One of my favorite personal projects has been reading through what is available in English from Nobel Prize laureate Imre Kertész. My wife bought be Detective Story for Christmas, but I saw that Melville House was publishing a newly translated piece for their The Contemporary Art of the Novella series. So, I guess because I like the idea of reading something newly published rather than something a few years old, I put off reading Detective Story to wait for The Union Jack (Az Angol Lobogó, 1991; tr. from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, 2009).
Review copy courtesy of Melville House.
Everything I’ve read from Kertész has been about the Holocaust, to one extent or another (since much of his work is still unavailable in English, though, that’s not necessarily saying much). However, after his tragic youth in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Kertész struggled to find a life in post-war Hungary and Communist rule. When reading his later works one can see the influence of this period on his narrative, but it is in The Union Jack that I’ve first seen those formative years described, albeit in a very strange fashion. Here is how the book begins:
If I may perchance wish now, after all, to tell the story of the Union Jack, as I was urged to do at a friendly gathering a few days ago — or months — ago, then I would have to mention the piece of reading matter which first inculcated in me — let’s call it a grudging admiration for the Union Jack; I would have to tell about the books I was reading at the time, about my passion for reading, what nourished it, the vagaries of chance on which it hinged, as indeed does everything else in which, with the passage of time, we discern what, whether it be the consequentiality of destiny or the absurdity of destiny, is in any even our destiny; I would have to tell about when that passion started, and whither it propelled me in the end; in short, I would have to tell almost my entire life story.
Kertész’s style in this piece is very roundabout, much more in the vein of Kaddish for an Unborn Child than, say, Fatelessness — you can see that easily in this first, fairly convoluted, sentence where we learn that he has a story about the Union Jack. It turns out that in 1956, in the midst of those struggling post-war years, Kertész spotted the Union Jack on a jeep. However, we only hear his account of this sighting a couple of pages before the book ends. The rest of it, which does not tell his whole life story actually, is focused on a few recollected experiences centered around reading and becoming aware of Wagner’s Die Walküre all told with a heightened awareness of how intervening years have changed him.
The young man (he would have been about twenty) who, through a sensory delusion to which we are all prey, I then considered was, and sensed to be, the most personal part of myself, I see today as in a film; and one thing that very likely disposes me to this is that he himself — or I myself — somehow also saw himself (myself) as in a film. This, moreover, is undoubtedly what renders tellable a story that otherwise, like every story, is untellable, or rather not a story at all, and which, were I to tell it in that manner anyway, would probably driver me to tell precisely the opposite of what I ought to tell.
This is an impossible book to summarize, but again it showcases one of the most intriguing aspects of Kertész’s writing: the constant awareness of the arbitrariness of history, a theme I’ve been happy to find in my favorite Roth novels. As in Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Liquidation, and particularly Fatelessness, though Kertész is recounting history, there is a constant awareness of dumb luck.
I had become acquainted with my wife-to-be in the late summer the year before, just after she had got out of the internment camp where she had been imprisoned for a year for the usual reasons — that is to say, no reason at all.
It’s a wonderful reflective piece, complex and rewarding, but I’m not sure how much I would have liked it were I not already interested in Kertész. I like to hope I would have, but I’m not sure I would have followed it well. Still, I do know I didn’t like this one as much as The Pathseeker, Kertész’s other book in Melville House’s series, but that one is a masterpiece.
Over the summer I read Imre Kertész’s Auschwitz trilogy (tetralogy if you don’t rely on English translations): Fatelessness, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and Liquidation. However, the first Kertész book I bought was The Pathseeker (A nyomkeresö, 1977 ; tr. from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, 2008). For some reason, though, I didn’t pick it up until I was reminded of it by John Self’s list of favorite reads of 2008.
Each thing I’ve read by Kertész has been stylistically different, and fairly brilliant. Fatelessness reproduced Auschwitz from an almost nonchalant point of view which led to incredible insights into Georgie. Kaddish for an Unborn Child was a steady declamation of “No!” to the many questions – including one where his wife asked if he’d like to have a child – asked of this Auschwitz survivor, a steady almost end-stop-less rant. Liquidation goes back and forth in time as B., who was a miracle child born in Auschwitz, commits suicide and happens to write all of the conversations his friends would have after his death. Sure, the theme is similar, and the philosophy introduced in one leads to another, but stylistically it would be difficult to pin them all on one writer.
And now I read this little gem, a masterwork in the poignancy of the unsaid.
He leaned forward, very close to the guest, his eyes burning with a strange light, his voice switching to a whisper. “The possibility, you catch my drift? Nothing else, the mere possibility. And that what happens just once, to just one person, has now transcended the frontiers of the possible, is now a law of reality . . .” He broke off, staring ahead, almost crushed, before again lifting his still slightly troubled eyes to the guest. “I don’t know if you understand what I’m getting at . . .”
And truly, it takes a while to figure out what the main character is getting at. We know he is a commissioner, but we don’t know what he is commissioned to do. He is interrogating someone at the beginning of the novel, someone who feels guilty but who is innocent, but we don’t know what for. He is searching for some location, some place hidden in the landscape, but we don’t know what that location is – or why he is searching for it. The air of mystery extends, apparently, to the commissioner’s own wife:
His wife did not respond. What and how much did she suspect, the husband wondered.
As the commissioner gets closer to his goal, the more uncertain even he is about what he is doing and why. He seems to recognize furtive details he can’t quite get his hands on. As much a journey through the landscape of an out-of-the-way train stop, we get a journey into the commissioner’s psyche as he discloses the nature of his assignment. If this sounds like it should be a work by Kafka, that’s completely understandable. In fact, if we look at Kertész’s ability with style, I’d say in this work he reflects Kafka very well. However, and this is something that amazed me – unlike Kafka’s absurdity, this one is “real.” Not that Kafka’s works aren’t real in their essence, but here is no heightened reality exaggerated for effect. As bizzare as it might sound, as ellusive as the author is being, the exercise in silence and inference creates a very realistic piece.
I have done my best not to disclose what is really going on here, who the commissioner is, and what he is doing. Indeed, this is a work best approached with no knowledge of its contents. Here is passage, however, that discloses little but still exemplifies the way Kertész drops little clues while setting up a haunting atmosphere:
These words suddenly confronted him, then they disappeared again in such a way that he could not tell off the top of his head whether he had read them or heard them. He had read them, of course, but right then it seemed as though he were hearing them as well. He turned to his wife, but she seemed to have noticed nothing; she was sitting calmly in her place amid the doomsday that was pulsing all around her.
And, finally, I find this passage articulates my feelings for The Pathseeker (only I think I’d be a bit more praising).
“Odd,” she said quietly.
“Certainly,” the commissioner smiled. “Obviously odd for some. But it contains a truth that is well worth consideration; you just have to decipher it,” he added.
Before you read the book:
Since I finished Fatelessness and Liquidation, I did a little bit of research on Kertész. He is the first Holocaust survivor to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize). And it is incredible, relatively, that he has survived the survival. Most other writers who survived the Holocaust eventually took their own lives: Paul Celan, Jerzy Kosinski, Jean Améry, Piotr Rawicz, Tadeusz Borowski, and debatably Primo Levi. Kertész is reportedly a very pleasant fellow, with a nice smile – though Kaddish for an Unborn Child (Kaddis a meg nem szvületett, 1990; tr. from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, 2004) would not lead one to think that. This is the third book in Kertész’s Auschwitz tetralogy (Fatelessness, Fiasco, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and Liquidation). I read them out of order but would recommend starting from the beginning because they build upon one another. Once again the translation is by the incredible Tim Wilkinson, whom I respect more and more with each Kertész translation. He has a fluid style and an excellent vocabulary. I hope he keeps up the work because there are plenty of books in Kertész’s oeuvre that are not yet available in English – like Fiasco.
A Kaddish is a Jewish prayer of mourning, and that insight makes this one of my favorite titles of all time. It evokes such a devestating statement: here the narrator speaks to the child that he could not bear to bring into this world.
The first word in the book is “No!” - this in response to a philosopher who asks the narrator if he has any children. On the next page, we also learn that “No!” was the response the narrator gave to his wife when she asked him if he wanted any children. But the existence of the book, this Kaddish, shows that the narrator’s unbudging stance is not simply jaded apathy or cynicism; it is also full of regret and sorrow:
“No!” something within me bellowed, howled, instantly and at once, and my whimpering abated only gradually, after the passage of many long years, into a sort of quiet but obsessive pain until, slowly and malignantly, like an insidious illness, a question assumed ever more definite form within me: Would you be a brown-eyed little girl, with the pale specks of your freckles scattered around your tiny nose? Or else a headstrong boy, your eyes bright and hard as greyish-blue pebbles? – yes, contemplating my life as the potentiality of your existence.
But this is not just a book about sorrow or cruelty, about not wanting to subject a child to this world. It is a great meditation, a philosophy even, on the Holocaust, particularly Auschwitz. The narrator, in case you haven’t guessed, is a survivor of Auschwitz. In fact, the narrator is B. whose story continues, sort of, in Liquidation. Since Auschwitz, B. has looked death in the face, not with fear, not with yearning, but more with a foggy stupor of someone who fails to understand why he isn’t dead. It can be said of B. (by B. himself) what Elie Wiesel said about Primo Levi upon Levi’s death: “[He] died at Auschwitz forty years earlier.”
. . . the continued digging of the grave that others had begun to dig for me in the air and then, simply because they did not have time to finish, hastily and without so much as a hint of diabolical mockery (far from it: just like that, casually, without so much as a look around), they thrust the tool in my hand and left me standing there to finish, as best I could, the work that they had begun.
Taking his rant a few steps further, Kertész also goes back and forth with a very difficult question: why did Auschwitz occur? Interestingly, that Auschwitz occurred is not that surprising to B. On the contrary, B. thinks that Auschwitz not happening is the true conundrum. After all,
. . . Auschwitz has been hanging around in the air since long ago, who knows, perhaps for centuries, like dark fruit ripening in the sparkling rays of innumerable disgraces, waiting for the moment when it may at last drop on mankind’s head . . .
So for a part of the book, B. stops questioning the nature of evil, which he says is rational, makes perfect sense, and looks at the nature of good, something ”truly irrational and genuinely inexplicable.”
But the book does not dwell in such abstractions the whole time. Much of the last part of the book deals with B.’s marriage to a Jewish woman born after Auschwitz, but still with “the mark” of Jewishness. She hopes that his ranting will help him purge himself of some of this pain and she supports him to show that she understands him. B.’s response to this offers a deep look at relationships in general.
I hope that what I’ve said above makes the book attractive – it should be read – because I’m about to note the style of this novel, which might at first seem discouraging. Kaddish is stylistically different than Fatelessness and Liquidation. Fatelessness read more like a conventional, philosophical novel. Liquidation felt a bit like a Tom Stoppard play. Kaddish is a lot like Notes from Underground, a continuous declamation where words and thoughts trip over each other in long sentences on the crowded page. The book is 120 pages. In those, we have only seventeen paragraphs (there are six paragraphs on one page late in the novel, so such a high number as seventeen is actually a bit misleading). Many of those paragraphs end in the middle of a sentence that continues on into the next paragraph. This run-on feel is not unique to paragraph breaks: there are only nineteen sentences in the first ten pages, or less than two per page (I almost counted for the whole book, but I decided not to – any takers?).
Amazingly, this style is not cumbersome. In fact, this type of Chomskyan recursion makes the novel feel like one long statement, and it flows well from the writer’s “pen dipped in sarcasm.” I really enjoyed it.
After you read the book:
This book follows the philosphy of fatelessness that Kertesz discusses in the book of the same name. B. views his birth as arbitrary, his confinement as arbitrary, every step of his life since then as arbitrary, nothing fated, nothing meant to help him become anything particular. The very fact that he, a secular, nonbelieving Jew would still be incarcerated and subjected to such horrors just doesn’t make sense:
There is no denying that I have known and felt since long ago, from the first stirrings of my thoughts, that some mysterious shame is attached to my name, and that I brought this shame with me from some place where I had never been, and I brought it on account of sin, which, even though I never committed it, is my sin and will pursue me throughout my life, a life which is undoubtedly not my own life, even though it is me who is living it, me who suffers from it, and me who will later die from it . . .
This book also offered some interesting insights into Liquidation, particularly with this line B. speaks to his unborn – never-to-be-born – child:
. . . your non-existence viewed as the necessary and radical liquidation of my own existence.
Here Kertézs sets up B.’s ultimate, uhh, fate. Liquidation begins with his suicide – B. has successfully liquidated himself. But Liquidation also looks at what that means to the survivors, particularly his ex-wife who has married a non-Jew and is raising two children who as yet do not know they are Jewish.
Before you read the book:
After reading Kertész’s Liquidation, I decided I’d better check out the books he wrote earlier, especially since they are the ones bearing the weight of the Nobel Prize. Fatelessness (Sorstalanság, 1975; tr. from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, 2004), the first book Kertész published, also the first book in a supposed tetralogy, is one of his most recognized.
Despite that fact, when I began it I was reading it more with the mindset of getting through it quickly to be able to read Kaddish for an Unborn Child, which appealed to me more. And at the beginning, nothing changed my mind.
Fatelessness, previously translated as Fateless (but doesn’t Fatelessness have a more Nobel-worthy name?), is a first-person narrative account of Auschwitz and Buckenwald, told from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old Hungarian boy, Georg Koves. At first, he sounded as apathetic and cynical as Holden Caulfield. His father is getting sent to a labor camp, and he doesn’t show much emotion and seems to accept it as “natural.” In fact, he feels a bit awkward at his family’s display of sentiment. Even when Georg himself is taken from a bus and shipped on a train to Auschwitz he has more comments about seemingly petty irritations or puerile observations:
I didn’t even know offhand which way I was supposted to turn, and all I remember is that in the thick of it I felt a bit like laughing, in part out of astonishment and confusion, a sense of having been dropped slap in the middle of some crazy play in which I was not entirely acquainted with my role, in part because of a fleeting thought that just then flashed across my mind, which was my stepmother’s face when it finally dawned on her that it would be pointless to count on seeing me for supper this evening.
Mixed in were comments about how it really wasn’t that bad: the police were cordial, he didn’t have to go to work that day, etc. It is a very interesting way to approach a story about the Holocaust, but it still didn’t appeal to me – at first – it felt like cleverness just to be clever, just to be different.
Soon my attitude changed, though. Before I knew what was happening, the narrative changed in a subtle, imperceptible way. I realized that, like the great Remains of the Day, the power was under the surface, what was not being said, how the deeper feelings emerged from underneath the narrative. Unlike Stevens, however, Georg is not pushing down feelings, refusing to feel them. He just notes things with a very noticeable lack of sentimentality. It isn’t a scientific disinterestedness. It is more, though I’m sure there’s a better way of explaining this, a deferential, understated attitude, an accepting as natural the way things were that somehow lets a subject become clearer because it is not hampered by sentimentality, somewhat – please forgive the incongruous reference – like Winnie-the-Pooh.
I had to concede, there could be no doubt about it, we were indeed at our destination. I was glad, very naturally, though in a different way, I sensed, than I would have been glad yesterday, say, or still more the day before that.
The power of these types of understatements grows and grows as Kertész narrative and philosophical stance build speed. Turns out, it’s not just a gimmick. Here is a particularly poignant passage where Georg is in a medical ward, sharing his bed with a fellow patient. Here, somehow, the understatement made me less aware of the suffering and more aware of the time and cold logic of the circumstances:
Hey! Cut it out, ease up there, and in the end he heeded the advice. I only saw why the next morning, when my repeated attempts to rouse him for coffee were futile. All the same, I hastily passed his mess tin to the orderly along with my own since, just as I was about to report the case, he snappily asked me for it. I later also accepted his bread ration on his behalf, and likewise his soup that evening, and so on for a while, until one day he began to go really strange, which was when I felt obliged finally to say something, as I could not carry on stowing him in my bed, after all.
Also of interest is the seemingly warped but curiously thought-provoking depictions where Kertész chooses to show a scene focusing on those who run the concentration camp rather than on the suffering Jews (though that’s still there):
I have no idea when the barbers get any sleep, for I am told that nowadays newcomers may have to stand around naked for two or three days in front of the bathhouse before being able to proceed farther while the Leichenkommando too, as I can hear, is constantly at work on its rounds.
There is much more to discuss about how these narrative choices affect the overall philosophy of the novel. Fatelessness has an interesting perspective about what it means to live life in a concentration camp or out of it. I gladly move on to Kaddish for an Unborn Child but not because I’m relieved at having finished this book; rather, this book encouraged me to keep up with my current trek through Kertész.
For after you read the book:
While I understand the narrator’s point about fatelessness, I’m not sure how that tied into seeing the beauty of the concentration camp. I enjoyed passages like this one:
It was that peculiar hour, I reconized even now, even here – my favorite hour in the camp, and I was seized by a sharp, painful, futile longing for it: nostalgia, homesickness.
However, how does this fulfill or rather emerge from the philosophy of taking steps and surviving that way? Does it echo Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning? Was it the choice to see the beauty that helped him survive? If so, that isn’t what I got from the actual account of the concentration camp. He chose to escape by imagining and also by attempting to understand the system, and I see how that helped him appreciate what he still had on his “earthly remains.” Still, I’m not sure I understand how this fits in with the idea of being fateless. I see how reckognizing one’s fatelessness leads to accepting one’s ability to choose. I see how that affects one’s ability to find beauty. I don’t see how this meshes with the other side of the coin: that fatelessness also uncovers the arbitrariness of one’s circumstances. And recognizing that arbitrariness, for most I’m assuming, does not lead one to happiness but to bitterness.
At the book store I was in the mood to try some Kertész, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Born in 1929, he was imprisoned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and he was old enough to know what was going on. I saw his latest book Liquidation (Felszámolás 2003; tr. from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson 2004), written after he won the Prize.
With a title that connotes closing shops, selling assets, and cutting losses accompanied with abstract illustrations of people, none looking at each other, I was very interested. Add to that the fact that it is only a novella, something I could get through in one day, and it was a must read. After reading it, I have to ask, why don’t we, at least we in America, care much about those who win the Nobel Prize in Literature unless they’re from here? This book was well worth the short time I put into reading it — in fact, it will be paying off for years to come.
In a way, I hear, Liquidationis kind of a part of a tetralogy that also includes Fatelessness (1975), Fiasco (1988), and Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990) (Fiasco is not available in English yet). I haven’t read the others (but will), and this work stood on its own as a tightly packed rumination on Auschwitz.
The book is set in Hungary in the 1990s. A decade or two earlier, “the hero of this story, Kingbitter” met B. or Bee, depending on the sentence. B.’s mother was four months pregnant when she was put into Auschwitz. Almost unaccountably, (“The blokova, possibly stirred by the thought of helping bring a child into the world in the death camp”) B. is, against the odds, born and survives, though he was immediately taken from his parents. Despite the miracle of B.’s birth, years later he commits suicide. That is where the book begins. But for what reasons did B. commit suicide? That is where the book goes.
B. prepares a deliberate, intricate suicide, even having the foresight to write a play (called Liquidation) that word-for-word foretells events and dialogues after his death. Kingbitter finds the play and then becomes obsessed with finding the novel, a master work that he knows B. would not have left the world without writing; after all, “[B.] felt that he had been born illegally, had remained alive for no reason, and nothing could justify his existence unless he were to ‘decipher the code name Auschwitz.’”
Thankfully, this very clever device is not the impetus of the story, as it would be for other writers. Some reviewers have said this is a flaw, that Kertész started with something interesting and then never really returns to it except as an afterthought. I disagree. I think it’s great that this device is almost incidental to the larger and (almost?) incomprehensible themes.
After reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus, I have been baffled by the lives of the “survivors of the survivors” (this children of those who lived through the death camps). How can they (how can any of us) get past all of this? Is it ethical? Isn’t it alarming that we are moving on? And in doing so, are we not ignoring reality? Aren’t we creating a fiction for ourselves by somehow living happily in the wake of such an event?
Some of the characters are bound to and trying to escape the heritage that is Auschwitz, especially B.’s ex-wife Judit. She was not a prisoner in Auschwitz, but it is part of her Jewish heritage, and her attempt to understand it was one reason, perhaps the reason, she married B. Later in life she visited the camp. It was not as it should have been: “I found myself unable to capture the right mood, despite having prepared for it for days. I was haunted by the sense of walking around an outdoor folk museum.” Her purse gets stolen. “The receptionist enlightened her that Auschwitz was teeming with pickpockets, who took advantage of the visitor’s deep emotional state and attendant inattentiveness.”
Judit’s current husband Adam, who is not a Jew, has spent a lot of time since he met Judit reading up on Auschwitz. Here is a telling scene from the play B. wrote where Judit interrogates Adam’s motives for reading:
Judit: And you understand now, perhaps?
Adam: I’ve read at least fifteen books about manic depression and paranoia.
(long silence.)
Adam: No one can revoke Auschwitz, Judit. No one, and by virtue of no authority. Auschwitz is irrevocable.
Judit (in growing distress): I was there. I saw. Auschwitz does not exist.
Adam (steps to Judit and grabs her roughly by the shoulders): I have two children, two half-Jewish children. They know nothing as yet. they are asleep. Who is going to tell them about Auschwitz? Which of us is going to tell them they are Jewish?
Really, it’s all incomprehensible to me. Recognizing that, I think, is part of the purpose of this book. There’s an interesting part where Kingbitter is trying to get B. to write his story. b. is indignant at the request and asks how would you discern a story like that?
“Look here, I submit to you a piece concerning how, with the cooperation of a bunch of thoroughly decent people, a child is born in Auschwitz. The Kapos lay down their clubs and whips, and, moved to the core, they lift the wailing infant on high. Tears rise to the eyes of the SS guard.”
Kingbitter admits it would sound kitsch but contends it could be written in different ways.
“It can’t. Kitsch is kitsch.”
“But it’s what happened,” I protested.
That’s precisely the problem, he explained. It happened yet it’s still not true.
B.’s suicide is somewhat mysterious. He seemed to have a lot going for him. He seemed happy. And after all, he survived Auschwitz, against the odds. Kingbitter is also baffled because years earlier B.’s insights prevented Kingbitter from furthering any plan he had at taking his own life, albeit a rather bleak though amusing insight.
“I could say, I said, that I felt it was superfluous for me to weary both myself and society with that.”
After you read the book:
But my thought is that B. committed suicide to complete his own story and desentimentalize it. The story wasn’t built on triumph. We hear stories like his and are amazed into thinking something great and moral took place. B. seems to repudiate this position with his own death.
There’s a lot more to this book. The relationships are complex. The title alone bears a lot of weight that I didn’t touch on in this post. It’s definitely one I will revisit again.
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