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122 Polyphony in Kertész's Kaddish for an Unborn Child (Kaddish a meg nem született gyermekért) Sándor Radnóti (Translated from the Hungarian by Julianna Horváth Chen) Imre Kertész's Kaddish a meg nem született gyermekért (Kaddish for an Unborn Child) is structured as one long monologue on a theme expressed in the book's title and provoked by the seemingly innocent question as to whether the protagonist of the text had children. The answer of the protagonist of the fictional text—a resolute no, also the first word of the novel—is not only a statement of fact but also its transfiguration into an existential decision. In addition to the major theme of this "no"—the "no" of the unborn and unwanted child—Kertész develops a number of recurring motif-like minor themes that further explain the protagonist's response and together present the intellectual portrait of a man who neither has nor wants to have children. The way I read Kertész's novel, he does not present a "story"; instead, he introduces and returns over and over again to a number of secondary themes, the two most important being those that might be labeled as "work" and "marriage." These literary themes are structurally akin to musical themes in the manner of an acoustical effect, as suggested by the long sentences throughout the text. Thus, the novel represents a musical text that is not a story narrated but one presented as musical motifs (re)introduced one after another simultaneously in a polyphonic fashion. Work—to the protagonist of the novel, a writer and translator of literature—is the antithesis of life: if he were working, he would merely exist and not live life. The description of this paradox is among the chief concerns of the novel, namely the protagonist's description of tireless self-analysis with the said musical polyphony as narration. The objective of work is not, as in its conventional definition, to provide life's necessities and the means of establishing a comfortable existence by aspiring to success or even appreciating work for its own sake. Instead, work opposes and extinguishes life. Predicated on the destruction of human relations, it is noth- Polyphony in Kertész’s Kaddish for an Unborn Child 123 ing less than a death sentence carried out slowly. This understanding of work and thus altogether of life results for the novel's protagonist in a curious constructivist structure, in turn resulting in the text's readers' mind a morbid mentality: a psychologist could no doubt list an entire catalogue of neurotic symptoms. However, "it's a well-defined nervous ailment, not a figment of the imagination, I at any rate believe that in its essence it has a basis in reality, in the reality of our human condition" (Kaddish a meg nem született 61-62; "Jól megalapozott idegbántalom ez, nem holmi képzelődés, én legalábbís azt hiszem, hogy lényegében véve valóságon, emberi helyzet ünk valóságán alapul"; Kaddish for an Unborn Child 87). Kertész describes the protagonist's work—and at another point his entire life—in words Paul Celan used as a motto: digging a grave in the air, digging a grave in the air with a ballpoint pen, the lifelong digging of a forced grave (61). In fact, Celan's poem "Todesfuge," his poetic response to the Holocaust, is a recurrent motif in the novel. Thus, the human condition at the root of the protagonist's complex description and self-analyses can be summed up in one word: Auschwitz. With Kaddish, Kertész returns to the theme of his first novel, Fatelessness (Sorstalanság), and presents the adult years of the youth who grew up in nazi concentration camps. What made Fatelessness astonishing and advanced when compared to other texts of Holocaust literature such as those by Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, and Varlaam Salamov, is its dispassion and at times its irony (on Kertész's work in English, see Vasvári and Tötösy de Zepetnek). Fatelessness is a Bildungsroman, the story of a child's socialization in concentration camps described as a normal state of affairs. Fatelessness's staggering final scene, where the liberated boy expresses nostalgia for the camps, provides the underlying tone for Kaddish. In Kaddish, however, the boy's education and socialization have come to an end. The naiveté that...

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