By Gary Adelman
Vol. 25, Nos. 1-2 (2004)I.
Little more than thumbnail sketches are available to English readers of Imre Kertész, the Hungarian-Jewish novelist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in literature for such Holocaust books as Fateless (1975) and Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990), which are the only two of Kertész’s works that have been translated into English as of this writing.1 Kertész was one of seven thousand Budapest Jews deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. He was fifteen at the time, the same age as the narrator-protagonist of his autobiographical first novel, Fateless. In that book, George emerges from the camps with a mental clarity that promises a successful rehabilitation. In the later Kaddish, the unnamed survivor-protagonist is, in contrast, haunted, isolated, and suicidal. The two novels (reputed to be the first and third in a trilogy) represent two contradictory interpretations of the Holocaust, one potentially redemptive and the other nihilistic. The contrast of these two readings of extreme experience could not be more important to Kertész (as they were to Dostoevsky, beginning with his prison memoir, The House of the Dead). At issue is the recovery of one’s freedom, on the one hand, and on the other, existence seen as an absence agitated by memories and “panting towards the grand apnoea.”2
