| 1945 and Other Stories By Gábor T. Szántó; translated by Walter Burgess, Marietta Morry, TLR Bass and Ivan Sanders CEEOL Press, 2024 |
Hungary is a small Eastern European country with a great literary tradition, whose inhabitants speak and write a language unrelated to any of its Indo-European neighbors. For four decades after World War II Hungary was shut off from the West by the Iron Curtain, with little circulation in either direction. Since the fall of communism, however, a few Hungarian writers, including those from Jewish backgrounds, have managed to cross linguistic boundaries and enter the space of world literature. (Imre Kertész, a Holocaust survivor who was deported to Auschwitz and other camps as a teenager, became the first Hungarian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2002, after his books had been translated into German.)
Like many of Szántő’s stories, “Homecoming, 1945” is short but carries a big punch.
Jewish themes are central to the fictional works of Gábor T. Szántó. Born in 1966 to secular Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust as young children, Szántó has been the editor-in-chief of the Jewish cultural magazine Szombat (Saturday) for more than three decades. He is the author of several novels and short story collections, as well as poetry. The title story of his first book, published in 1995, “The Tenth Man” (it appeared in English in 2003 in an anthology I coedited with Éva Forgács, Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary) features a young man from Budapest who visits his parents’ birthplace, a provincial town that once had a thriving Jewish population but has been almost empty of Jews since the Holocaust. The cantor at the local synagogue begs him to stay long enough to join the evening service and be the “tenth man” in a minyan—but after promising to come, the young man flees, telling himself that at least he gave the cantor hope for a few hours. This story packs a lot of meaning into a few pages, not only about the destruction of Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust but about the feelings of ambivalence and guilt that characterize the descendants of those who survived.
The long reach of world war and the Holocaust into individual lives are also a major concern in 1945 and Other Stories, the first of Szántó’s books to be translated in its entirety into English. Excerpts from his novels and individual stories have appeared in American magazines, including Moment, which in 2019 published the title story of this volume, “Homecoming, 1945.” The story was the basis of an earlier film, 1945, with a screenplay by Szántó and the director Ferenc Török. The 2017 film was a huge hit on the international film festival circuit and garnered many nominations and awards.
The writer Gábor T. Szántó. Credit: Reichel Tamás (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Like many of Szántő’s stories, “Homecoming, 1945” is short but carries a big punch. Just a few months after the end of the war, the inhabitants of a village in the Hungarian countryside are thrown into a tizzy when they find out that two strangers dressed in black suits have arrived on the train from Budapest, accompanying a cargo of ten heavy boxes that they take to be merchandise. “These folks have learned nothing,” one villager concludes. “They’re only interested in business and that’s it.” But the two Orthodox Jews are not there on business, it turns out: They have come to bury 1,417 pieces of German soap in the Jewish cemetery, one for each Jew deported from the area in 1944. (An author’s note explains that even though there is no historical evidence for the belief at the time that Jewish remains were used to make soap, in many places “soap was buried to represent human remains.”)
The villagers’ worry that returning Jews will want to reclaim their property, which they had grabbed after the Jews were deported, effectively highlights the guilt of bystanders. But the story also shows how shame and guilt can be turned against the very people who have been wronged:
“It dawns on them how it might feel if the previous owners, returning to the village, were to meet with their dear possessions face-to-face. They’re ashamed, and this feeling angers them, but they also proclaim their innocence. Now why should we feel ashamed, they ask themselves, directing their passion towards the two newcomers, whose arrival foreshadows the ominous vision of others coming home…”
In the end, it’s the villagers’ angry guilt, rather than anything done by the unsuspecting visitors, that lingers in the reader’s mind as the dominant theme of the story. The same is true of the film version.
The seven other stories in the volume, all but one translated by Walter Burgess and Marietta Morry in serviceable prose, span the period between the immediate postwar and the early 21st century. The most powerful ones feature Jewish protagonists grappling with questions of identity and belonging, in a society where many Jews don’t feel totally at home even decades after the war. In “The First Christmas,” set in the mid-1960s, a Jewish man who still has horrifying memories of the forced labor service he endured during the winter of 1944-45 reluctantly buys a Christmas tree his kids have begged for, then gets them pellet guns as Christmas gifts and proceeds to shoot all the ornaments off the tree. This is another very short piece, but one that speaks volumes about the long-range consequences of wartime trauma.
The longest story, “Trans,” takes place closer to our own day and is about a young Orthodox student in a rabbinical seminary in Budapest who gradually comes to realize that he wants to be a woman; but he also wants to stay in the seminary. By a kind of grim humor, he takes his request all the way up to a Beth Din, a rabbinical court, where he presents learned arguments for why the Torah doesn’t forbid sex-change surgery as long as it’s performed by a non-Jew. He is expelled from the seminary for “too many absences” before the Beth Din can pronounce a decision, but a visiting rabbi from the United States provides a way out: He knows of an Orthodox community in San Francisco where the young rabbi-to-be will find a welcome.
My personal favorite is “To Tell the Truth,” a rather tall tale in the form of a mild revenge fantasy. Two middle-aged Jewish professionals in contemporary Budapest, a successful dentist and his pop musician older brother, decide to take justice into their own hands when an aged perpetrator, a former officer in the gendarmerie (the police force in the provinces, which aided in deportations and committed other war crimes) is acquitted in a belated trial for lack of sufficient evidence. (There were two actual cases of a similar kind in Hungary in 2011.) The brothers’ administration of justice consists of kidnapping the man and forcing him to watch a 12-hour endless video loop about the Holocaust in a basement room until he is ready to admit his crimes. But the old man foils them, for he stubbornly turns his back to the screen. After weeks of having to provide food and lodging for him even as he persists in his denial, the musician brother, totally disgusted, decides to leave the country with his family: “If they let Nazis march freely on the streets, if they let them speak up in the parliament without consequences…let them do it but without me,” he tells his sibling. The story ends with the war criminal still in the basement, being housed and fed by the Jewish dentist and his newfound love. This absurdist, tragicomic fable succeeds beautifully in showing us the ongoing impact of the Holocaust and the insoluble dilemmas it still poses.
Susan Rubin Suleiman is professor emerita of French and comparative literature at Harvard University. Her most recent books are the memoir Daughter of History: Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood and István Szabó: Filmmaker of Existential Choices.