⚠️ Historical Documentation Notice
Historical Documentation Notice

This document is part of a historical archive and is presented for scholarly research and educational purposes.

The content reflects historical perspectives and should be understood within its historical context.

Postedd Thursday, October 17,
2002

Alphabetical index (text)

IN REPONSE to that letter on our website requesting information on Nobel prize winning author Imre Kertesz, we have received the entry on him from the database “Contemporary Authors Online” (Gale, 2002): Contemporary Authors (Contemporary Authors is a publication compiled mainly from material supplied by the subjects themselves. It appears to have been posted only one day ago, after we first raised the question of the authenticity of his story)

Imre
Kertész

1929-

New Entry : October 16, 2002

Ethnicity: Jewish

Birth Place: Budapest, Hungary

Personal Information: Family: Name is pronounced
“Im-RAY KERtez”; born November 9, 1929, in
Budapest, Hungary; male. Ethnicity: Jewish.
Addresses: Home: Budapest, Hungary. Agent: c/o
Northwestern University Press, 625 Colfax St.,
Evanston, IL 60208-4210; c/o Magvetõ Press,
1055 Budapest, Balassi B. u. 7, Hungary.

Career: Deported to Auschwitz,
Poland, 1944 [at age fourteen?] , and Buchenwald,
Germany, 1945; Világosság, Budapest,
Hungary, journalist, 1948-51; writer and translator, 1950–.

Awards: Brandenburg Literary Prize, 1995;
Leipzig Book Prize, 1997, for Diary of a Slave;
Welt Prize, 2000; Nobel Prize for Literature, 2002, from the Swedish Academy.

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

Sorstalanság: regény,
Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó
(Budapest, Hungary), 1975, translation by
Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson published as Fateless, Northwestern University
Press (Evanston, IL), 1992.

A nyomkeresoe: két regény (title means “The Pathfinder”), Szépirodalmi
Könyvkiadó (Budapest, Hungary),
1977.

A kudarc: regény (title means “Fiasco”),
Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó
(Budapest, Hungary), 1988.

Kaddis a meg nem születetett gyermekért, Magvetõ (Budapest,
Hungary), 1990, translation by Christopher C.
Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson published as Kaddish for a Child not Born, Hydra Books (Evanston, IL),
1997.

Az angol lobogo (title means “The English
Flag”), [Budapest, Hungary], 1991.

Gályanapló (titles means “Galley
Diary”), [Budapest, Hungary], 1992.

A holocaust mint kultúra: három eloeadás (title means “The Holocaust as
Culture”), Századvég (Budapest,
Hungary), 1993.

Jegyzokönyv, Magvetõ (Budapest,
Hungary), 1993.

Valaki mas: A valtozas kronikaja (title means
“I-Another: Chronicle of a Metamorphosis”),
[Budapest, Hungary], 1997.

A gondolatnyi csend, amig a kivegzoeosztag ujratölt (title means “Moments of Silence
While the Execution Squad Reloads”), [Budapest,
Hungary], 1998.

A szamuezoett nyelv (title means “The Exiled
Language”), [Budapest, Hungary], 2001.

Author of short stories, essays, and plays.
Translator of literature and philosophy from German to Hungarian.

Works in Progress: A novel set in Hungary during its transition from Communism.

“Sidelights”

When Hungarian writer Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, the Swedish
Academy praised his works for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.”

Kertész, a survivor of both the Auschwitz and Buchenwald death camps erected by the Nazis during World War II, became the first Hungarian writer to win the award, even though his works were not widely known in his native country, much less the rest of the world, at the time.

Kertész attributes this fact as much to an unwillingness among the Hungarian people to acknowledge the Holocaust as to his own unwillingness to conform to literary status quo during the decades Hungary suffered under Soviet oppression. “There is no awareness of the Holocaust in Hungary,” Leonard Doyle quoted
Kertész as saying in the London Independent,
“I hope in light of this recognition, they will face up to it more than until now.”

His books have been popular in Germany, and in a press conference covered by the Hungarian News Agency,
Kertész commented, “Here [in
Germany], my books are fulfilling the kind of mission a writer dreams of all his life.”

Through his novels, Kertész explores his belief that the Holocaust, and the kinds of torture inflicted in concentration camps, are not an aberration of history, but a state of normalcy.

His three most well-known works, Sorstalanság (published in English translation as Fateless), A kudarc, and Kaddis a meg nem születetett gyermekért (published in English translation as Kaddish for a Child Not Born), form a semi-autobiographical trilogy in which
Kertész examines the horror and degradation visited upon the individual as a result of human animosity fueled by political power and religious intolerance.

“As a Jew persecuted by the Nazis, and then a
Hungarian writer living under a communist regime,
Kertész experienced some of the most acute suffering of the twentieth century,” commented a writer for the Glasgow Herald. Thane
Rosenbaum of the New York Times commented,
“Kertész’s books are reflections on the nature of survival and the impact of the Holocaust on those who must reconcile themselves to living in a world of madness and mass death.”

In acknowledging Kertész’s first-hand experience with one of the greatest horrors of modern history, the Swedish Academy concluded that

“for him, Auschwitz is not an
exceptional occurrence. The shocking credibility
of the description derives perhaps from this
very absence of any element of the moral
indignation or metaphysical protest that the
subject cries out for.”

Kertész was still a teenager when he was liberated from Buchenwald in 1945 and returned to
Hungary. Several years later, he became a journalist but lost his job when the Communist party assumed power and turned his newspaper into a propaganda publication. For many years, he earned a living as a translator of literary and philosophical works, introducing works by
Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and
Friedrich Nieztsche to Hungarian readers.

His first novel, Fateless, took ten years to find a publisher, and though it was initially praised in literary circles, it was not widely read. It was never banned by the government, but
Kertész’s steadfast refusal to join the
Communist party’s official writer’s association ensured that his works would never enjoy literary prominence in Hungary as long as the regime was in power.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, Hungary transitioned away from
Communism peacefully, and by 1989 Kertész’s novels had gained a wider audience. A loyal following developed, particularly in Sweden and
Germany, where his novels were readily available, and winning several prestigious literary prizes, including the Brandenburg Prize and the Leipzig
Book Prize, strengthened his reputation.

In Fateless, written in 1965 but not published until 1975, the fifteen-year-old narrator, Gyorgy
Koves, is taken to Buchenwald and learns to survive amid the starvation and boredom that fill his endless days. In the camp, Gyorgy is ostracized by the other Jews because he knows neither Hebrew nor
Yiddish and becomes an outsider among outsiders. In order to cope in such an absurd world, Gyorgy rationalizes everything, and eventually he comes to believe that Buchenwald is a beautiful place.

The concentration camp is not an aberration in his mind; it is a normal place, and Gyorgy does not bother to protest his treatment or contemplate the indignities he suffers. A reviewer for Publishers
Weekly praised “Kertész’s spare, understated prose,” noting that the novel’s intensity “will make it difficult to forget.” His next novel, A kudarc, is also narrated by Gyorgy, who is now a middle-aged novelist detailing his concentration camp experiences for a book.

Upon completing the novel, Gyorgy prepares himself for rejection, but to his surprise the novel is published. He receives no solace, however, when the book is released and he continues to suffer the sadness and desolation that have plagued his entire life.

Kertész confronts his Jewish heritage in
Kaddish for a Child Not Born. Despite the book’s title, Kertész considers himself a nonbelieving Jew, even though much of his identity is tied inextricably to the religion. The book’s title refers to the Jewish prayer for the dead, which in this case is said for the children the narrator could not bring himself to father, despite his wife’s wishes for a family.

Distrust, fear, and a Jewish identity are only three of the factors that torment the novel’s narrator, a middle-aged translator and Holocaust survivor, who is eventually deserted by a loving wife because he cannot cast out his demons and live a “normal” life.

The narrator hints at horrors other than the
Holocaust that led to his neurosis. A traumatic childhood in Budapest, complete with the humiliating rigors of boarding school, pre-date his time in Auschwitz. These combined atrocities have left him pessimistic and faithless, circumstances under which he is not willing to create life. The sadness caused by his decision not to have children in turn leads him to mourn the absence of these children.

In this cyclical despair, the Kaddish prayer becomes “a cry for death,” wrote M. Anna
Falbo in the Library Journal.

Kertész’s writing has been described as dense, and Kaddish for a Child Not Born is no exception. The short novel does not contain chapters, and one paragraph comprises nearly a quarter of the text.

The story itself, according to
Robert Murray Davis in World Literature
Today, is similarly complex: “Part meditation, part memoir, part highly abstract and achronic narrative in the first person, part transcriptions from drafts of earlier work, part circling around a series of scenes, images, and issues without reaching any conclusion except the fact that it stops with a prayer to cease forever.”

Likewise, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly commented that the strength of the novel is the strength of the narrator, noting that “the reader is carried along on his desperate, nihilistic tirade.”

Despite the somber tone of his writing,
Kertész himself does not wallow in the mire that often traps his narrators. Alan Riding
of the New York Times quoted literary critic
Hermann Tertsch as describing Kertész as “a person who has created literature and culture where others would find only desolation and neurosis. . . . His smile is a permanent gesture of conciliation toward a world that at no moment deceives him.

And his amiable nature seems like a generous revenge for the cruelties and miseries he has known.”

Underscoring the Swedish Academy’s decision, fellow Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winning writer Elie
Wiesel praised Kertész. “He is a great writer,” Wiesel commented in an article for the Associated Press, continuing, “His style and his approach are of such high quality that he deserved to be given the highest prize in literature.”

[Website
comment: Both Wiesel and Deborah Lipstadt also
highly praised the works of “Binjamin
Wilkormiski”, who turned out to be a
fraud.]

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE
AUTHOR:

PERIODICALS

  • Daily Telegraph (London, England), October
    11, 2002, Nigel Reynolds, “Holocaust Survivor
    Wins Nobel Prize for Literature.”
  • Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), October 11,
    2002, Thane Rosenbaum, “Survivor of Auschwitz
    Wins Nobel Prize; Writer’s Work Looks at Ability
    of Man to Overcome Barbaric Forces.”
  • Hungarian News Agency, October 11, 2002,
    “Nobel Prize Winner Imre Kertész Holds
    International News.”
  • Independent (London, England), October 11,
    2002, Leonard Doyle,

    “Auschwitz Survivor Wins
    Nobel Prize for Literature.”

  • Library Journal, June 1, 1997, M. Anna
    Falbo, review of Kaddish for a Child Not Born,
    p. 149.
  • Los Angeles Times, October 11, 2002, David
    Holley, “Hungarian Holocaust Survivor Is Awarded
    Nobel in Literature, ” p.

    A3.

  • Manchester Guardian, October 11, 2002,
    “Hungarian Camp Survivor Wins Literature
    Nobel.”
  • New York Times, October 10, 2002, Associated
    Press, “Hungarian Author Wins Nobel Prize in
    Literature”; October 11, 2002, Alan Riding,
    “Hungarian Novelist Wins Nobel Prize in
    Literature, ” p.

    A1; October 12, 2002, Thane
    Rosenbaum, “The Survivor who Survived.”

  • Publishers Weekly, August 24, 1992, review
    of Fateless, p. 73; May 19, 1997, a review of
    Kaddish for a Child Not Born, p. 63.
  • World Literature Today, winter, 2002, Robert
    Murray Davis, review of Kaddish for a Child not
    Born, p. 205.

OTHER

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