sorstalanság.
Filmforgatókönyv (2001; Fateless: The Film Script).
5. Kertész's awards for his work
to date include, in Hungary, the Milán Füst Prize (1983), the
Forintos Prize (1986), the Artisjus Literary Prize (1988), the Attila József
Prize (1989), the Tibor Déry Prize (1989), the 1990 Best Book of
the Year Prize, the Örley Prize (1990), the Soros Foundation's Prize
(1992, 1995), the Sándor Márai Prize (1996), and the Kossuth
Prize and in Germany he received the Brandenburg Prize for Literature (1995),
the Leipzig Book Fair Prize of European Cooperation (1997), the Friedrich
Gundolf Prize (1997), the Jeanette Schocken Prize (1997), the Herder Prize
(2000), the literary award of the weekly Die Welt (2000), the Robert
Bosch Foundation Prize (2001), and the Hans Sahl Prize (2002). In October
2002 Kertész received the Nobel Prize for Literature from the Swedish
Academy.
6. Kertész began
to write his novel
Sorstalanság
(
Fateless) in 1960,
fifteen years after he came back from the concentration camp. After much
tribulation including the then communist government's cenzorship and reluctance
to publish the book because of its topic, the Holocaust, the book was published
in 1975, with its first foreign translation ten years after that, in Swedish
in 1985. It is this novel that brings Kertész eventually recognition
in Germany in particular and that leads to the Nobel Prize: it is the story
of a fifteen-year-old Hungarian-Jewish boy's experiences in nazi concentration
camps. Although the novel is clearly autobiographical, Kertész states
that he "did not write an autobiographical novel" but "a novel using autobiographical
material. You must not think of me as the protagonist of the novel and
if you do, that only proves that I succeeded in writing a good one" (Kertész
qtd. in Adorján and Minkmar 21; trans. Totosy). He continued the
novel in a trilogy, with the novels
A kudarc (
The Fiasco)
(1988), and
Kaddis a meg nem születetett gyermekért (1990)
(
Kaddish for a Child not Born (1997), the latter written in the
technique of stream of consciousness. In the mode of autobiographical fiction
similar to
Fateless, the protagonist is now a middle-aged survivor
of the holocaust whose literary career has been unsuccessful in a failed
marriage with an ex-wife who has her new family and children. The alter
ego of the author does not want children of his own because to bring children
into a world that has allowed the holocaust is impossible (see
Books
and Writers at <
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/kerte.htm>).
7. What is important
to register is that all of Kertész's work is connected to the holocaust
of the Hungarian Jewry. Kertész's commitment to his own experience
as a Jew in the Hungarian and German holocaust and his understanding of
the history of Hungarian Jewry is perhaps best illustrated with Zsuzsanna
Ozsváth's concise articulation of the historical and cultural context
of Miklós Radnóti, one of Hungary's best poets and who was
killed in a forced labour unit of the Hungarian army. Concentrated into
one insufficient sentence: the history of Hungarian Jewry is a horrific
resolution of assimilation and the termination of unparalleled contributions
to Hungarian culture ending in the genocide of 1944: "For many years, most
Hungarian Jews had participated in, and benefited from, the fast-spreading
emancipation and assimilation processes initiated in nineteenth-century
Hungary. Protected by the law of 1867, giving them equal rights, and by
that of 1895, giving them equal religious status, Jews started to live
in considerable freedom in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Grateful for
being tolerated, appreciated, even feeling wanted -- unless, of course,
they showed too deep an attachment to their religious or cultural past
-- masses of Hungarian Jews assimilated to the Hungarian way of life and
became passionately patriotic. But their sense of security changed considerably
after the First World War. The loss of that war, the subsequent violence
created by the commissars of Hungary's Soviet Republic, the rise of the
counter-revolutionary army and its pogroms, and the Trianon Peace Treaty,
which excised two-thirds of Hungary's historical terrain, catapulted the
country into ever new turmoil. Amid chaos and economic collapse, old ideals
of liberalism disappeared and the nineteenth-century tolerance shown toward
the Jews changed into hatred … [but] Magyar was the language of his [Radnóti's]
environment, the language of the great Hungarian poets, whom he loved and
revered, the sound of his earliest nursery rhymes and the words of his
lyrics. He expressed his joy and sorrow in Hungarian; he dreamt in Hungarian;
Hungarian was the language of his people, whose fate and future he felt
to be his own. He conflated his sense of being and identity with those
of other Hungarian poets, and he understood his life in terms of the ethos
and myths of his homeland. In fact, so passionately did he feel about the
country of his birth and his own rootedness in its soil and culture" (Ozsváth
52-55; see also Suleiman 2002; see also Marsovszky at <
http://antisemitismus.juden-in-europa.de/osteuropa/ungarn.htm>).
8. Since the award of
the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature to Imre Kertész, Hungarian media,
politics, as well as the academe, locate Kertész and his work in
the traditional patriotic -- that is, nationalist or at best self-referential
-- context of Hungarian culture and literature thus appropriating Kertész
and his work. This is problematic to say the least. In my view, Kertész's
work ought to be read in the context of Central and East European culture
and within this in the social, historical, and literary relevance of Central
and East European Jewish memoir culture. And here is the crux of the matter:
no culture of Central and East Europe has dealt with its Jewish history
and the Holocaust; not Austria, not Hungary, not Czechia, not Romania,
and so on. And then there is the renaissance of anti-Semitism. In today's
post-communist Hungary anti-Semitism is alive and well and separately from
justified (or not) criticism of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. In fact,
sociologists and Hungarians in general often refer to Hungary as the "Two-Hungarys,"
the perception based on clear lines of division -- roughly speaking and
in the reductionist mode -- between anti-Semites and Judeophiles. In Hungary,
it is said, one does not have the luxury of neutrality or indifference:
one must take sides either for Jews or against (on this, see, e.g., Susan
Rubin Suleiman's
Budapest Diary). Kertész and his work and
now the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his work represent
a problematic situation for Hungary and Hungarian culture for several reasons,
not the least because Kertész himself has said often that he considers
his existence, his life, and consequently his writing belonging to no particular
place or space (see, e.g., Adorján and Minkmar; more on this see
below). It is also true that many Hungarians would vehemently disagree
with the suggestions that they are anti-Semitic. Why, "some of their best
friends are Jews, the only problem is that Jews control the media, the
universities, many industries, the country’s finances, etc."; in other
words, such and similar arguments are precisely those of traditional anti-Semitism.
It is the emotional logic of a people who have often been colonized themselves
but who at the same time have a self-imposed mythology of national virtues
against adversity, a navel-gazing attitude, and certainty that does not
allow for the inclusion of a "foreign," that is, Other, people, even if
they have been an integral part of society for several generations such
as the Hungarian Jewry.
9. Hungarians have been successful in assimilating and incorporating
many other nationalities into their national make-up but only if and when
such Other accepted and recognized all matters Hungarian. Jews have also
been assimilated and integrated -- perhaps in higher numbers than in any
other culture of Europe -- until World War I (the integration and assimilation
of the Hungarian Jewry occurred at large in the nineteenth century. At
the beginning of the eighteenth century, the time from when onward the
Hungarian-Jewish population began to increase, there were about 4000 Jews
in Hungary, living under circumstances similar to those of other countries
at the time). A change arrived with Austria-Hungary's losing the war on
the side of Germany and, briefly put, the country's and its culture's turn
towards racism and intolerance can be explained with the following: with
German nazism next door and Hungary's choice to align itself with Hitler
much of nazism's ideology gained open acceptance in all walks of life.
The rampant intolerance of many things deemed "non-Hungarian" and thus
objectionable is a consequence also of more recent history, namely the
aftermaths of World War I, when in 1919 at the Treaty of Trianon Hungary
lost 60% of its territory and population, with large numbers of Hungarians
in the newly created Czechoslovakia, in Austria, in Romania, and in Yugoslavia.
The alignment with Hitler, at the time, appeared inevitable to most because
of Hungary's history with Germany, the impossibility of alignment with
Stalin's Soviet empire, because of Hitler's expansionism towards the east,
etc. Of course, the new post-1919 intolerance and anti-Semitism had some
"justification" in the minds of many, precisely because the proportional
exuberance of Jewish intelligentsia, Jewish artists, writers, the banking
industry, indeed the relevance of Jews as the main representatives and
in some ways the initiators and creators of the urban bourgeoisie of the
country. But this had reasons obvious to anyone who knew just a bit of
history: for centuries the Hungarian Jewry was not allowed landed property
and were barred from many walks of life (similar to the situation in practically
all of Europe) while the Hungarian gentry, landed or other, considered
business and industry unworthy of interest (in literature, this has found
expression in many ways but without the desired effect to the better).
Add to this the fact that in history Jews are the only people who since
the dawn of time encouraged knowledge, reading and writing, to all members
of their people (instead of using knowledge as privilege) and while in
Europe for example obligatory schooling was not instituted until the late
eighteenth century, how can anyone be surprised that Jews excelled in all
areas of intellectual, artistic, and business activity? It is the educated
mind of the Jew and the logical consequences of excellence resulting from
this that bothered (and still bothers) the Hungarians. Pity. And in my
opinion simply stupid, although as we know well, not exceptional as the
same has been going on elsewhere and continues to go on today. The work
of writers like Kertész -- a rare type because of his total and
consequent devotion to writing and literature -- is thus in my opinion
of great relevance today as literary text and as memory while at the same
time his prose in its literary, sociological, and political contexts suggests
lasting relevance as well, precisely because of its aesthetic literary
content and form, autobiographical content, and as historical and personal
documentary.
10. Jewish memoir culture with
regard to the Holocaust is a prominent genre across several types of cultural
production. As I propose above, Kertész's work needs to be located
and read within this memoir culture but in its larger context of Central
and East European culture. Although there is the danger this way to make
Jewish memoir writing a particular and thus limited and specific type of
text, when read in the Central and East European cultural context, Kertész's
work discloses exceptional qualities and associations which would otherwise
remain hidden or secondary. Kertész suggests himself that he belongs
"to that Jewish literature which came into being in eastern and central
Europe. This literature was never written in the language of the immediate
national environment and was never part of a national literature. We can
trace the development of this literature from Kafka to Celan and to their
successors -- all we have to do is peruse the various emigré literatures.
For the most part, this literature deals with the extermination of European
Jewry; its language may vary, but whatever the language, it can never be
considered a native tongue. The language in which we speak lives as long
as we speak it. Once we fall silent, the language is lost too -- unless
one of the larger languages takes pity on it and lifts it on to its lap,
as it were, as in the pietà paintings" (Kertész "The Language
of Exile," (2002): <<http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,814806,00.html>).
11. Following my earlier
suggestion that Kertész's work can be understood as part of a phenomenon
of Central European culture categorized as Central European Jewish memoir
literature, first I present examples of this genre of writing, in the present
instance texts written in English. My focus on English-language Jewish
memoir literature is for the reason that the "central European" is particularly
prominent in these texts. As John Willett writes in his paper "Is There
a Central European Culture?" "the elements of a new Central European culture
must come from even farther a field than they did before Hitler and Stalin.
We certainly cannot expect them to depend on the spontaneous German-Jewish-Yiddish
tradition that once seemed to link the comedian Peischacke Burstein in
Vilnius with the writer Ettore Schmitz in Trieste: however unforgettable,
the source is barred, buried under the masonry of the great concentration
camp memorials. But the essence of mid-Europe surely is that its cultural
inspiration must come from both East and West, and its role be to test
ideas against one another and use the result in its own creativity" (15).
Willett touches on several issues pertinent to my line of thought. The
importance of Jewish culture in its varied forms on and in Central Europe
is a given. However, while I understand the history of Central European
Jewries tragic as Willet does, I do not find it "barred" and "buried" (on
this, see also Ozsváth). Instead, I understand Central European
Jewries as a quintessential synthesis and expression of Central European
culture very much present and with a future. And my immediate proof is
the Nobel Prize for Kertész. The notion of a "Central European culture"
is a debated notion: in my understanding, Central European culture is an
expression of art, thought, and literature, a world view defined through
a geographical region stretching from Austria and the former East Germany
(incl. Mitteldeutschland) to Romania and Bulgaria, the Baltic countries,
Serbia and the Ukraine, etc., including the Habsburg lands and German influence
and their spheres of interest at various times including now.
12. In contemporary American and Canadian English-language literature,
memoir writing is a genre with a significant and growing corpus. In Central
Europe proper, too, after 1989 and since there has been a large output
of memoirs. In Hungary, for example -- although of course memoirs have
been published under the socialist/communist period -- after 1989 memoirs
of all possible persuasions appeared in large numbers. In English, I find
of particular poignancy André Stein's Hidden Children: Forgotten
Survivors of the Holocaust (1993), a collection of oral histories as
told by child survivors from Central and East Europe. Among recent Holocaust
(auto)biographical histories with a Central European background similar
to those I discuss below, of note is Eugene L. Pogany's
In My Brother's
Image: Twin Brothers Separated by Faith after the Holocaust (2000),
the story of a Hungarian-Jewish family and their conversion to Catholicism,
their conscious assimilation into Hungarian culture and urban Central European
society, and the Holocaust, Anca Vlasopolos's
No Return Address: A Memoir
of Displacement (2000), a fictional autobiography of a family of Hungarian,
Romanian-Jewish, and Romanian-Greek intellectuals, their lives, and the
lives of their relatives and friends in communist Romania (on Vlasopolos's
book, see Freedman at <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb02-3/books02-3.html>),
and Judith Kalman's
The County of Birches (1998), a poetic novel
about a happy and charmed childhood in an environment best described as
the suggested "Central European culture" best exemplified by the Jewish
bourgeoisie of the region. On the other end of the spectrum, there are
memoirs by the former upper class whose members were, in the rule, patriotic
and nationalist, anti-Semitic, and conservative while at the same time
very much Central European in their outlook towards Austro-German culture
and with family, friends, and contacts over the whole region. A good example
of this category of memoirs is Jenö Koltai’s
Egy honvédtiszt
visszaemlékezései. Korkép a XX. Századból
(Memoirs of an Officer: A Portrait of the Twentieth Century) (1989). While
resonating with much nostalgia, Koltai's writing is void of emotion and
suggests an emotionally dry, truncated life. On the other hand, he represents
most aspects of the patriotic Hungarian cultivating a belonging to Central
European culture and with commitment to honoring the codes of the upper-class
bourgeois officer serving in the country's professional army. What is fascinating
in the text is the author's description of a Central European landscape
of culture and social life in the interwar period of Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Austria, and Germany.
13. Of the many texts of first- and second-generation Central European
Jews who published in recent years memoirs and fictional autobiographies,
in a geo-cultural context, perhaps Julie Salamon's The Net of Dreams:
A Family's Search for a Rightful Place (1996) is perhaps the most "Central
European." Her idea and research of the book began by the impetus of reading,
in 1993, about Steven Spielberg's plans to film his Schindler's List
after which she traveled to Poland and other areas of Central East Europe
such as Huszt, now in the Ukraine, and formerly a Hungarian town. Salamon's
description leading into the history of the mixture of nations is intriguing
itself: 'This was the land of the
shtetl -- and of Gypsies, Slovaks,
Hungarians, and Ukrainians -- an ignorant backwater that had been annexed
by the USSR after World War II. Now Communism was finished and the place
where my parents were from had been reshuffled again. Their birthplace
had lost the status of affiliation with Czechoslovakia or the former Austro-Hungarian
Empire" (13). What is significant in this brief excerpt is the reference
to Czechoslovakia (the interwar period) and the Austro-Hungarian Empire
(the period prior to the 1919) and thus the setting of the notion of Central
Europe, geographically and culturally. The Salamon family history, like
that of Susan Rubin Suleiman or that of the Sonnenscheins' in István
Szabó's film Sunshine (see Portuges; Suleiman) stretches
across Central and East Europe in time, in space, and in cultural parameters.
It includes the particularities of their education (the Austro-German Gymnasium
and university), their knowledge of languages and cultures, and the necessities
of maneuvering from one cultural context to another but altogether being
in a Central European space. Salamon's interpretations and explanations
of matters and things Central European -- be those in the particular Slovak,
Hungarian, Ruthenian, Jewish, or Czech -- extend over much detail. For
instance, at one point she explains a specific instance of the usage in
Hungarian of the familiar (te) and polite (maga) forms of
address and other forms of address they used such as the Ukrainian-Czech
mixture of
zolotik ("little golden one") in their social and individual
contexts (205). Salamon's narrative of memory is concentrated on family
and family history and the memory of the horror of the Holocaust runs through
it. Yet, the Central European cultural space as well as spaces the family's
history and the histories of individual members occupy the book’s narrative
and they involve us as readers not only as historical evidence but also
as evidence for a culture and literature of the region.
14. Elaine Kalman Naves's
Journey
to Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family (1996)
is the most historical among the texts introduced here (it also has the
least mistakes with diacritics and the translation of phrases and terms).
The Hungarian-Jewish families whose history is told in the book, the Schwarz-Székács,
the Weinbergers, the Rochlitz, etc., belonged to that stratum of Jews in
Hungary who assimilated and became members of the educated upper-bourgeoisie
of the country (see Braham; Ozsváth). In the case of the author's
family, they produced members who were members of the Austro-Hungarian
officer corps (the crème de la crème of pre-First World War
and interwar society) and upper-government officialdom, landowners, industrialists,
and the urban intelligentsia such as one Aggie Békés, who
earned a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Debrecen
in the 1930s (section of photographs, n.p.). Jews in Hungary underwent
perhaps the most widespread and deepest possible process of assimilation,
for the reason that Kalman Naves describes as "during the forging of Magyar
nationalism, they cast their lot wholeheartedly with that of the emerging
Magyar nation -- only one of the many ethnic groups in the polyglot Austro-Hungarian
Empire which included Slovaks, Ukrainians, Slovenes, and many other nationalities.
Even the orthodox among Hungarian Jews described themselves with self-conscious
pride as Magyars of the Israelite faith" (15). In many instances,
assimilation and magyarization resulted in access of numerous Hungarian-Jewish
families to both non-titled nobility and to the ranks of the aristocracy
and the large numbers of the urban strata of Hungarian Jews created much
of the country’s industrialization. Although assimilation and "voluntary"
magyarization occurred to all of Hungary's national minorities such as
Germans, Slovaks, Romanians, etc., in the case of Hungarian Jews the results
of cultural and emotional assimilation explain much of the proposed character
of Central Europeanness of the region's Jewries (for the Jewish nobility
of Hungary, see McCagg; see also Molnár and Reszler; the above mentioned
autobiography by Koltai contains descriptions with regard to the assimilation
of Hungary's ethnic German population). Magda Denes's Castles Burning:
A Child's Life in War (1997) is a doubly sad book in view of its author's
recent death in 1996 (all other authors of the memoirs under discussion
here are alive today). The story of Denes's family is particularly poignant
because of her father’s abandon of his wife and daughter in 1939. The story
of this Hungarian-Jewish family, again in the context of its position as
educated upper bourgeoisie, is of particular interest for my argument of
Central Europeanness because the story unfolds in "travel." What I mean
is the telling of the tale when Magda Denes -- after surviving the Holocaust
in hiding -- flees Hungary in 1946 with her mother and grandmother and
how she perceives and experiences life as a refugee with and among all
the other nationalities in the refugee camps. The narrative contains much
reference and description of the self-confidence of the educated and cultured
Central European (a theme in itself). Here is an excerpt: "I always suspected
Ervin of having a bit of the prole [proletarian] in him. Anyway, now he
wants to emigrate to Palestine with her, and he wants to fight for a Jewish
state. I don't even know what that means. Jews are intellectuals, not farmers
or soldiers" (147). Denes eventually ends up in New York where she becomes
professor of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy at Adelphi University.
15. Susan Rubin Suleiman's
Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook
(1996) is bittersweet in many instances of her narrative of recollection
of Budapest life and death during the war and the Holocaust. The books
title itself is intriguing: Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook
and it is similar to Tibor Fischer’s (another second-generation Hungarian)
Under
the Frog (1992), in that it contains a translation from the Hungarian.
Fischer's un-English
Under the Frog is a translation of the Hungarian
phrase describing when one is in bad circumstances (as in quality of life):
a
béka segge alatt ("under the arse of a frog"). Suleiman's Motherbook
is a translation of anyakönyv, the official name of one's birth
certificate in Hungary and a term of nostalgia and patriotism in Hungarian
literature and even in general discourse. Thus, the title of the book sets
the scene, the author's search and re-discovery of her Hungarian background
and history. In the first chapter, "Prologue: Forgetting Budapest," Suleiman
describes her escape from Hungary as a ten-year-old, in the last months
when the border was still open to Czechoslovakia. After stops in Kosice
and Bratislava -- Kassa and Pozsony/Pressburg (the Hungarian and German
names of the cities, respectively) -- the Rubin family of three arrives
in Vienna, free. After immigrating to the United States, Susan Rubin becomes
an academic with a Ph.D. in French literature and her life is with clear
distance to her cultural background in the American melting pot. Although
with a brief interest in Hungary during the 1956 Revolution and its aftermath
of Hungarian refugees arriving in the United States, it is only in the
early 1980s -- upon the illness of her mother, her own divorce, and the
stress of raising two sons as a single mother -- that 'Zsuzsa' (the Hungarian
version of Suleiman's first name) takes new interest in Hungary, Poland
(her mother's background), and her unresolved past. After the dissolution
of communism in 1989, she is invited to Budapest as a guest professor and
she spends an extended period there in 1993. In Budapest -- and it is in
these chapters where the cultural reading I am interested in is written
-- Suleiman immerses herself in the intellectual life of scholars, writers,
and artists and makes many interesting observations. While her descriptions
of life and letters in Budapest may be uninteresting and at times contrite
to a reader familiar with matters Central European and Hungarian, they
are valuable for the North American reader because in North America these
matters are of little or no importance or interest. Suleiman's writing
is such that among the many interesting aspects of Central European and,
within that, specifically Hungarian scenes, situations, and cultural varieties
of matter, some may be of particular interest to the English-speaking and
North American reader. Interestingly, there is one instance where Suleiman
falls prey to that most Hungarian characteristic, cultural nationalism.
In Suleiman's case this could perhaps be better described in terms of enthusiasm
and over-valuation of things Hungarian: "I felt elated by the beauty of
the city. It really is a great capital; it really can be compared to Paris.
I told myself as the cable car rose above the river." Well, yes, Budapest
is a beautiful city, indeed, but in my opinion and despite the often repeated
comparison to Paris it was never like Paris or Vienna and it is not comparable
to them today either....
16. Desider Furst and Lilian R. Furst's
Home Is Somewhere Else:
Autobiography in Two Voices (1994) is a dual autobiography. For her
book, Lilian Furst edited autobiographical writings her father left her
and added her own recollections in some chapters. Desider Fürst was
born in Hungary, studied dental surgery from 1919 to 1926 at the University
of Vienna, became a naturalized Austrian citizen in 1928, and practiced
dentistry in Vienna until 1938. He fled Austria with his wife, also a dentist,
Dr. Sári Fürst-Neufeld and daughter, Lilian, after the German
annexation of Austria in 1938, to settle in England. The Fursts, similar
to the Salamons and the family of Susan Rubin (Suleiman), had relations
all over Central and East Europe, including Poland, Hungary, and Austria.
They were educated with active interest in literature, theater, and the
arts. Lilian’s father and mother both had an M.D. and specialization in
dental surgery from the University of Vienna. And their families and relatives
suffered the Holocaust everywhere. Yet, Lilian Furst and Desider Furst's
memoirs of their lives and the lives of their families are imbued with
nostalgia for the lost world that before the Shoah was theirs, a world
that their memories recover and dress in sunshine. In addition to their
value in the corpus of the genre of memoir literature, the above texts
are seminal descriptions of culture, history, and everyday life of pre-Holocaust
Central Europe. These memories of real events are formations of an (imagined)
Central Europe, a landscape with a culture of its own. Cumulatively, the
texts reclaim a world destroyed and, by preserving and transporting its
images to today, they locate a Central European culture of today. While
these memoirs suggest and demonstrate variably similar perspectives of
a Central European culture, they are also inseparable from the Holocaust
and the history of the genocide of Jews remains part of Central European
culture and its postcolonial situation.
17. And now there is the work of Imre Kertész. In comparison
to the texts introduced here, his work is more immediate because he remained
in the culture and language that put him into the concentration camp, into
the Holocaust. There is another special feature of Kertész's Fateless:
within the genre of memoirs about the Holocaust, Fateless is of
particular significance because of the author's narrative in which there
are representations of the Holocaust with "laughter." As such, and predating
Lina Wertmüller's film Seven Beauties
(1975) and Nicola Paviani's
film Life is Beautiful (1997), the novel is one of the very few
examples of representation of the Holocaust where the banality of
evil is transcended in art despite the moral dictum that there cannot be
art about the Holocaus. Kertész's bittersweet, at times biting,
irony laced with intelligent humor is a masterpiece as the Swedish Academy
has recognized, although among scholars of Holocaust literature it would
have detractors precisely because of the "laughter" the author describes
in the concentration camp and the humor he attributes to life under the
most horrific circumstances.
18. In Valaki más. A változás krónikája
(1997;
Someone Else: The Chronicle of Change) Kertész travels through Central
Europe. The time is 1991, after the fall of the Soviet empire. In Vienna,
Kertész searches for the city of the philosopher and is unable to
find it. ......................................................
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