Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature

Imre Kert

182 Imre Kertész and the Filming of Sorstalanság (Fatelessness) Catherine Portuges As we continue to celebrate Imre Kertész’s Sorstalanság (Fatelessness), the first Hungarian-language novel to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, we also commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary on the eve of the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. The confluence of these major events cannot fail to evoke the memory of the massacre of the country’s Jewish population in the last months of 1944, the most intensive process of extermination in the Second World War (see, e.g., Braham; Lendvai). Yet, the proliferation of recent publications on these subjects should not be allowed to obscure the silence that once surrounded (and in fact nearly obliterated) the discourse of the Shoah in Hungary after 1948 (see Kende; Lanzmann; Resnais). In order to account, albeit briefly, for the stages that led to the breaking of that silence, it is useful to consider for a moment a major development in the realm of artistic creativity: Over the course of the 1970s, Holocaust memory appeared to return to the public scene primarily in the form of literary texts produced by a generation of writers who had experienced personally this persecution as children or as adolescents (see, for example , Delbo; Dénes; Handler and Meschel; Márai; Suleiman; Szép; Wiesel; on English-language Central European Jewish memoirs, see Tötösy de Zepetnek). Among them was Imre Kertész, whose interrogation of the role of the Holocaust in Hungarian literature continues today. In “Long Dark Shadow,” an essay from his collection, A holokauszt mint kultúra (1993) (The Holocaust as Culture), he suggests that “nothing would [appear to] be simpler than to collect, name and evaluate those Hungarian literary works that were born under direct or indirect influence of the Holocaust. . . . However, in my view that is not the problem. The problem, dear listeners, is the imagination. To be more precise: to what extent is the imagination capable of coping with the fact of the Holocaust? How can imagination take in, receive , the Holocaust, and, because of this receptive imagination, to what extent has the Holocaust become part of our ethical life and ethical culture…This is what we must talk about” (171). In this essay, published in English in Suleiman and Forg ács’s collection, Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary, Kertész attempts to explain why, during forty years of Stalinist rule in Hungary, the genocide of the Imre Kertész and the Filming of Sorstalanság (Fatelessness) 183 Jewish people and the complicity of so many Hungarians in that genocide went unacknowledged. Kertész was honored by the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his novel Sorstalanság, first published in 1975, for writing that “upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history,” and that admittedly has drawn upon the “barbaric arbitrariness” of his own tragic experience as a fifteen-year-old Hungarian Jew in Auschwitz (Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates [2002]: ). In the aftermath of the Nobel, and following years of relative invisibility, Kertész was catapulted into the forefront of media attention, generating acclaim as well as ambivalence and hostility (on this, see, e.g., Nádas). Born in Budapest, he considers himself to be part of a generation whose lives were marked by momentous historical turning points—1944, 1945, 1948, 1953, 1956. After his liberation from Buchenwald, he was both a factory worker and journalist in Budapest before publishing his collected works in Germany in 1999. Nonetheless, at present, only Fatelesnesss and Kaddish for a Child Not Born (Wilson and Wilson) have been translated into English, in what the author considers to be “a disgracefully bad English translation, a fact I consider utterly unethical . . . [and that has] . . . nothing to do with what I wrote. The language, yes, that’s all that connects me to Hungary. . . . How strange. This foreign language is my mother tongue”) (“A Nobel-díjat” 47–48; subsequent translations from the Hungarian are mine unless noted otherwise; it should be note that the 2004 translation by Tim Wilkinson, Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child have been approved by Kertész). Although Sorstalanság was written between 1960 and 1973 and published in a censored form in 1975, it received wide recognition only after 1990 (e.g., the novel was named one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Best Books of 1992). Kertész’s earlier , mesmerizing novel of identity...