Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe: A Guide

8. Writing along Borders: Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary

eight ‰ Péter Varga with Thomas Nolden Writing along Borders: Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary Hungary lies on the border between West and East European Jewry. The religious , linguistic, and literary vestiges of this divide are still visible today and continue to inform Hungarian Jewish literature as a border phenomenon. To be sure, this literature does more than merely straddle, in a most unique way, the fault line separating two different geographical—and cultural —spheres of European Judaism. Hungarian Jewish literature also negotiates the complexities of the past and present of Hungarian Jewry, whose unique course Susan Rubin Suleiman and Éva Forgács summarize as follows: For generations, despite the rising tide of ever more virulent anti-Semitism, a large number of Hungarian Jews, including the majority of Jewish writers and intellectuals, put their faith in the promises of liberalism and assimilation. After two thirds of Hungary’s Jews were murdered in the Holocaust—with the cooperation of the Hungarian government and police—Hungary still stood out as the Eastern European country where the greatest proportion of surviving Jews decided to stay after the war instead of emigrating. Today, Hungary has the largest Jewish population in eastern Europe (approximately one hundred thousand, most of them living in Budapest). (2003, xi) Writing along Borders 161 Many attempts have been made to define the Hungarian Jewish experience and its corresponding self-image (Braham and Vago 1985; Köbányai 1999; Ranki 1999). Hungarian Jewish literature was the focus of an international symposium held in Budapest in 1996.1 The symposium marked a scholarly and cultural watershed. Until then Jewish contributions to the cultural scene in Hungary had been forgotten, ignored, or even actively suppressed—and not just by official decree but in most cases by Jews themselves. Prior to this very recent interest in Jewish identity in Hungary and its expression in the arts, hardly any attention was paid to Hungarian Jews’ self-perception and selfexpression during the second half of the last century. The entire area of inquiry was surrounded by taboos and suppressed by a false sense of shame. This now appears to have changed with the arrival of a new, contemporary form of Hungarian Jewish identity based on Jewish tradition and historical experience. The components of this identity—both old and new—reflect the long and markedly heterogeneous history of Hungarian Jews. There have been various characterizations of Hungarian Jewish literature in the course of its history. At the beginning of the twentieth century Zsigmond Móricz, writing about the Jewish soul in Hungarian literature, described a “world of Jewish spirituality, perception, and mentality.” He predicted that “the time will come when the powerful spirituality embodied by the Jews will be able to develop its potential in unrestricted honesty” (1959, 334). Aladár Komlós, one of the foremost scholars in this area, counts “every writer of Jewish origin” as part of Hungarian Jewish literature (1941, 8). In three lectures entitled “Jewish Problems in Hungarian Literature,” András Komor perceived in 1935 an “authentic Jewish environment and authentic Jewish spirit” in the works of Tamás Kóbor, while branding Sándor Bródy and József Kiss “rootless ” because they “lacked the courage to be truly Jewish.” Komor emphasizes that “the Jewish writer should not wish to appear not to be Jewish” (1935, 29; Török 1999). He asserts that there is only one possible solution to the rootlessness of some Jewish writers, namely, to return to their roots. But this is very difficult when “János Arany is closer to us than Moses Maimonides.”2 Finally, Miklós Radnóti, one of the greatest Hungarian poets of the twentieth century, wrote in his diary for May 17, 1942: “I’ve never denied being Jewish. . . . I still belong to the Jewish faith. . . . Being a Jew is a problem in my life because the circumstances have made it so. . . . I don’t think of myself as a Jew. . . . I’m a Hungarian poet. . . . I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a ‘Jewish writer’ nor ‘Jewish literature’” (quoted in Szegedy-Maszák 1999). The critic Tamás Ung­ vári maintains that the “young, assimilated Jews who wrote for József Kiss’s journal Hét at the close of the 19th century were determined to play a part in the development of Hungarian literature. While rejecting any sort of pact with conservative, aristocratic forces, they still clung to the aspect of assimila- [3.144.102...