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Katalin Pesci
In Search of Lost Female Writers, Remembrance
of Lost Female Writes – Meditations About the Feminine Part of the
Hungarian Jewish Literature
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
Simone de Beauvoir
Laughing a lot, my grandmother used to tell me the same stories: how she smuggled a message from the prison station where they were gathered, asking her little sister for summer dresses, since she will need them desperately in the labour camp… another was about how she admired the beauty of the Schwarzwald, as she had her turn to stand on her friend’s shoulder so she could look out of the box-car heading for Dachau („I have to come back here once!” decided she rapturously, upsetting her friends). In another story from the camp she told about how hard it was to get a needle, but at last she managed it and could embroider the collar of her uniform with thread unravelled from the seam of a blanket… The great story after they were released: her son found my grandmother in the camp with the help of a list, but she did not want to get off her wooden bunk to see the young man asking for her, since she was just about to go to the dentist, her face swollen – she did not want any man to see her in a state like that…
(We, her teen-age grandchildren, were of course grinning candidly: our grandmother, though well on in years, was clearly still a proud lady. And we knew the other side of her stories too, told by our father: the always pretty woman used to welcome her son’s comrades with a beautifully set table, since “the movement” preferred to hold its meetings in their house in the Lipótváros. She was taken hostage as a political prisoner but they could not flog anything out of her, not even a single name.)
As I grew up, I always hoped to find women’s Holocaust stories similar to those of my grandmother.
As an adult I came to understand that my mother’s stories, different from those of my grandmother, are not obvious at all either. What could her religious family have said, living in their small village in Szatmár, raising a lot of children, when their daughter – sister – moved to Budapest, breaking conventions and flouting requirements in order to join the young Zionists instead of getting married? What might the Pester fellows, children of bourgeois families, have thought about my mother, who supported herself through hard labour? (And what might the neighbourhood have thought about the group, all members of Hashomer Hatzair, renting a flat together in the Aradi Street?)
What could it have felt like, transferring from the Zionist to the labour movement, and – being not only Jewish but a woman – belonging to the minority? Working hard in a factory, but evenings going to the Zeneakadémia in a white shirt to listen to Bartók or Attila József? Having her hair cut and permed in a boyish style in the era of vamps, wearing trousers, smoking even on the street, playing volleyball, going on walking tours, rowing and skiing on the weekends? And then in ‘44 living and working alongside Nazis with forged documents, her hair girlishly blond, wary all the time of being nabbed because of a telltale gesture or an Ady-book?
It is fruitless to look for Hungarian prose written by women in similar situations.
Why are women not present in the Jewish literature?
Thanks to historians and psychologists, we have known about the importance of oral history for quite a while: we know that women’s narratives have their own point of view and mood. Researchers collecting stories about the Holocaust have realised that women tell different stories in a different way – that is why it would be really important to come to know their narratives, not only those of men, and to consider them independent of gender, proper to mankind. Since the theme is inevitably important and the collectors of oral history are insistent, far the greatest number of the stories told by Jewish women are about the Holocaust, although there are numerous other possible Jewish themes. Looking around in a bookshop in any Holocaust museum in the world one can find a great number of books by women. Hungarian publishers are not really interested yet in the memoirs, considering them as non-literature, though they might be priceless „treasures”: some of these stories even turn out to be „literature.” (Aranka Siegal1, born in Beregszász, publishing as an American, wanted originally nothing more than to bear witness to what happened to her, struggling with the memoirs as well as with the English language. But her two books on the deportation, about Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and her vicissitudes after the war became bestsellers in many countries; she was praised as the „Hungarian Anne Frank”, although the books are not based on a diary).
Another „Anne Frank”, Edith Bruck, first moved to Israel, then settled down and became famous in Italy. Her autobiographical book, „Ki téged úgy szeret”,2 tells the story of a girl growing up in a poor peasant family, about the deportation, the impossibility of returning home and the struggles to reach Israel.
The theme was taboo in Hungary for decades, and although now and again there was a book published, I presume that we, children of survivors, tried to put together the mosaics from the newly published Semprun- and Peter-Weiss-books, and not from the memoirs of our parent’s Hungarian contemporaries. Although quite a few personal memoirs had been published directly after the war, they did not become well known for some reason – so they did not become part of the Jewish canon either. The most interesting seems to be an „Anne Frank” kind of diary: it was only by pure chance that the diary of a 13- year-old girl – deported and killed in Auschwitz with the other people from the ghetto in Nagyvárad, together with her grandparents – was not lost; it was published by Zsolt Béla’s wife, Ágnes, under the title „Éva lányom3.”*
Teri Gács’s4 authentic report tells about the Glasshouse in the Vadász Street, where more than 5,000 Jews were interned. (We know painfully little about the Glasshouse, as we have virtually no information about, for example, the role of women in the Zionist movements). Ágnes Fedor’s5 interview-novel shows her family hiding with false documents, suffering from the misery connected with living behind a mask.
Well, these first stories told by Jews – by Jewish women! – were unknown to the post-war generation – as were the „Jewish” novels or „novels with a Jewish motive” from the second wave, published almost at the same time, in the middle of the 1970s. (I remember having been totally astonished by György Spiró’s article in the ÉS in the middle of the 1980s: he accused literary critics of deliberately suppressing Imre Kertész’s novel, the Sorstalanság, published in 1975. Needless to say, I – though a young literary woman – had not heard about it at that time yet, and could only buy and read it in 1985, after the second edition came out.) The first in the series was a novel written by a woman in 1974, the Hajtukanyar by Mária Ember6. (Supposedly I am not the only one whose attention was attracted to the work only later, through the work of György Száraz.) Mária Ember tries to show the unshowable from a child’s point of view – a method often used in memoirs. It is not only genuine because the author herself lived through the Holocaust as a child, but because the viewpoint of a child, both naive and wise, stultifies attempts to explain and understand the situation.
Ágnes Gergely’s novel of 1973, A tolmács7, opened a new chapter, covering everything following the deportation – i.e. choices faced by Jews after the war: stay or leave? What does Israel/Palestine mean for the Jewish survivor from Europe? What is the right decision: assimilation or self-imposed „ghetto”? However, this collection of essays with some interesting descriptions does not talk openly about the heroine’s antinomic identity – and for that reason it can only be superficial. Though this is completely understandable – given the cultural politics at that time – the blurb makes one still smile and then pucker, as it does not even mention „Jewishness”: „The constant background theme is the second world war.” („…The word (Jewish) itself has an intrinsic negative meaning in Hungarian, especially in the Eastern region, where the sh at the end of the word is even stressed or pronounced ‘ssshhh’ – I don’t know whether you can sense this – fish, rubbish, sluggish – as if there was something to throw away at the end of the word” – says the novel’s heroine.)
From the end of the eighties on, there has been a constant increase in the number of publications concerning Jewish themes, but few were written by women. A rare exception is Éva Székely’s Eden, a thin „talking book” full of family photographs. It is actually a memoir, since the author answers the questions raised by András Mezei, talking about her family, childhood, being in exile and in hiding. It is a highly interesting and moving book: the author talks about the quondam Eden and its loss by keeping or reconstructing the point of view of the little girl of long-ago. She mentions everything important for her life: the towering desire for love, the odd feelings towards her family, the tragedy of losing her mother, her growing Jewish identity – all easy to sense and to understand as the reader completely identifies with the little girl, while the narrator, standing by her heroine, analyses the situations at the same time.
There is one more book to be mentioned – the newly published posthumous volume8 by Mária Ember, which shows Jewish life in the country before and after the Holocaust, from a child’s point of view.
Here I could stop listing the literature treating the themes of “Jewish” and “women” – though there obviously must be stories about Jewish women as well as novels that mention or refer to these themes. But here come the questions that prompted me to write this essay:
Where does Jewish literature start – and end? Does it exist at all? Does only the author’s ancestry count? And what if they have never written anything about the problems of (their) being Jewish? If they haven’t even thought about it at all? If they have not even had a Jewish identity? Of if they even were baptised?
„Frankrayh frest yidn”, France devours Jews, goes the wise Yiddish saying. Since the age of Enlightenment, assimilated Jews have said the following throughout Europe: „In public behave as a human and at home as a Jew.” Alan Astro, editor of a French Jewish anthology published in the USA, had good reasons to call his introductory essay “Discreet Jews in French Literature.”9 This effective title could be rewritten as Discreet French (Hungarians) in Jewish Literature.
Does Jewish literature exist at all?
And: can only those works be regarded as part of the Jewish literature that concern the problem of being Jewish? Obviously, poetry expresses everything that prose can discuss thematically, using the power of language. But what to do with novels whose only clue to Jewishness comes through descriptions of milieu or the behaviour of certain characters, or even only by the composition of the text?10
(What to do with Proust, the ‘discreetly French’ Jewish writer? He was Jewish on his mother’s side, which is well known from his letters and from his biography – but is this enough to count him as a Jew? Not at all. But some Proust experts claim that the text itself is revealing: “A la recherche du temps perdu” treats among other things the question of Jewish identity.)
On the other hand, in talking about the Hungarian Jewish novel, Ágnes Heller mentions a strange phenomena, the „de-judification of the characters: „The Jewish identity of the heroes is denied. These Hungarian Jewish writers portray Jewish characters as if they were not Jews.” With subtler words: „Discreet Jews in Hungarian literature.”11
„If I ever wrote my autobiography, I would give it the title The Story of an Attribute” – Isaac Babel once said. Can those who could not speak Yiddish even before the Holocaust, but rather spoke Russian, French or Hungarian, be considered as Jews or can they only be called Jews if with an attribute? And what about those raised in a non-religious family?
Let us have a look at the list of pre-war Jewish female authors as well as “literary partners” of Jewish origins.12 There are authors of girls’ novels, storywriters, activists in the labour movement, linguists, artists, editors of literary magazines, military correspondents and muses among them. Some have been long forgotten, some are hailed as important personalities in Hungarian literature; others are known as former popular pulp-fiction writers. What do they have in common, except for being Jewish? First of all, they have never written about their Jewishness. Neither the religion, the loss of the religion, nor the assimilation, Zionism or anti-Semitism became a problem of self-definition or self-expression. (It is still possible to study these life-works – even if we do not study the Jew him- or herself, but the „Jew-like.” As Aladár Komlós13 said: „I cannot consider it as a coincidence that even assimilated Jews still have a lot of prophetic verve: I believe that when these modern Jewish prophets are compared with the existing order – in their bitter dissatisfaction, strong desire for being equal, and wishing for a new world to come – their suppressed Jewish feelings burst out through an unlocked channel.”)
However, there are literary texts all over the world talking candidly about the history of the attribute Babel mentioned – what authors think about being Jewish. This search for identity can be expressed directly, but more often it is only built in into the complex system of meaning by a complicated transmission. In my respect only these works that tackle the problem of Jewish identity can be regarded as part of “Jewish literature”: origins alone can neither determine identity, nor can they be considered as a literary factor. The autobiographical impetus plays an important role in the new (feminine) authors’ publishing after the Holocaust: Writing is a means of self-expression as well as of seeking identity.
Female literature has not been mentioned yet
If origins alone are not sufficient conditions for consideration as Jewish literature, the same is true with respect to being a woman. Why have novels portraying the complex relationship between women never been written? (In her novel “A Room of One's Own,” Virginia Woolf14 writes that novels about women never handle friendship between them. „All the great women of fiction were (…) not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that (…)!”15 To write in another way about women one would need another tradition: „For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”16 Female writers throughout literary history usually had two choices: either to apologise all the time – „I am just a woman” – which only leads to low-quality literature but not to „literature without an attribute” (which in this case would be “woman”), or to pick up the glove, saying „I am at least as important as a man,” in which case they had to hide or even forget that they are – as women – different. The popular apprehension still supports this valuation, considering „feminine” themes less important, even trifling. (Jane Austen is less significant than Tolstoy, since she wrote about familiar things, emotions, not about worldwide issues, real themes of high literature.) In an ingenious essay, Harper’s raises the following question: „Is it size that matters, in literature too?”17 Maybe so. In America, critics claim that books by female authors might sell well, but the Great American Novel will still not be written by a woman, and they will never get major literary awards either.
Where might the female author belong within Jewish literature?
„A woman must have her own room if she is to write fiction”18 – wrote Virginia Wolf at the beginning of the 20th century. From the second half of this century the Jewish female author has to have enough autonomy and authority if she wants to report openly on any issues of Jewish life, to write about her family life and traditions, religious liturgy and assimilation, survival and relationships between parent and child, about studying and marriage, personal desires and memories, myths and reality.
Aladár Komlós tried to encourage Jewish writers – irrespective of gender – which can be extended to the female authors as well19: „Hungarian literature will be open for all of you, even if you write about yourselves as a Jew. If you write about yourselves, you will write even better. It is in the interest of the literature that you write about yourselves.”
Dr. Katalin Pesci - co-founder and editor of "Esther's Bag", a Jewish women's group and journal in Budapest, essayist and translator on the field of contemporary Jewish literature and film, as well as feminist cultural theory