Kertész, Imre "Fateless" or "Fatelessness"

(Hungarian Title: Sorstalanság) - 1975


Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read

The author is a Holocaust survivor, in fact he was in two of the major concentration camps and as such has a lot to tell about his history. But it’s the unique way he chooses to tell us about his early life that makes his work so special. He tells the life of a fifteen year old boy who grows up in Hungary during World War II. Despite a lot of similarities to his own life, the author claims this is only a story based on his life.

Anyway, we see the Nazi regime and the concentration camps through the eyes of a child who doesn’t know anything else. This is his life. It is "normal" for him that his father is sent to a labour camp, that his friends disappear, so he is not too surprised when he is sent there, as well. He describes his time in the camp as if everything that happens there is the most normal thing in the world. How awful that must have been! He has more problems adjusting back into normal life when he returns to Budapest after the war where he meets people whose lives went on and who didn’t go to the camps.

Apparently, Imre Kertész received a lot of criticism for his "naïve" portrayal of one of the worst genocides that ever happened. I think his writing is very interesting, who knows what a child thinks when they grow up in a crazy world, it’s the only world they know. I’m not the only one who thinks so, though, because:

Book Description:

"On his arrival Gyuri finds that he is unable to identify with other Jews, and in turn is rejected by them. An outsider among his own people, his estrangement makes him a preternaturally acute observer, dogmatically insisting on making sense of everything he witnesses."

Imre Kertész received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002 "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history".

Another interesting book by a Nobel Prize winner on the same topic:
Wiesel, Eli "Night"

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Original Post on "Let's Read".

Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész

Reviewed by Edith LaGraziana

On my literary tour of Europe I visit Hungary today and it almost goes without saying that I continue with a book connected to war and death. Hungary entered World War II in 1941 siding with Nazi Germany, but only in March 1944 German troupes occupied the country and began with the deportation of the Jewish population to concentration camps. In February 1945 Red Army forces liberated Hungary as can be read in Sándor Márai’s masterly novel Szabadulás (meaning “liberation”) set during the siege of Budapest which lamentably doesn’t seem to have been translated into English. The country remained under Soviet supremacy (and control) until 1989. All those hardships naturally influenced the further lives of people, among them the Nobel Prize laureate in literature 2002 Imre Kertész who made his balance in Kaddish for an Unborn Child.

Imre Kertész was born in Budapest, Hungary, in November 1929. For being of Jewish descent he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz at the age of fourteen and later moved on to Buchenwald. After his liberation from the concentration camp in 1945 he returned to Hungary, finished school and then worked for a newspaper, as an industrial worker and a ministerial officer until his obligatory two-year military service. From 1953 on Imre Kertész earned his living as an independent writer and translator of German-language authors and philosophers. The author’s first and probably most famous novel published in 1975 is Fatelessness (Sorstalanság; also translated as Fateless) which together with Fiasco (A kudarc: 1988), Kaddish for an Unborn Child (Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért: 1990; also translated as Kaddish for a Child Not Born), and Liquidation (Felszámolás: 2003) forms kind of a tetralogy with strong autobiographical echoes like all his fiction and essays. In 2002 Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Since 2001 the author lives mainly in Berlin, Germany.

The Kaddish is the Jewish prayer for the dead. The narrating protagonist writes his Kaddish for an Unborn Child or to be precise for a son or daughter who could have been, but never even was conceived because he always refused to bring children into a world in which the holocaust had been possible. At the beginning stands the innocent question of a philosopher making conversation during a walk through the park of a rest-home in the Hungarian highlands. He wants to know whether the ageing narrator has children. His answer is an as immediate and vehement “No!” as when his then wife, now (remarried) ex-wife, told him that she wanted a child. What follows is a bitter look back at his failed marriage, at his career as a writer compelled to do translations for a living, at his ordeal in the concentration camps, at his relations with the autocratic father and his time in a boarding school, thus at his entire existence. He also meditates on what relevance his Jewish heritage has in all this, especially for him who has no faith. He knows that in reality he has died long ago together with millions of others. Like many holocaust survivors he feels that he has no right to exist and that his purpose is to complete the task which the Nazi bloodhounds began in the concentration camps. So he is constantly “digging his grave in the air”. As a natural consequence he is unable to commit to anyone or anything with his entire self, be it his wife, his career, his dwelling – or a child.

Kaddish for an Unborn Child is a thin book offering dense content with many philosophical insights. It’s a first-person narrative addressed to the child whom the narrator never fathered and in a way it reminded me of a long letter. In fact, a thoughtful monologue interrupted only by some remembered dialogues fills the pages from beginning to end. In addition Imre Kertész didn’t structure his novel in any usual way. There are no chapters and only few paragraphs. Sentences are long and meandering. Form and style are entirely subordinated to the natural flow of the stream of consciousness which also forces a line break whenever the narrator hurls another firm “No!” at his wife and at the world. Also the inner order of the story isn’t chronological, but it works like our mind picking up ideas and thoughts on the spur of the moment. So in a certain way it’s a difficult read requiring sometimes to leaf back and to re-read passages to understand properly.

If you’re looking for a cheerful and entertaining read Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész definitely is the wrong choice. If you enjoy intelligent as well as intense writings and don’t mind a dark mood, it’s the perfect read. Highly recommended to everyone who wishes to understand the minds of holocaust survivors and their children.

Original post on Edith's Miscellany:
http://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2013/11/kaddish-for-unborn-child-by-imre-kertesz.html

Fateless by Imre Kertész

Fateless, by Nobel prize winning Hungarian-Jewish author Imre Kertész, is also known as Fatelessness, which has a slightly different meaning. The suffix -less means ‘without‘ or ‘a lack of’,  and the suffix -ness means a ‘state of being’ .  So Fateless means without a fate, whereas Fatelessness means a state of being without a fate.

Wikipedia tells me that Kertész won the Novel Prize in 2002 “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history“, and in this book, the adolescent narrator’s ‘state of being’ and what he chooses to make of it, is all.

György Köves is a Hungarian teenager when the story opens.  His father is about to be deported to a labour camp under the Nazi Occupation.  György gets permission to leave school early, and witnesses his parents’ preparations: leaving Mr Suto, (a business partner) in charge, and buying clothing and other supplies for Father to take with him. We know that the parents recognise the fragility of their arrangements because Father doesn’t bother to get a receipt for the jewellery he hands over to his partner, knowing that the possession of such a receipt is risky, and that it’s probably useless anyway.  But György is bored by these events.

Bored?? This comes as a shock.  It is a powerful reminder that Jews had no comprehension of what was to happen to them.  This boy has become used to systematic discrimination and at this stage in his life finds it merely tedious.  He doesn’t understand why his friend Anne-Marie’s sister is so offended by it.
Fateless shows us the inexorable progress of the genocide as it is happening, through the eyes of a disinterested, compliant adolescent.  It reminded me of the immediacy of  Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky, a Jewish author who wrote as events unfolded with the Occupation of Paris.  She had no idea of what lay ahead of Jews in France, and this is what makes her writing so poignant to read.  Kertész, however, wrote his book in 1975.  He did know what had happened; he is himself a Holocaust survivor.  He has recreated the naive impressions of a teenager, but says the story is not autobiographical.

The dispassionate tone of the narrator is quite unnerving.  There is something about György’s dull incomprehension of events that makes it all seem so much more awful. He’s a boy, preoccupied with nothing much, and (when he can muster the energy to pay attention) he is mystified by his uncle’s belief that their travails are a judgement on Jews for their sins.  It hasn’t occurred to him to pray for his father, and he doesn’t understand the Hebrew prayer when Uncle Lajos pressures him into it because – although György is about to be plunged into religious persecution himself -  he’s not even a religious Jew.

What does make sense to him, when he is conscripted to work at the Shell Oil Refinery is Uncle Lajos’ appeal to him to behave well because he represents the ‘whole Jewish community‘ and ‘has a responsibility to be on [his] best behaviour’ (p22).  He can see the logic of this, and he is painfully keen to be logical.  Most awful of all is his naive reliance on the opinion of

the more worldly, older ones [who] thought that, regardless of how the Germans felt about Jews, basically, as everyone knows, they were clean, honest, orderly, precise, and industrious people who respected others  who exhibited these same traits…I was expecting more order, work, an occupation and some fun (p48).

I defy anyone to read those words and not feel queasy.
There were times when this the book suddenly overwhelmed me, and I could not bear to read it any more.  I had to get up and walk around my quiet, peaceful house to compose myself.  I think it was the youthfulness of the narrator that made it so difficult to read, knowing that so many young lives were truncated in those death camps, so few that survived.   But it was also the narrator’s tone -  the way he tries to rationalise the irrational,  his pride in being a reasonable person himself, his ghastly acceptance of his circumstances as if somehow they were the natural order of things…

It is unbearably sad when he asks a friend who has an ‘enviable position among those great dignitaries, the potato peelers’ for ‘some leftovers, … some remnants, maybe from the bottom of the pots‘ and he learns that ‘friendship is a finite thing, whose boundaries are defined by the laws of life’ (p114).  His poignant account of the three ways to escape a concentration camp focuses not on the drama of  suicide or an actual escape attempt but on the most modest:

There is one aspect of human nature that, I had learned at school, is also a person’s inalienable right.  It is true that our imagination remains free even in captivity.  I could,  for instance, achieve this freedom while my hands were busy with a shovel or a pickaxe – with a moderate exertion, limiting myself to the most essential movements only.  I myself was simply not there (p115).

And where does this boy wish himself to be?  Home, he tells us, with the pride of an adolescent, but only because he can’t credibly imagine himself in Calcutta or Florida – such fantasies are not tenable.  And when transported home by his imagination he feels regret that he had not ‘lived correctly‘ because he had been finicky about food, he had been foolishly afraid of his professors, he had wasted opportunities.

It seems to me that Kertész’s choice of title is profound.   What happened to his character, and by inference all the other Jews in the camps, was not his fate, and this fatelessness is a chosen state of being.  He is asserting that he refuses to explain these events with the notion that the Holocaust was predetermined by some spiritual being either out of malice or an Old Testament judgement on them.  He is making a statement that the German genocide of the Jews was a choice perpetrated by an evil leadership which succeeded with the acquiescence of the many.

About a year ago, I read and reviewed Eva Hoffman’s After Such Knowledge which explained how the ‘grotesque sadism and humiliation [of the Holocaust] which – along with losses so profound we cannot imagine them – poisoned the lives of the survivors: they were traumatised by the humiliation of having submitted to degrading treatment‘.   Hoffman’s book made me realise that the common ‘dynamic determination [to be 'normal'] was sometimes a frantic or hysterical response to [that] trauma‘.  I wonder now,  if there is a little of that dynamic determination in the disconcerting conclusion to Kertész’s book, where György declines to act as a witness, and refuses to help the journalist tell the story of what happened.

‘I am here,’ [he says] and I know full well that I have to accept the prize of being allowed to live.  Yes, as I look around me in this gentle dusk in this square on a storm-beaten yet full-of-thousands-of-promises street, I already begin to feel how readiness is growing, collecting inside me.’ (p190)

His way of dealing with the shock of learning what has happened to his family is his refusal to be unhappy, succoured by an optimism that can only survive for as long as he denies the horror.  György has become institutionalised by his experiences and has a distorted sense of perspective:

There is no impossibility that cannot be overcome (survived?), naturally and further down the road, I now know, happiness lies in wait for me like an inevitable trap.  Even back there, in the shadow of the chimneys. in the breaks between pain, there was something resembling happiness. Everybody will ask me about the deprivations, the ‘terrors of the camps’, but for me, the happiness there will always be the most memorable experience, perhaps.  Yes, that’s what I’ll tell them the next time they ask me: about the happiness in those camps.
If they ever do ask.
And if I don’t forget. (p191)

The question for me is, is it György who is traumatized, or is it Kertész?

Author: Imre Kertész
Title: Fateless / FatelessnessTranslator: Christopher C. Wilson and Katherina M. Wilson
Publisher: Hydra Books, Northwestern University Illinois, 1992
ISBN: 9780810110496
Source: Kingston Library

I read this book in December 2010.
Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers
Lisa Hill, Melbourne Australia

Kaddish for a Child not Born by Imre Kertesz (Laura)

Kaddish for a Child not Born
Imre Kertesz
95 pages

I lived in such a way that the Germans might return at any time; thus I didn't quite live. (p. 45)

This book is a holocaust survivor's first-person narrative exploring the impact of imprisonment at Auschwitz on his adult life.
Then she asked me whether I suffered or perhaps even still suffer from my Jewishness aside from what I had to suffer in the past. I answered ... that I have carried this sin as my sin even though I have never committed it. (p. 56)As the title indicates, the narrator is mourning the child he never had. His marriage fell apart after he emphatically refused to have children: No -- it should never happen to another child, what happened to me: my childhood. (p. 71)

This is a short book written in a free-form style, and yet was not an easy read. It is probably best read in small pieces and then digested through contemplation. I was not in the mood for this kind of book and probably should have set it aside. Nonetheless, I could see that, if read with proper attention, it could be a quite powerful book. ( )


My original review can be found here.

Imre Kertesz's Auschwitz Tetralogy

I recently finished the three books of Kertesz's Auschwitz tetralogy that are translated into English (by the great Tim Wilkinson): Fatelessness, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and Liquidation. (We're still waiting for Fiasco, the third published, to be translated).

I enjoyed all three, and reading them close to each other was not a burden at all since all have unique styles. Fatelessness is much like a conventional novel with a philosophical core. Kaddish for an Unborn Child was a declamation in the style of Notes from Underground. And Liquidation read like a Tom Stoppard play, though it is for the most part a novel.

In these books Kertesz analyzes what Auschwitz means. He himself is a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald (like the narrator in Fatelessness). Thankfully, he has also survived suriving Auschwitz - most other writers who survived have taken their lives - and has produced these excellent ruminations on the subject and on what it means to humanity.

All of the novels are short, but they say a lot more than most. Highly recommended reading.

For my complete reviews of each novel, please visit the Kertesz page of my blog: http://mookse.wordpress.com/category/kertesz-imre/.

Detective Story by Imre Kertesz (3m)

Written in 1977 but published in the US for the first time this January, Detective Story by Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz tells the story of a group of men who, while working for an unnamed Latin American country's government, go too far to stop their political enemies. While I thought Kaddish for a Child Not Born by Kertesz was brilliant, I must admit I didn't get into this one too much. I'm willing to confess the fault might lie with the reader rather than the writer, however. Luckily, this one was short, but it didn't pack the same punch for me that Kaddish did.

1977 [2008 for the English translation], 112 pp.
Rating: 3/5

Originally reviewed at 1morechapter.com

Kaddish for a Child Not Born by Imre Kertesz (3m)

Definition: Mourner's Kaddish expresses love of God and acceptance of God's will, even while the mourner is feeling sorrow over the death of a loved one. [See the actual English translation at the end of this review.]

Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz, survivor of both Auschwitz and Buchenwald, is a brilliant writer. As I was reading this short work, I found that I wanted to quote almost the entire book for this review. In the story, a man at a writer's conference explains to a colleague why he refused his ex-wife a child because he doesn't want to bring a child into a world where an Auschwitz is allowed to occur. In fact the very first word of the novel is "No," a reference to a question on whether or not he has children. He then expounds on his reasons for that decision, and on his childhood, his marriage, and his survival experiences.

"No!" something screamed, howled within me, immediately and forthwith, and it was only gradually, after many, many years had quieted it down, that my cramp gave way to a quiet but persistent pain, until slowly and maliciously, like a malignant sickness, a question began to take distinct shape with me: "Were you to be a dark-eyed little girl? With pale spots of scattered freckles around your little nose? Or a stubborn boy? With cheerful, hard eyes like blue-gray pebbbles?" Yes, my existence in the context of your potentiality.

I've had family members also question the wisdom of bringing children into the world, and the first time it was put to me, I didn't understand the reasoning behind this stance at all. Perhaps I was too naive then, though, because I do understand it now. I am a mother; I'm grateful to be a mother; but, unfortunately, there is much evil in this world, and while not my choice, I understand why people would question whether to subject their potential children to it.

1990, [1999 for English trans.], 95 pp.
Rating: 4.5/5

English Translation of the Mourner's Kaddish
May His illustrious name become increasingly great and holy
In the world that He created according to His will,
and may He establish His kingdom
In your lifetime and in your days
and in the lifetime of all the house of Israel
Speedily and soon. And let us say amen.

May His illustrious name be blessed always and forever.
Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled
Honoured, raised up and acclaimed
be the name of the Holy one blessed be He
beyond every blessing hymn, praise and consolation
that is uttered in the world. And let us say amen.
May abundant peace from heaven, and life
Be upon us and upon all Israel.

Originally reviewed at 1morechapter.com