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Notes PREFACE 1. Fran. 13. Gyula Gazdag was assistant director for Love Film, and played the role of Ocsi in 25 Fireman Street. I interviewed him in Los Angeles during the fall of 1994. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. On autobiography in Meeting Venus, see Janet Maslin, "'Meeting Venus' Sings of Politics," New York Times, 10 November 1991, sec. 2, 17-18. 18. Szab6's role as artistic producer for the Hungarian film The Book of Esther (1990) demonstrates his historical ambivalence toward the representation of the Holocaust. The film-written and directed by Krisztina Deak, and featuring Balint-tells the story of a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor who returns to Budapest after the war in search of her missing daughter. Szab6's involvement with the film exemplifies the productive marginalization of the Holocaust within his career, while the film's conclusion with the mother's suicide seems to sum up his attitude, until recently, toward explicitly representing the Holocaust : a suicidal enterprise, best left to others. Szab6 is not credited for The Book of Esther, but his involvement is mentioned in Paul "Szab6," 159. 19. Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, 168-72. The prominence of Mephisto in this book is indicative of the imprecision of its selection of films.Mephisto is arguably not about the Holocaust at all, but, rather, fascism. 20. Braham, Politics ofGeocide, 1-4. 21. Ibid., 16--20, 28. 22. Ibid., 28--32,122-27,153-56,194--95. 23. Zsuzsanna Ozsvath, "Can Words Kill? Anti-Semitic Texts and Their Impact on the Hungarian Jewish Catastrophe," in The Holocaust in Hungary:Fifty Years Later, ed. Randolph L. Braham and Attila Pok (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 79-116. 24. This period is discussed in detail in Braham, Politics ofGenocide, 362--685. 25. Ibid., 732-39. 26. Ibid., 829-43. 27. Randolph L. Braham, "Hungary," in The World Reacts to theHolocaust, ed. David S. Wyman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 207-19. 28. According to Gyula Gazdag, Janos Hersk6 is a crucial figure in the history of Jewish memory in Hungarian film. He was a mentor to Szab6, serving as head of the studio in which Szab6 made his first three features. A poster for Dialogue appears in the background of a scene in Szab6's first feature. Gazdag says Hersk6 attracted several Jewish filmmakers to his studio and mentored Copyrighted Material 186 Notes to Chapter 5 them. He emigrated to Sweden in 1970, reportedly attributing his decision to Hungarian anti-Judaism. In 1992, he appeared in the film Zentropa, playing a German Jewish refugee returning to Germany after the Second World War. His wife tells him she wants to go to Palestine; he replies, "But we're Germans," and she replies, "But we're Jews." In 1995, Hersko returned to Hungary to make the autobiographical documentary A Kenyeresltiny Balladdja/The Ballad of the Bread Girl. The film consists entirely of shots of Hersko revisiting the places he was sent as a Jewish slave laborer during the war, standing in front of the camera, and testifying. 29. Iasked Szabo about this scene in an interview on 7July 1997, in Budapest. He explained that the mother'S remark was her way of simplifying the issue for Tako, because he is so young. Szabo gave no indication of agreeing with my argument about the role of Holocaust autobiography in his films. For me, the evidence for this argument lies in the films themselves and the historical record. If I am confident about the methodological risk of interpreting the films against the author's stated intentions, however, I am ambivalent about the ethical risk of "outing" the author's work, particularly since, being the American child of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, I am essentially an outsider to the Jewish community in Hungary, and to its ethical constraints. 30. I am not arguing here that Szabo has mentally repressed his own memories , which I have no reason to believe. I have neither the evidence to make such an argument nor the desire to do so. The repression that I am discussing takes place only at the level of the filmic texts. An additional symptom of Jewish discourse in the film appears in a fantasy sequence in which people paste homemade signs to the outside of a trolley car. These signs contain photographs and descriptions of lost loved ones who are being sought. According to Zsuzsanna Ozsvath, in personal correspondence, Jews did post such signs in postwar Budapest. The only...

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