A magyar-zsidó irodalom története
Janos Kobanyai
The History of Hungarian Jewish Literature
from Flowering to being Ploughed
Under
SUMMARY
The idea
for this book was born out of two previous works. The first, written at the
request of YIVO Encyclopedia, was the
Hungarian-Jewish Literature entry,
along with other individual entries of significant Hungarian Jewish writers.
(In Jews in Eastern Europe. Yale
University Press: New Haven, London. 2008. pp.763-770.
http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org./article.aspx/Hungarian_Literature.)
This
concentrated yet comprehensive work provided the general framework for the
present book, the definition of Hungarian-Jewish literature, the need for
placing its background in the appropriate context, and the unearthing of this
literature’s beginnings at the time when Hungarian Jewry entered Hungary’s
demographic, economic, political and cultural sphere. The system of
institutions and undertakings of Hungarian-Jewish intellectuals developed as
part of this process, including the personalities that cultivated as well as
organized the literary activities—at first within the Jewish-Hungarian and
later within the universal Hungarian culture. Applying appropriate historical,
social, and esthetic criteria, I judged the boundaries of the shockingly short
duration of the entire process to be between 1890 and 1944/45; scarcely half a
century between a swift “flowering” and an even swifter stage of “being
ploughed under.” Whatever followed this period—including the “Job’s story” of
some authors (Dezső Szomory, Ernő Szép) and Imre Kertész’s Nobel Prize in
2002—is, at best, a “posthumous blooming” or “stubbles on a dead man’s face.”
My other
work that helped produce the present book, was my doctoral dissertation at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Creating
the Modern Jewish Culture in Hungary; Josef Patai and his Múlt és Jövő
(Past and Future) 1911-1944. Writing this thesis at first
appeared an easy task; however, I soon discovered two major problems to tackle.
On the one hand, I had to absorb, digest, and then present the material in Múlt és Jövő in the absence of previous
studies or methodology, since neither in Hungary nor anywhere else had there
been many monographs dealing with the history of a periodical. On the other
hand, I was amazed to realize during my research—aided also by the centenary of
the major Hungarian literary magazine Nyugat
(West,1908-1941)—that everything
Hungarian-Jewish literature has produced, is represented, on a higher level and
in more defined characteristics, in the non-Jewish, so-called universal
Hungarian cultural sphere than in the self-representing Jewish one.
Although—against my mentor’s considerable resistance—I was able to express this
observation in my dissertation but, naturally, I could not tell the whole story
via the history of a Zionist periodical. I’ve found the proper forum for it in
this, separate monograph. The above realization supports and justifies the
realization of Aladár Komlós, who was the first to attempt a monograph on
Hungarian-Jewish literature, which the Holocaust would not let him complete.
The definition in his essay, “Preface to a Jewish Literary History to be
written” (Libanon, 1939: no.1.) is
the starting point and the basic premise of any Jewish literary history.
Truth to tell, there is a Jewish
question both in a narrower and a wider sense; the wider one contains God, homeland, and love;
everything in a Jew’s life. In this sense, “the surging of the Jewish
soul” means not only the expression of national solidarity, but the manifestation of the total world
of sensibilities and ways of looking at
things that more or less characterizes the Jew, which comes equally to the fore in his relation to God,
fellow humans, the state, nation, and his family. This soul evidently does not stop surging even if the
writer is afraid to write down the name:
Jew. The condition of the soul’s functioning is that to create, the writer bravely and deeply reaches into himself;
this does not depend on whether the artist accepts
his origin or finds ways to avoid admitting it, in other words, whether he is a
good Jew or not; rather,
it depends on whether or not he is a good artist. In this sense, it is possible that a Jewish
apostate lyricist will produce poems that are more Jewish than those written by a tried and true,
zealous Jew—provided the apostate possesses
in large measure the determining artistic ability that allows him, in the act of creation, to remain faithful to the
hidden hues and resonances of his being. Therefore,
when it comes to Jewish literature, we must include every Jewish writer, regardless of how he has decided
to deal with the problems of his origin. […] It’s the Jew’s social situation that’s different from other
nation’s situations, it has been so for
two millennia, and that in itself is quite sufficient to explain the peculiar characteristics of Jewry’s world
of sensibilities and ways of looking at things.
My monograph, first of all, is a
social history—it cannot be anything else. It traces the path of Jews yearning
to become Hungarians, across the pitfalls of hoping to assimilate or integrate
into Hungarian society, all the way to the fiasco of the mighty attempt. The
sensitive medium of literature is a most precise means of measuring identity;
the true mirror in which the process undergone by Jews in Hungary be examined
in the greatest depth. In its methodology also, my book picks its way across a
border zone; it tries to synthetize the achievements of literature and
historiography as well as those of sociology and psychology so that I could
relate the complex story in as coherent and nuanced a way as possible. I relate
the story of the interaction between Jews and non-Jews, which is also the story
of Hungarian modernity; the Jews’ entrance into the intellectual-spiritual world
of Hungary was inseparable from and simultaneous with the beginning of
Hungarian modernity—the former was the main engine of the latter. That is why I
use the method of “szétszálazás és
újraszövés” or unraveling and reweaving (instead of Jacques Derrida’s
“deconstruction”) to reveal the modernization of Hungarian culture whose
achievements endure even if the Hungarian-Jews have been “ploughed under” in
the plough-land of Hungarian culture.
In this book I have validated
all my accumulated experiences since 1988 when I revived the periodical Múlt és Jövő, and have intensified them
since 1994 when I established the eponymous publishing house—something like a
teacher would do by marching one lesson ahead of his pupils. As writer,
researcher, editor and publisher, I’ve often descended into the depths for the
Atlantis of Hungarian-Jewish literature and retrieved precious treasures to be saved. I
have molded into a homogenous text all my studies, fore- and afterwords of the
last fifteen years to make up the second, special
part of the book—as opposed to the first, general
part. I have organized the plans of the publishing house (we’re talking
about more than 200 published books) with the goal of presenting, perpetuating
and burning into the cultural memory of the world the enduring traces of
Hungarian-Jewish literature—and life. If it had been ploughed under in Hungary,
may its fertile seeds be scattered throughout the world!
The book is
complemented—sterophonically, as it were—by a 100-page photo-novel, so that it
could appeal also to today’s increasingly more visual culture.
Chapters
of the book:
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
Story
of an insult
I. Introduction to the history
of Hungarian-Jewish literature
•
Hungartian-Jewish literature as a question
•
Jewish conquest in the Hungarian Reform era
•
Emergence of Hungarian-Jewish Intelligentsia
•
Swift blossoming, swifter ploughing under
II. The Periodical Nyugat as a Hungarian-Jewish story
•
The Nyugat’s Jewish
question
•
The Nyugat and the Múlt és Jövő. Deconstructionist
strategies
III. Posthumous flowering
150
years of Hungarian-Jewish Poetry
IV. Hungarian-Jewish
narration/short story
[Introduction]
1.
Tamás Kóbor’s “Jewish Budapest”
2.
Through a distorting mirror sharply; master and pupil: Adolf Ágai and Zoltán
Ambrus
3.
Locked into the myth of escaping. András Komor
4.
Hungarian history as the mysterious (sensual-erotic) object of desire. Ákos
Molnár
5.
The Holocaust as narrative
V. On the umbilical cord of
the Monarchy
Ignotus
VI. In the attraction of the
“resurrecting Holy Land”
1.
Múlt és Jövő and the Patai family
2. Between Palestine and
Israel. Kardos G. György
3. From Ady to Jerusalem.
Avigdor Hameiri
VII. The Jewish story of Endre
Ady
VIII. The other life(‘s work)
in the other cultural sphere
Zoltán
Somlyó
IX. The Hungarian Proust, or a
fertile alienation
Dezső
Szomory
X. The resurrection of Károly Pap
XI. Poet of the Apocalypse
Miklós
Radnóti
•
Neither memory nor magic
•
The truth of “Der springt
noch auf”
•
(Open) letter to Miklós
Radnóti’s wife
XII. Job and his prize
Imre Kertész
Summary
Index