Glenn Kurtz. Three Minutes in Poland. More Trails to the Past.

Continuing my reading jag. . . .

This is a fascinating book.  In August 1938, Glenn Kurtz's grandparents went to Europe, visiting famous European cities, such as Paris and Brussels.  As part of their trip they also visited a small city in Poland named Nasielsk.  While there, his grandfather shot about three minutes of film, both in black and white and in color, of the people of this town. By the next year, all the Jews in this town will have been deported, first to the Warsaw ghetto and then to the camps.  Of the town's three thousand Jewish inhabitants, less than 100 survived World War II.

Kurts finds this film and recognizes its  potential interest.  He sends it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is able to salvage the film's images.  (Just in time, a few years later and it would have deteriorated beyond repair.)  Kurtz wonders who these people were.  The film is one of the very few home movies made of pre-WWII Poland, and one of the very few in color.

Kurtz wants to find out as much as he can about these people, but it isn't until someone sees the movie on the Holocaust Museum's website and sees her grandfather--whose face remains recognizable over 70 years later.  Once Kurtz meets the man in the movie, now the 80+ year old man named Maurice (Morrie) Chandler of Florida, Kurtz and Chandler try to name as many of the people in the film as they can.

Meeting Morrie, Kurtz begins to find connections and those connections spur further connections.  He travels to Canada, the UK, Israel and Poland.  He becomes, as he admits, obsessed with documenting as much as he can.  But as he eventually recognizes, each connection spins out and the connections almost become infinite.  

When I first viewed my grandfather's film, I imagined it might still be possible to identify a few of the individuals who appeared in the beautiful color images.  But my conversations with survivors quickly spilled over from the frame of the film, from individual identifications into much larger networks. . . .  Jewish Nasielsk  that exists in memory is the chance artifact of those who happened to live longest."

Kurtz recognizes how arbitrary it is that this remembered Nasielsk survived:  arbitrary that he found the film in time, arbitrary that someone happened to see it and recognize her father as a child.  But even more arbitrary, who survived, who lived long enough to tell the story.

Three Minutes in Poland is a glimpse into a lost world and a profound meditation on what makes "history,"  It is a narrative dream.

You can see the move here.

#ThreeMinutesinPoland

#GlennKurtz

#HistoricalNarrative

#PolandinWWII

Sarah Wildman. Paper Love. Paper Trails to the Past (A Reading Jag)

Recently I've been reading a lot of books that center around someone's discovery of a cache of papers (or film) that reveals a secret history of a family member during World War II.  The best of these "look back" "memoirs was probably In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi which I wrote about earlier. Another fascinating book is Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind, by Sarah Wildman

Wildman discovers a cache of letters that belonged to her grandfather Karl Wildman. The letters were notable, first because Sarah thought all her grandfather's personal papers had been destroyed, and second because the letters were from a German woman named Valerie (Valy) Scheftel.  Valy was the woman Karl left behind when his family emigrated to the US, shortly after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938.  Only Valy's letters remain, but it appears that during the course of the correspondence, Karl promised to love Valy and to help her escape.  As the years went by, the correspondence became more despearate as Valy's circumstances worsened.  Sarah Wildman sets out to discover as much as she can about Valy and, she hopes her grandfather, who--by the end of the war had married an American woman and began a medical practice in the United States.  Sarah Wildman is quite emphatic about how her grandfather's resources were limited--financially (little money and many relatives to support) and logistically (the difficulty of getting exit permits from Germany and entry permits from the US).  However, it is Valy with whom Sarah was becomes fascinated.  And the book becomes the attempt to find out what happened to her.

Sarah Waldman writes for Salon.com where parts of the book are published.  Thus she has resources the amateur genealogist lacks.  Sarah travels to archives and museums in Europe and the US and visits relatives of people who knew Valy.  She is able to get documents translated and to visit sites in Valy's life.  The book records to an amazingly detailed degree Valy's life, particularly in the years between 1938 and January 29, 1942 when she was deported to Auschwitz and eventually murdered.  Sarah can, in fact, trace her to the very train that carried Valy to the death camp, where the record ends. That is, it's not clear whether she was immediately selected for deathh or died sometime later in the camp.

During the course of her research, an important museum at Bad Arolson is finally opened to researchers.  It includes lists of names and was initially a sort of clearing house by which people could trace the fate of relatives.  As Sarah begins looking at Bad Arolson for traces of Valy, she speaks to one of the major archivists who tells her "It's not a Holy Grail.. . . but it will change the direction of research.  "It's not revolutionary--it's not like Hitler's order to kill the Jews. . . .  [I]t will become a place of instituionalized memory" (106).  Later, he explains that "a list of names takes on a different meaning when it is observed through the eyes of a researcher or someone who knows the history, or through the eyes of someone who wants to understand the dynamics among populations, or what brought survival rather than death" (110).   In other wourds, the "lists of names," the "raw data" must be organized, arranged, and interpreted.  Thus history becomes not simply a set of names or places but a narrative.

In particular, Sarah asks whether the kind of small history she wants to write is important.  "Are small stories important?"  "Yes," the historian immediately answers: "As historians we can describe what happened, Where it happened.  But we can't exactly describe why it happened.  [Or as a historical narratologist would say, we need chronicle and plot, a story and discourse.]. The historian cannot describe the suffering of the individuals.  Therefore, we need  the memorials.  We need the letters, the diaries, the the memories of the individuals,  As the main part of the picture of what happened" (94).

In reading this book, one participates in Sarah's search.  It is a book that I found hard to put down because, like Sarah Wildman, I desperately wanted to know what happened to Valy

(More on my reading jag to come).

#SarahWildman

#PaperLove

#ReadingJag

#NarrativeAndHistory

Susan Faludi. In the Darkroom.

In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi is a biographical account of her father.  Faludi is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist and noted feminist writer.  In this account, Faludi interrogates the slippery and often dangerous notions of identity, especially (as in the case of Susan's father) identities that include gender, religion, and nationality.  The book begins when Susan, after being out of contact with her father for twenty plus years, receives an email announcing that her father, Steven Faludi, has undergone gender transformation surgery and is now Stephanie Faludi.  Her father is in his seventies, living in Budapest when the news arrives.

Susan Faludi's memories of her father are of an aggressive, often bullying man.  These memories include her father brutally attacking a man her mother was seeing after Steven had left his family and Steven threatening Susan as a child.  When her father emails her asking her to come to Budapest and perhaps write the story of her father's life, she hesitantly resumes contact.

In the Darkroom details the story of Susan Faludi's attempts to understand and connect or perhaps reconnect with her father--now Stephanie.  It takes place over about 10 years, from 2004 when, as she says, she "set out to investigate someone I scarely knew, my father," to her father's death in 2015. On one level, the book narrates the story of their 10-year renewed relationship; on another level, it narrates the story of her father's life, as Susan comes to understand it.

This extraordinarily complex and beautifully written book explores ar least three contradictions in her father's sense(s) of identity.  One is gender.  As a feminist, Susan understand gender as a socially constructed category that exists on a continuum, rather than as a binary M/F.  However, Stephanie, and most of her transgender friends, believe that once they have remade themselves women (especially those who undergo gender transformation surgery), they are changed in an essential way.  Stephanie now lives as a "lady," concerned with clothes and being pretty, and happy now that people "help" her because she is a woman.   Life is much easier, she insists.

The second problematic category for Susan and Stephanie is that Steven Faludi was Jewish.  Born Istvan Friedman in Hungary, he survived the Arrow Cross in Budapest by hiding and also by masquerading as an Arrow Cross member.  In one noteworthy incident, he marches as Arrow Cross into the Yellow Star house where his parents reside and orders them out  before deportation.  There is little or no Judaism in the house Susan remembers growing up in.  But one night when they end up at a Rosh Hashonah service in Budapest, it is Stephanie who knows the prayers and who saves the prayer book so she can say Kaddish for her parents.

And all this is made even more problematic because Stephanie has now reclaimed Hungarian citizenship and lives, apparently with pleasure, within a country that is increasingly anti-Semitic and homophobic.  Susan argues with her father over all this.  As the book unfolds we see the arguments and the truces. They did not achieve a "laying down of arms," she says, but did seem to arrive "at an understanding, even a closeness."

I read this in Budapest, not that far from where Stephanie lived.  (I am in Pest; Stephanie was in Buda.)  Stephanie died in 2015, the year I began extended visits to Budapest.   Like Stephanie, I love Budapest, but like Susan I understand that the "beautiful parts" exist within a country that has a terrible history and some terrible parts of its present.

One of the pieces of her past Stephanie held onto were deeds to two properties her father owned before the war, properties that were never returned to her despite the round of claims for restitution so many others have also made.  When she died, Susan found the deeds along with a sheaf of birth certificates of dead relatives and a few letters in the safe which held the "important things" Susan would inherit after her father's death.  One of the houses is on Raday utca (street), where I live next to in Budapest.  This house, 9 Raday utca, is a beautiful secession house built in 1909 by the famed architect Gyula Fodor.  Fodor is known for incorporating sculpture on his buildings, and the picture at the top of this blog post is a sculptural piece prominent on the facade: a female figure (probably Hungaria, or more simply a mother), sheltering her children who are themselves holding up tokens of art--sculpture and books.  There is also another statue, see below, this one at the very top of the building and covered by a protective screen, where the figure holds the miniature of a house.

At the very end of her life, Stephanie recedes into dementia which Susan sees as "an onrush of all she had experienced, suffered, fled.   The paranoia and hallucinations afflicting her were rooted in the realities of her past, the histories she had walled off."  Steven lost his family, his home, his religion, and his country.  Like Anderson's "ugly duckling," (a story Stephanie loves), Stephanie has changed.  But like the house on Raday utca, the past remains--even if its inhabitants are no longer the same.

#InTheDarkroom
#SusanFaludi
#RadayUtca

The Lives of Books

When I retired two years ago, I had about 400 books in my office.  I started getting rid of them a few years before retirement by giving each student a book at the end of the semester as a gift.  I then gave the rest of the books to the UofL English Graduate Organization (EGO) for their book sale.

This last few weeks, we have been readying our house to sell.  As part of that I had to reduce the number of books I had at our large house to the much smaller number of books I could keep in the condo.

At the house, I had about 1000 books--ten book cases that held about 100 books each.  Tony has a comparable number.  We decided we could each have 3 bookcases at the condo.  So I had to downsize from 1000 to about 300 books. Which to keep and which to give away?

About half of my home books were novels--mostly gifts Tony has given me over our life together.   The other half was part of my professional library: books about critical theory, rhetoric, composition pedagogy and evolutionary biology;

Most of the novels I had read.  I had to carefully choose those that were most important.  The rest, I took out the first page which held a dedication and wrote the name of the book and author on it. The professional books were those I had read mainly for particular research projects--the kind of research I no longer plan to do.

How did I decide which books to keep and which to give away?   I chose novels that have been especially meaningful for me--harkening to points in my life that were shaped by particular books, or books whose meanings I continue to carry with me. The professional books I kept were those that had most deeply defined my ideas.  But those decisions were difficult and even painful.  I've lived my life surrounded by books, and they are valuable and evocative to me, even if already read,  I cannot imagine living anyplace that didn't have books.  Our house at the lake has several bookcases as well.

Now most of my books have gone to EGO for their fund-raising sale.  And I suppose they will then continue to fulfill their main function: being read.  But their physical presence--their weight, heft, and color remains a loss.

I am not alone in my saving books over a lifetime.  It's not a sensible decision, because we will never read them all again or for the first time. But we have a hard time letting go.  For many people, their books define who they are.

#books
#moving

Sally Mann. Hold Still.

Hold Still by the American photographer Sally Mann is described as a Memoir with Photographs. It tells the story of Mann’s life and the stories of her family--based on her experiences and memories and on the archive of photographs and papers in her attic.  Hold Still is divided into several parts: Mann’s own story and that of her husband Larry; her mother Elizabeth Evans Munger and her family; the black woman GeGe who cared for Mann as a child; and her father Robert Munger and his family. Near the beginning, Mann writes that when she started the project, she looked into boxes of family papers was looking for “southern gothic: deceit and scandal, alcoholism, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, racial complications, dearly loved and disputed family land, abandonments, blow jobs, suicides, hidden addictions, the tragically early death of a beautiful bride, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of a prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder.”  And she got it:  “all of it and more.”

But Mann’s story is Southern in so many more ways than “gothic.”  She was born and spent most of her life in an extraordinarily beautiful place: Lexington, Virginia, where the Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountains meet.  More specifically, she lives in a remote house on the Maury River in the Shenandoah valley, a place that was a regular part of her life since she was a child.  Mann’s life in this place is responsible for a number of traits she describes as typically Southern.  (This is a part of the book that may annoy people who are not themselves from the South.)  But I suggest that it is more important to think about the fact that Mann lives with “a sense of place,” and not just focus on the particular place in which she lives.  The truth is that many people locate their identity strongly in a particular place—anywhere from an Italian village to New York city.  However, claims about the beauty or virtues or dangers of the “South” can be  suspicious to many.  The “South” sometimes functions as a kind of metonymic trope for a set of assumptions, e.g., ignorant, racist, backward.  But the “South”—like any other “part” of the United States is not one thing; it is multiple.  (Just like the “West” is never—and was never—just one thing.)  And, of course, not all people who live or lived in the South are the same kind of people.[i]

Mann is known primarily (or at least this was the case for me) because of her pictures of her children, mostly taken nude.  These pictures, mostly from the 1980s, caused a huge controversy, one that was partly fueled by the appearance of Robert Mapplethorpe’s censored pictures of children around the same time. But she is also a landscape photographer.  Most of her pictures are of the American South, as well as Civil War battlefields.  She is known for her use of old forms of cameras and film, such as collodion plates and ambrotypes.  I was not familiar with these pictures and, though they are reproduced in Hold Still, the quality of the reproduction makes them difficult to see, much less evaluate.  (This seems to me a major flaw of the book.)  I tried to find better quality reproductions on the internet, but most of them were very small images copyrighted to her.

The parts of Mann’s story that deal with her own life are interesting because Mann’s voice is funny and sharp.  It is also interesting as a kind of portrait of the artist as a young woman, explaining her evolution as a photographer, and why she decided to take particular pictures in particular ways.  There are not many books that offer this kind of narrative.  The story of her mother’s family is laced with scandals Mann had not known of.  The story of Gee-Gee, the black woman who raised her, is a canonical narrative of southerners of her (and my) generation: as she says “Down here, you can’t throw a dead cat without hitting an older, well-off white woman, and every damn one of them will earnestly insist that a reciprocal and equal form of love was exchanged between them.”  This, says Mann, is part of the ”fundamental paradox of the South.”  Mann describes her relationship with Gee-Gee in loving terms, but also admits the unexamined assumptions that that underlay that relationship.  Speaking of family trips, she asks “How could I not have thought it strange that Gee-Gee never ate anything but also never had to go, never even got out of the car? How could I not have wondered, not asked?”  The story of her father offers no hidden secrets, but does Mann does try as an adult to understand his fascination with death and the way his self-absorption affected his dealings with his wife and children.

Mann connects these stories of the past to her own identity, claiming at several points that attributes of her ancestors are wired into her own DNA.  This, I believe, she means literally.  But though it is possible (for almost all of us through lived experience) to accept a genetic family history of depression, it is more difficult to locate a gene for nostalgia for the past or for quirky behaviors.  Nevertheless, one can see how a family—handing on to its children patterns of behaviors, values, flaws and everything else that makes up a person—can be, at least partly, the source of who one is now.  Just as where one lives—its beauty, history, inhabitants—can anchor one’s self to its own sense and importance of place.

Hold Still shows how family stories are constructed out of the archives of family life:  the papers, pictures, letters, report cards, and more that a family saves.  The artifacts are by themselves meaningless.  But woven together they become a narrative of a family and its individuals.  That this is only one possible narrative is made manifest in the reproductions Mann includes in the book.  Choosing this letter or that letter is the job of the storyteller who uses them to tie these unruly people into a family.

This month, my Louisville Book Group read Hold Still.  I am sad that I missed the discussion, because this is a book I would really like to talk about.  I liked the book, almost as a “guilty pleasure,” because I wasn’t always sure I should like it as much or in the ways that I did.  After finishing it, I looked at the reviews and was happy to find they were almost all positive.  This makes me a little more confident in my judgment.  But I would still have liked to test my response within the conversation of some of the sharpest critics and best readers I know. 

#SallyMann
#HoldStill

__________________

[i] Odd as it may seem in a blog entry, I insert an endnote here.  I too grew up in the South.  In my case, I was born in South Carolina and lived there until I was almost six.  I also spent all my summers there until I was 14.  My extended family and later my mother lived in North Carolina.  And though I also lived as a child in Florida, Virginia, and as an adult in Louisiana, it is the Carolinas that anchor me to a sense of place.  When I fly into Raleigh-Durham to go to the beach, I become nostalgic (though that is not quite the right word) as soon as I see the long leaf pine, more so when I see tobacco fields, and achingly so when I see old abandoned shanties.  So I kind of “get it.”

The Narrative of Retirement Redux

A while ago, I posted something along the lines of "I don't need a narrative at the lake; instead I just have cyles of pleasure."  And that is--to some extent--true.  The first two and a half months up here at Lake Medora have been wonderful:  lots of friends here, lots of great company, lots of beautiful days in the water and on the deck.  But. . . .

I have come to realize that I have to have a project.  This summer I did actually work on a project, a book of Budapest photographs.  It was pretty large, something around 140 pictures, and all of them had to be resized in photoshop and often fiddled with.  Along with that I tried (and for the most successfully) to find the address of the buildings and the architect of each one.  This I did mainly for my own pleasure and as a thank you gift to our generous landlord.  But that's done now, and I'm thinking what next?

We will be at the lake til late in November.  Still a lot of summer and Indian summer left.  But not so many friends, not so many gorgeous days when just to be outside is to be happy.  I don't know if it's because as a teacher, I always started the year in the fall, or just my natural need to move towards something (there's that narrative again).  But I need to do something.  And I think I just might have a plan.

My professional life was bound up with writing and publishing.  Everything I have ever published has been in peer-reviewed scholrly journals or books.  Without peer-review, the work doesn't have the scholarly credential, and--at least in the world of tenured faculty--doesn't really count.  Except I no longer live in that world.  I could continue producing peer-reviewed scholarly work, as some of my emeritus-faculty friends are doing.  But I am tired of that game, at least for now.  But I am not tired of thinking and writing.  So where do I go?  Whence is my narrative of retirement?

I have decided to write a book about Hungarian Secessionist architecture.  Anyone who has read my blog knows that I am obsesssed with it: I lust for it.  I actually have learned quite a bit about it, over the years.  And I have thousands of pictures, all of which are my own intellectual property.  And there is really very little available in English on this (trust me) fascinating topic.  But my first problem is that I do not have the scholarly credentials to publish a peer-reviewed book in the field of art history.  And my second problem is that I don't read Hungarian, the language in which most of the published research is written. So no chance of a peer-reviewed book.

But I don't really need to write a peer-reviewed book.  I don't need to add any more peer-reviewed scholarship to my CV.  Thus, I have decided that I will write a book, but that I will self-publish the book, probably on Amazon.  I will set a low price, hoping to attract readers.  (The money is less important to me than a readership.)  It will be a quasi-scholarly book (based, that is, on everything I have learned in the 6 or 7 years in which I have been reading about and taking pictures of Secessionist architecture).  But it will be written for a general audience.  (That is, it will lack, except for a concluding bibliography, all the scholarly apparatus of the peer-reviewed product--and for those of you who have not wandered in this particular maze, the scholarly apparatus is of a truly scholarly peer-reviewed book is HUGE.)

People who are in academia will appreciate what a huge shift this is.  (I spent over 30 years chasing a dissertation then academic publications: it is who I was--and still am to a large degree.)  People not in academia will probably think what's the big deal.  (And I am starting to feel this way myself.)

I am grateful for the technology that allows one to easily self-publish.  However, I am not going to be lured into producing something that's equally easy to write.  I want the book to be good.  I am prepared to put the time in.  And then when it goes out (assuming I make it that far) see what it's worth.

This blog has been, and will continue to be, wonderful for trying out ideas.  So I plan to do more Budapest-themed posts. But I'm not going to make it into a rough draft for the book, so I will try to continue to post about other aspects of my life.  I have not been much of a blogger this summer: too much going on here in paradise.  But I'm now in a different rhythm and hope to be back to regular posting.  Next post will be about summer in the Keweenaw,

#retirement
#publishing

On a Reading Jag

One of the absolute best things about retirement is the ability to read whatever and whenever  you want. In fact, when people ask me what my retirement plan is, the first thing I think of is reading.

Last summer I read a lot about Budapest and Vienna (which I thought we might also visit).  That was my main reading jag: one book kind of led to another.  But I went on a series of mini-jags during the summer.  I read the wonderful novel Euphoria by Lily King which is based on Margaret Mead and her then husband Reo Fortune and her future husband Gregory Bateson, all in New Guinea doing anthropological fieldwork.  I also read Savage Harvest by Carl Hoffman about Michael Rockefeller who was looking for primitive art and was attacked by cannibals in New Guinea.  That led me to Peter Matthiessen's Under the Mountain Wall, which was his account of the same expedition Michael Rockefeller was a part of when he disappeared,  Then just some more books about New Guinea art (with which I was utterly unfamiliar).  I also went on a mini-jag about bog people, reading Karin Sanders' Bodies in the Bog and P.V. Glob's Bog People, then some of Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory; that was a completely unexpected turn in my reading adventures.

This summer I am on a sort of World War II reading jag.  I came home from Budapest having learned so much about Hungary in World War II.  The parts of Parallel Stories I found most compelling were those about the war.  I then read Dark Continent by Mark Mazower (wonderfully ironic title) about Europe in the 20th century.  After that I read Martin Amis's unbelievably smart and clever book about one of the Auschwitz camps, The Zone of Interest.  That was followed by W.G. Sebald's A Natural History of Destruction, about the German amnesia concerning the bombing of German cities during the end of the war.  Followed by The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan about Australian POWs building the Japanese train line in what was then Siam.  I kind of like to alternate fiction and non-fiction.  But I am not sure what to read next.

The "problem" with reading such compelling, well-written, important books all together is that it's hard to go back to books that are not so well-written, compelling, or serious.  But really most of life is made up of reading books that are "good," not "great."  I am trying to decide whether to start Orlando Figes' book about the Russian Revolution, A People's Revolution. That is a huge decision because it is a mammouth book.

I should also say that I read flippy mysteries on my Kindle while I am doing "serious" reading.  I read them at night in the dark next to my husband in bed.  Most of them were bought for about $1.99, as part of a Kindle Daily Deal.

I am writing about this in perhaps too much detail because reading is a big part of what I do in retirement and at the lake.  Along with swimming, eating, drinking (martinis or gin and tonics), it is a favorite: perhaps THE favorite.

Do you ever go on reading jags?  What are you reading now?  I would love to know.

#retirement
#reading

Antal Szerb. Journey by Moonlight.

• When I was in High School my favourite pasttime was walking.  Or rather, loitering.  If we are talking about my adolescence, it's the more accurate word.  Systematically, one by one, I explored all the districts of Pest.  I relished the special atmosphere of every quarter and every street.  Even now I can still find the same delight in houses that I did then.  In this respect I've never grown up.  Houses have so much to say to me.  For me, they are what Nature used to be to the poets--or rather, what the poets thought of as Nature. Antal Szerb.  Journey by Moonlight.  

Journey by Moonlight is the last, and oldest, of four great Hungarian novels I read in Budapest.  Antal Szerb (1901-1945--those horrible dates) was one of the greatest literary scholars and novelists of his generation.  His work on world literature--including Stephan George, William Blake, and Henrik Ibsen--is still considered authoritative.  He was also a translator and professor and one of the most important Hungarian novelists of the twentieth century.  Journey by Moonlight, his most famous novel, was published in 1937.  In 1944, Szerb was deported to a concentration camp and beaten to death in 1945, at the age of 43.

Journey by Moonlight is the story of a young man, Mihaley, who is on his honeymoon in Italy.  One night he unexpectedly meets a man from his youth, and then tells Erzsi, his new wife, the story of his relation with this man, another man, and a brother and sister during his school years and early adulthood.  Later, he "accidentally" gets on the wrong train while in Italy and becomes separated from his wife.  He then wanders through Italy, meeting other people from his past, until he arrives in Rome.  His Italian journey (like that of so many others) is to some hoped for self understanding.  It is a journey by moonlight--outside of the world of "the fathers, the Zoltans, the business, world, people."  Except that it is not.  He ends by going home.  The book exhibits what its translator, Len Rix, calls "an irony distinctively Middle-European in character."

Journey by Moonlight is the novel all Hungarians "read as students.  Every educated Hungarian knowls and loves this book."  One can see why: intelligence, humor, warmth, wry acceptance, and of course irony.  It is so very Hungarian.

#AntalSzerb
 #JourneyByMoonlight

Istvan Gall. The Sun Worshiper.

I bought this book at Massolit, a branch of the famous Krakow bookstore. I picked it up because the cover looked interesting and it only cost 1200 forint, or a little over $4.00.

The Sun Worshiper [sic] was written by Istvan Gall, another Hungarian artist who has since seemingly disappeared into what John Batki (writing of Erno Szep) calls the "'black hole' of his nation's collective conscience and memory."  It was published in 1970, translated into English in 1985, then republished by Corvina Books in 1999.  Gall, about whom little appears on the internet, has a brief Hungarian Wikipedia entry which gives his dates (1931 to 1982) a list of his works, and his awards, including the very prestigious Jozsef Atilla and Kossuth prizes.

Gall came of age as a writer during the Communist dictatorship.  In 1950, he was expelled from high school because of remarks critical of Marxism.  He subsequently was called up for military service in 1951.  His literary work includes poetry, film and radio, as well as novels, and he is known for his "realist prose characterized by lyrical irony" (a definition that could fit many of the Hungarian writers I have read.)

The Sun Worshiper is a short novel that, on one plane takes place during a single night, but on another across the whole lives of a middle-ages married couple.  Robi, the husband, is awakened by the sound of his wife Juli grinding her teeth. He brings her out of a recurring dream about "Germans with dogs."  To soothe her, Robi gets into bed with Juli.  Juli is happy to "snuggle up to him": she loves the closeness of their bodies. But Robi likes to sleep alone, and he lies there "rigidly with all the discomfort of her body entwined around him."  Robi is worried that if he does not get enough sleep, he will be tired the next day and "his work will be shot."  Juli is happy to be close to him: "every part of her body was happy."

During the night, Robi and Juli talk of their lives.  They also doze and dream and remember.  His story is of a Hungarian youth who is drafted into the army at the very end of the war and who runs away to survive.  Hers is of a Jewish girl who is partially sheltered by a Red Cross hospital.  Their stories also encompass their identities within the Communist party after World War II, and their various political and personal struggles.  It is often difficult to tell exactly what time period they are thinking about, as the various parts of their past blur into one another and into the present.

The novel's original title is A napimado. Napi means daily or diurnal or quotidian.  In Hungarian, napimado also refers to sun-loving flowers, such as zinnias or asters.  In this sense, Robi and Juli worship the sun as the source of the daily, diurnal, quotidian lives they lead.  Much of the novel's force rests in these details: the daily events and experiences that give Juli and Robi's lives their meaning and significance.

     "Their greatest pleasure is walking.  They never tire of it.
     They fool around while they are walking.  It doesn't matter what they say.  They only walk for the sake of the rhythm, the same way marching soldiers sing.
     Julie holds tightly on this arm.
    After 5:00 everyone is in a hurry.  The pedestrians zigg-zagg, the street cars are packed, the cars try to pass each other flashing their blinkers, the city is nervous.  For them it was the calmest hour.
     They promenade, watch the people and the shops."

It is the day, the time of the sun, that is the source of happiness.  Juli begins every morning asking "will this be a good day?"  It is at night that dreams come: of Germans and dogs.

At the end of the novel, the jumble of the past becomes the jumble of the daily life:  "the twenty thousand eggs that we have eaten sizzle in a largish skillet. . . .  Juli makes the radio roar, her hands are covered with grease."  It is in this jumble that love resides.

The Sun Worshiper is another Hungarian novel in which I don't recognize the Budapest in which it is set. It suggests a different city, made in a different time, that is only partially available to people like me (and like so many other non-Hungarians) who do not speak the language or know very much about the country's history. Like other Hungarin novels I have read, the life of the book lies in the realist prose and the lyrical irony.  It is a book where you are never sure exactly where you are: in history or in meaning.

#GallIstvan   #TheSunworshipers  #HungarianFiction
  

Magda Szabo. The Door.

I recently read Magda Szabo's novel, The Door.  Szabo is an Hungarian writer, the novel is set in Budapest, and I bought it in a small bookstore in Buda.  So it came to me with many associations (and self-induced) demands.  During the last several months, I have read many Hungarian novels because I knew they were important--even when I wasn't always sure I liked the book.  The Door is an extraordinary novel--read in Budapest or anywhere else. 

The Door is narrated by a young female writer who has been pretty much silenced In Hungary.  The book opens when she and her husband are looking for someone to help keep their flat in order while they work.  They are referred by a friend to an older woman named Emerence who might take them on.  (It is Emerence who interviews the young couple, rather than the other way around.). Happily, they pass muster and Emerence includes them among the people she cleans, cooks, and shovels snow for.

Emerence is a strange and enigmatic character.  Although she rules the neighborhood, no one is allowed in her house. During the twenty or so years in which the novel takes place, Emerence and the young writer become close, even to the extent of Emerence treating her like a daughter.  But it is always on Emerence's terms and according to her standards of behavior. The secret of her house, like that of her past, is kept tightly guarded.  Eventually the young writer becomes recognized in Hungary and is awarded a prestigious prize.  In a strange plot twist, the writer is forced to choose between rescuing Emerence and attending the prize ceremony.  Her failure to make the right decision is foreshadowed in the novel's first scene.

Emerence and the writer live in two versions of  Hungary under Communism.  Emerence survived World War II and prides herself on being a worker.  She does not consider writing "work," and views the writer as spoiled and hapless. The writer comes from a privileged family and is able to sustain a somewhat luxurious life even in the midst of what would have been hard times in Hungary.  Both women are, in their way, admirable, but it is Emerence who holds the power--both in her unrelenting standards and in the secret past that lies behind her door.

The Door is a compulsively readable novel. Many of the reviews mention its autobiographical elements, but if it is autobiographical it is in no way sentimental or self-forgiving.  There is apparently also a recent movie starring Helen Mirren as Emerence, and I can well imagine her in the part.  But the novel's language--it's style, tone and affect--creates  a world that is uncanny and is difficult to visualize, even for someone reading it in the city in which it's set.  There is something deep, elemental, and Greek (as the novel hints) in its tragedy--a tragedy born in Hungarian history but hidden behind the barriers of conventional life.

Dezso Kosztolanyi

Subotica, Serbia.  2014

How often does one discover a completely unknown (to one) literary genius?

In preparation for three months in Budapest, I have started reading (translated) novels by Hungarians and (English language) novels set in Hungary.  During my foray into Central European fiction, I discovered Deszo Kosztolanyi--a modernist genius.

Kosztolanyi (1885-1936) was born Szabadka in the Austria-Hungarian Empire (now Subotica, Serbia), where he lived as a child.   He moved to Budapest in 1903 and in 1906 became a journalist and poet.  In the 1920s, he began to write novels and short stories.  He was a prolific translator and first president of the Hungarian PEN Club.  I have read three of his translated novels--Anna Edes, Skylark, and Kornel Esti.  Each is, in its own way, remarkable.  Anna Edes is an extremely quiet book that offers a shattering portrait detailing the devastating consequences of class consciousness in inter-war Hungary.  Skylark is a lyrically tragic portrayal of wasted lives; it is also the most accessible of Kosztolanyi's novels (that I have read) and is the one I would suggest readers begin with.  But it is the last, Kornel Esti, that was for me the most thrilling--providing a new angle to modernism.

Kornel Esti is a very strange novel.  It reads as a kind of James Joyce meets Sigmund Freud meets Robert Musil meets Franz Kafka meets Groucho Marx.  But despite these modernist flavors, it is utterly unique.  Kornel Esti begins thus: "I had passed the midpoint of my life, when one windy day in spring, I remembered Kornel Esti."  The unnamed narrator of the first sentence and Esti were born on the same day and at the same minute, and had been inseparable until the age of thirty.  As a child Esti admonishes the narrator to set fires to curtains or to not wash his hands.  Later in adolescence, Esti pushes the narrator into all sorts of "bad habits": dirty words, dirty books, dirty deeds.  People begin sending the narrator letters asking for repayment of debts or admonishing him for improper behavior.  The narrator says he paid:  "Paid a lot.  Not only money, I paid with my reputation too." If the narrator is the proper Budapest writer, Esti is his other or his id: the dreams, impulse, and desire that the narrator had to split from in order to become a Hungarian, liberal, bourgeois adult.  But without Esti, the narrator becomes "empty and bored."  "Help me," he cries to Esti.  "Otherwise, I'll die."

The narrator thus proposes to Esti a Faustian bargain:  that they will write together. "Make me whole again. . . What can a poet achieve without anyone?  What can anyone achieve without a poet?  Let us be joint authors."  What follows is not a coherent life story.  Rather the novels offers "what you would expect from a poet: fragments." These fragments differ in their style and construction: some are quasi-realistic stories; others are filled with the fantastic and with Swiftian irony; still others resemble Beckett's existentialist dramas.  

Reading Kornel Esti was like being reawakened to the thrills of modernism: the radical style and structure of the text, the fantastic analysis of the unconscious.  But it was also something completely new, because it takes place within a set of cultural assumptions that are not only European but also distinctly Hungarian.  I wish I could read it in its own language.

Until I started reading for my trip to Budapest, I had never heard of Dezso Kosztolanyi (or so many other great Hungarian novelists).  That was a loss.  Because two years ago I had visted the town Kosztalanzi was born in and where he set Skylark.  I had gone there to look at the Komor and Jakab synagogue and all the other wonderful buildings in Szabadka/Subotica.  But had I known, I would have seen that city so differently.  I would have seen the streets and the buildings Kosztolanyi inhabited and that he transformed in his work.  

Best Books of 2014

I have read a lot of books this year--something around 85.  And about 70 were read during retirement Here are some of the best books I read. (In the order I read them.)

The Orchardist.  Amanda Coplin.  An amazing first novel; a unique voice.    An old man and the daughter of a pregnant runaway form a family

Euphoria.  Lily King.  Another totally unexpected book.  Based on the relations among Margaret Mead, her current (second) husband Reo Fortune, and her next husband Gregory Bateson:  all doing anthropology in New Guinea.

Austerlitz.  W.G. Sebold.  Wow.  I had never read Sebold til this summer (Error). This summer I read The Emigrants and Austerlitz.  Now onto the rest.

 Constellation of Vital Phenomena.  Anthony Marra.  Another unexpected novel. Set in Chechnya; beautifully sad.

The Age of Insight.  Eric Kandel. Written by a Nobel-winning neuroscientist and art collector (no one should be this smart), this book traces the "inward turn" in Vienna from the late 19C to the early 20C. The first part begins with a history of medicine in Vienna, then on to Freud and the Vienna early modernist painters, especially Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka.  The remainder of the book locates the discoveries of these intellectuals and artists in contemporary knowledge of how the brain works.

Tom Jones.  Henry Fielding.  Not altogether sure it was a "best book," but I couldn't not include it.  (I was educated in the canon.)  Tony and I read Richardson's Clarissa last year (one of the best books ever) and felt we needed to read Tom Jones for what is surely our last time.  

All the Light We Cannot See.  Anthony Doerr.  As good as the reviews.

A Month in the Country.  J. L. Carr.  Paul Griner kept telling me it is one of the best novels written, and he is right.

 Stoner. John McGahern.  An academic novel that transcends the genre.  Existential tragedy and beautifully written.

Effie Briest.  Theodor Fontane.  The best of the early 20C German/Austrian novels I read.  (And I read a lot.)

I also read a lot of Hungarian novels.  But that is for another post.