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. That is, the homogenization and the homogenousness Hungarian culture has always been considered -- and so is today -- a matter of survival. 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). The Hungarian Jewry of the period 1840 to 1918 accepted the proposal that they would be considered equals if they assimilate to the homogeneous Hungarian culture, a particular alignment owing to the fact that Hungarians themselves have always been an "other" in Europe, which they invaded and settled in the ninth century whereby their choice of the Danube valley is right inbetween the Slavs and the Germans. The process of assimilation along with the development of a bourgeosie and the industrialization of a country very much feudal until the late nineteenth century (in many ways even after still) served at the time the Jewry of Hungary well and in retrospect it could have been a model of succes against historical anti-Semitism. But then, in retrospect again, the choice to accept the Hungarian proposal turned out to be a major mistake: 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 as follows. 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 plain 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 about Central European culture (for a recent bibliography of studies about Central and East European culture, see Tötösy "Selected Bibliography" 189-206 and  <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/library/centraleuropeanculture(bibliography).html>).

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>).
 

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.