Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
)
Catastrophe and Utopia
Europas Osten im 20.
Jahrhundert
Herausgegeben von/Edited by
Włodzimierz Borodziej
Michal Kopeček
Joachim von Puttkamer
Band/Volume 7
Catastrophe and
Utopia
Jewish Intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe in
the 1930s and 1940s
ISBN 978-3-11-055543-1
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-055934-7
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-055708-4
ISSN 2366-9489
www.degruyter.com
Foreword
Some of the core ideas of this volume were first raised at the panel ‘Catastrophe
and Engagement: On Jewish Intellectual Trajectories’, which was part of Catas-
trophe and Utopia: Central and Eastern European Intellectual Horizons, 1933 to
1958, the 2013 annual conference of the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena held in cooper-
ation with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. The volume took
more concrete shape as the result of a one-day authorial workshop hosted by
the Center for Historical Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin on
9 May 2015. The editors are grateful to both institutions for their cooperation
and hospitality. We are especially grateful to the German Federal Ministry of Ed-
ucation and Research for its generous financial support of our initiative. We
would also like to thank Jasper Tilbury, David Burnett, Thomas N. Lampert and
Peter Sherwood for their excellent translations of those four chapters that were
originally submitted in Polish, German and Hungarian. Jonathan Lutes, Adam
Bresnahan, Dylan J. Cram and Ben Robbins put great efforts into copy-editing
the remaining papers. Daniela Gruber and Jaime Hyatt have held together the
strings from all over Europe and successfully managed the editing process. Fi-
nally, we wish to thank Jaime Hyatt for all the highly diligent and conscientious
work she has invested into ironing out many minor and a few major flaws, and
for giving this manuscript its final touch.
Ferenc Laczó
Joachim von Puttkamer
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-202
Table of contents
Ferenc Laczó
Introduction 1
Ines Koeltzsch
Utopia as Everyday Practice
Jewish Intellectuals and Cultural Translation in Prague before and after
1933 15
Marija Vulesica
What Will Become of the German Jews?
National Socialism, Flight and Resistance in the Intellectual Debate of Yugoslav
Zionists in the 1930s 45
Gábor Schein
‘Jewishness’ in the Diary of Milán Füst 71
Eszter Gantner
The New Type of Internationalist
The Case of Béla Balázs 91
Małgorzata A. Quinkenstein
‘Europe’ – It’s such a strange word for me!
A Portrait of Arthur Bryks against the Background of the Events of the
Mid-Twentieth Century 113
Camelia Crăciun
‘Virtually ex nihilo’
The Emergence of Yiddish Bucharest during the Interwar Period 133
VIII Table of contents
Clara Royer
A Liberal Utopia Against All Odds
The Survivor Writers of The Progress (Haladás), 1945–1948 155
Ferenc Laczó
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews
Early Hungarian Jewish Monographs on the Holocaust 175
Tamás Scheibner
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism
Imre Keszi in the Thrall of Utopias 223
Felicia Waldman
Avatars of Being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest in the
First Half of the Twentieth Century 263
Karolina Szymaniak
Rachel Auerbach, or the Trajectory of a Yiddishist Intellectual in Poland in the
First Half of the Twentieth Century 304
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-001
2 Ferenc Laczó
Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Ham-
burg: Hamburger Edition, 1999); Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel: Realpolitik,
Ideologie und der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944/45 (Stuttgart/Munich: S. Fischer, 2002);
Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Das Dritte Reich und die Slowakei 1939–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh,
2005); Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944 (Göttingen:
Wallstein, 2011); Simon Geissbühler, Blutiger Juli: Rumäniens Vernichtungskrieg und der verges-
sene Massenmord an den Juden 1941 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2013).
4 See Zagłada Żydów: Studia i Materiały, I–X [Holocaust Studies and materials, I–X] (2005–
2014).
5 See Ulrich Herbert, ‘Holocaust-Forschung in Deutschland: Geschichte und Perspektiven ei-
ner schwierigen Disziplin’ in Der Holocaust: Ergebnisse und neue Fragen der Forschung, eds,
Frank Bajohr and Andrea Löw (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 2015).
6 In her recent discussion of the aforementioned Editionsprojekt, project coordinator Susanne
Heim highlighted in particular that the cases of Hungary and South-East European countries
remain under-researched. See Susanne Heim, ‘Neue Quellen, neue Fragen? Eine Zwischenbi-
lanz des Editionsprojekts “Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäische Juden”’ in Bajohr
and Löw, Der Holocaust: Ergebnisse und neue Fragen.
Introduction 3
tion of Jewish themes in Central and Eastern Europe, which – ironically – coin-
cided in time with the foundation of the state of Israel. The late 1940s would
thus bring a rather paradoxical reassessment of Jewish intellectuals’ relation to
Zionism; celebrating the accomplishment of the movement’s main goal and the
forced suppression of any open affiliation to it proved to be parallel develop-
ments.
It is widely agreed that upon the publication of the two volumes of Nazi
Germany and the Jews, Saul Friedländer’s integrated history of the Holocaust,
the latest, mainstream historiography has come to conceive of the study of Jew-
ish perspectives as an essential part of depicting the Nazi era as it unfolded.7
Several ongoing scholarly publications, such as the Jewish Responses to Perse-
cution, 1933–1946 series or the German-language Editionsprojekt Judenverfol-
gung, aim to map diverse Jewish perspectives in the age of Nazi Germany and
the Holocaust on an unprecedented scale. The five volumes of the former proj-
ect, a key part of the larger Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources
in Context series released under the auspices of the United States Holocaust Me-
morial Museum, is exclusively devoted to such perspectives in a transnational
manner.8 The planned 16 volumes of the latter German-language project with
an all-European scope may also be seen as a clear step toward the increased in-
corporation of such perspectives in a national academic context where they
7 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New
York: Harper Collins, 1997); Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and
the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007). On Friedländer’s work and historio-
graphical context in English, see Christian Wiese and Paul Betts, eds, Years of Persecution,
Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies (London: Contin-
uum, 2010). For a most recent reconsideration of Friedländer’s impact in the broader context of
the transformation and new challenges of Holocaust culture, see Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kan-
steiner and Todd Presner, eds, Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 2016).
8 See: Jürgen Matthäus and Mark Roseman, eds, Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume I,
1933–1938 (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2010); Alexandra Garbarini with Emil Kerenji, Jan
Lambertz and Avinoam Patt, eds, Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume II, 1938–1940 (Lan-
ham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2011); Jürgen Matthäus with Emil Kerenji, Jan Lambertz and Leah
Wolfson, eds, Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume III, 1941–1942 (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira
Press, 2013); Emil Kerenji, ed., Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume IV, 1942–1943 (Lanham,
Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); Leah Wolfson, ed., Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume
V, 1944–1946 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). For a review essay on the series, see
my own Ferenc Laczó, ‘Agency and Unpredictability’ in Yad Vashem Studies 44, no. 1 (2016).
4 Ferenc Laczó
9 The first volume in the series was published in 2008. At the time of writing in 2016, nine out
of the planned sixteen volumes have been released. According to current plans, all sixteen of
them will also appear in English translation.
10 Ian Kershaw, The End: Hitler’s Germany, 1944–45 (London: Allen Lane, 2011); Daniel Blat-
man, The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2010); Stefan Hördler, Ordnung und Inferno: Das KZ-System in letzten Kriegsjahr
(Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015).
11 For this, see David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 (London: Mac-
millan, 2015). On the consequences of liberation, now see Dan Stone, The Liberation of the
Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
12 Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Eu-
rope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
13 Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence
after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: NYU Press, 2009); Boaz Cohen, Israeli Holocaust
Research: Birth and Evolution (London: Routledge, 2012).
Introduction 5
Leo Baeck Institute’s German-Jewish History in Modern Times.14 The growing in-
terest in the seven decades since 1945 has already yielded intriguing intellectual
historical works as well.15
The present volume draws on key lessons of such documentation and re-
search projects with an all-European or more narrowly Central European scope
to offer case studies on the biographies, agendas and accomplishments of Cen-
tral and Eastern European Jewish intellectuals from the interwar years up to the
Holocaust, and, in the case of the minority of survivors, from the Holocaust un-
til the late 1940s in particular. We are convinced that the study of this relatively
neglected region promises to yield important original insights into Jewish intel-
lectual history and, more particularly, into Jewish intellectuals’ complex nego-
tiation of catastrophe and utopia.
After all, Central and Eastern Europe served as the major stage of Jewish life
until the Holocaust. On the eve of the Second World War in early 1939, the Pol-
ish, Romanian, Hungarian and Czechoslovak Jewish communities constituted
the four largest in Europe west of the Soviet Union. In the course of the next six
years, the great majority of them – and others from all over Europe – were mur-
dered by the German Nazis and their accomplices within the territory of the his-
torical region stretching from the Baltics to the Adriatic – above all, in that of
occupied Poland. These territories were subsequently Sovietized with momen-
tous consequences for their post-war memory regimes and arguably also for the
post-war memory regime regarding Jewish history and the Holocaust across the
globe.
The exact definition of who qualifies as a Holocaust survivor may have re-
mained contested up to today, but it is among the uncontroversial facts that in
the early post-war period, Central and Eastern Europe had some of the largest
communities of survivors. With the nearly complete annihilation of the largest
and most prolific Polish Jewish community, Paris, Bucharest and Budapest
14 See Michael Brenner, ed., Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart
(München: C.H. Beck, 2012); the four volumes covering German-Jewish history until 1945 that
were published in 1996 as Michael A. Meyer and Michael Brenner, eds, German-Jewish History
in Modern Times I–IV (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). The original four volumes
were respectively titled Tradition and Enlightenment 1600–1780; Emancipation and Accultura-
tion 1780–1871; Integration in Dispute 1871–1918; Renewal and Destruction 1918–1945. (Note the
telling change in the German title to a history of Jews in Germany.)
15 For example, leading Jewish intellectuals’ relations to and activities in post-war Germany
serve as the subject of the following intriguing volume: Monika Boll and Raphael Gross, eds,
‘Ich staune, dass Sie in dieser Luft atmen können’: Jüdische Intellektuelle in Deutschland nach
1945 (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2013).
6 Ferenc Laczó
emerged as the three most sizable urban communities on the continent.16 After
the end of the Holocaust, two of the four largest Jewish communities in Europe
west of the Soviet Union may have resided in its western half – in France and in
Great Britain – but the other two lived in Central and Eastern Europe with Ro-
mania’s being, despite the massive early involvement of Romania in the Holo-
caust, the largest of them all.17
The presence of such substantial communities of survivors in what by 1945
belonged to the Soviet-dominated parts of Europe make the question of intellec-
tual continuities and change – whether they are of a personal, discursive or, to
employ Clara Royer’s apt phrase from her study in the present volume, illusory
kind – all the more relevant to explore. It stands to reason that, irrespective of
how much we may be inclined to perceive the Holocaust as the ultimate rupture
in human civilization, intellectuals of the time tried to respond to the Nazi gen-
ocide through means already at their disposal. However, we currently possess
too little precise knowledge in which ways such intellectual continuities were
manifest in Central and Eastern Europe and, more particularly, what specific ex-
pressions such continuities found with regard to the unprecedented Jewish cat-
astrophe.
Scholarly discussions of Jewish responses beyond Central and Eastern Eu-
rope have in fact already repeatedly addressed the question of continuity.18 As
illustrated by a recent scholarly exchange between Beate Meyer, Andrea Löw
and Dan Michman, a key point of difference seems to be whether to conceptu-
alize Jewish behaviour between 1933 and 1945 as a more immediate reaction to
the drastically worsening circumstances under Nazi rule, as both Löw and
Meyer have done in their respective monographs on the Litzmannstadt ghetto
and the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland,19 or to try to embed them in
16 For figures concerning 1948, see Michael Brenner, Kleine jüdische Geschichte (München: C.
H.Beck, 2008), 365. With 234,000 Jewish inhabitants, London had by far the largest Jewish
community in Europe, followed by Bucharest, Paris and Budapest, with 160,000, 125,000
and 110,000 inhabitants, respectively.
17 Ibid., 364. According to the figures Michael Brenner provides, Romania had 380,000 Jewish
citizens, Great Britain 345,000, France 235,000 and Hungary 174,000.
18 See Andrea Löw, ‘Handlungsspeilräume und Reaktionen des jüdischen Bevölkerung in Ost-
mitteleuropa’, Beate Meyer, ‘Nicht nur Objekte staatlichen Handelns: Juden im Deutschen
Reich und Westeuropa’, Dan Michman, ‘Handeln und Erfahrung: Bewältigungsstrategien im
Kontext der jüdischen Geschichte’, all in Bajohr and Löw, Der Holocaust: Ergebnisse und neue
Fragen.
19 See Andrea Löw, Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt: Lebensbedingungen, Selbstwahrnehmung,
Verhalten (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006); Beate Meyer, Tödliche Gratwanderung: Die Reichsverei-
nigung der Juden in Deutschland zwischen Hoffnung, Zwang, Selbstbehauptung und Verstrickung
(1939–1945) (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006).
Introduction 7
20 See Michman, ‘Handeln und Erfahrung’. See also his earlier: Dan Michman, ‘Understand-
ing the Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust’ in The Fate of the European Jews, 1939–1945: Con-
tinuity or Contingency?, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 1997);
see also Norman J. W. Goda, ed., Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Ap-
proaches (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014).
21 See, most recently, Jörg Baberowski, Räume der Gewalt (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Verlag,
2015).
22 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books,
2010).
8 Ferenc Laczó
the Second World War as allies of Nazi Germany and co-perpetrators of the Hol-
ocaust.
It was the factum of widespread and relatively autonomous support of the
Axis cause and profound involvement in the continent-wide radicalization of
anti-Semitism that led us to raise our second research question, namely how did
the relations of Central and Eastern European Jewish intellectuals to the national
cultures and political traditions of their countries transform between the 1930s
and the early post-war period? More concretely, what characterized their intel-
lectual reactions to policies of exclusion, persecution and extermination in com-
parative and transnational frames? How important were the often-remarked ex-
ternalization attempts in Jewish intellectual circles – attempts to symbolically
marginalize local responsibility by an almost exclusive focus on the role of Nazi
Germany – and what was their exact function in various contexts and at differ-
ent moments in time?23
Reflecting on these two main questions in a, for Jewish intellectual history,
rather original regional frame, the twelve case studies are ultimately meant to
offer insights into how the Jewish catastrophe and the utopian commitments of
intellectuals were negotiated. They are further meant as a preliminary inquiry
into the added value that a novel dialogue between intellectual histories of Cen-
tral and Eastern European countries might bring.
The first section ‘The Rupture of 1933 and New Expressions of Jewishness in
the Age of Nazi Germany’ focuses on divergent attempts of Jewish intellectuals
to redefine their place and role when the Nazi threat was already tangible and
growing but not yet at its most horrendously acute. As the articles in this sec-
tion show, the refugee problem emerged as a key concern among Yugoslav
Zionists and intellectual mediation turned into an ever more timely and urgent
pursuit in Prague. However, a profound sense of alienation from all things Jew-
ish and a deepening crisis of the self may also have resulted from the radical-
ization of anti-Semitism. The section begins with Ines Koeltzsch’s ‘Utopia as
Everyday Practice: Jewish Intellectuals and Cultural Translation in Prague be-
fore and after 1933’, which looks at attempts of cultural mediation between Ger-
23 Regarding Hungary in particular, Guy Miron has focused attention on Hungarian Jewish
attempts at an externalization of anti-Semitism prior to the Holocaust, their recurrent ambition
to depict it as something alien to the true spirit of the country. In his comparative study, Miron
maintained that such attempts had close parallels among French Jews. See Guy Miron, The
Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France,
and Hungary (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2011). Intriguingly, the thesis of externalization is cen-
tral to the argument of Regina Fritz in her book on Hungarian history politics’ treatment of the
Holocaust since 1944. See Regina Fritz, Nach Krieg und Judenmord: Ungarns Geschichtspolitik
seit 1944 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012).
Introduction 9
works rather tell of living through death and re-emerging into the world, tat-
tered and broken.
Last but not least, ‘From Utopias to Post-war Trajectories’ focuses on Jewish
intellectuals from Central and Eastern Europe whose current fame stems pri-
marily from their post-war activities. As all three articles underline and explore
in their different ways, Jewish post-war intellectual trajectories need to be re-
lated to those of the pre-Holocaust and Holocaust era in order to be properly
understood. Felicia Waldman’s overview ‘Avatars of Being a Jewish Professor at
the University of Bucharest in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’ systemati-
cally compares the various choices as well as the divergent fates of Jewish pro-
fessors in the humanities and the sciences at Romania’s key university in the
age of catastrophe and utopia. More concretely, Waldman’s contribution ana-
lyzes the respective levels of merit, concessions, suffering and professional
gains of professors appointed at the University of Bucharest before 1944, be-
tween 1944 and 1948, and in 1948. Tamás Scheibner’s ‘From the Jewish Renais-
sance to Socialist Realism: Imre Keszi in the Thrall of Utopias’ provides an ex-
amination of the social and intellectual background of Imre Keszi’s career,
showing how Keszi conjoined several intellectual stimulants in the initial, more
impressive phase of his career, being clearly influenced by contemporary pro-
fessional discourses on the German Volk in his native Hungary when formulat-
ing his vision of the role of Jews. Even though Keszi, who became a fierce Marx-
ist-Leninist literary critic of the early post-war period, has often been depicted
as a renegade, Scheibner’s study highlights the continuities in his thinking re-
volving around key questions of Jewish existence. Last but certainly not least,
Karolina Szymaniak’s ‘Rachel Auerbach, or the Trajectory of a Yiddishist Intel-
lectual in Poland in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’ shows that Auer-
bach – one of only three survivors of the underground Warsaw ghetto archive –
was equally shaped by her Polish education and culture and her Yiddishism in
interwar Poland. Szymaniak argues that understanding both of these dimen-
sions of her intellectual formation is indispensable to fully appreciate Auer-
bach’s later activities as the creator and manager of Yad Vashem’s testimony
collection. Through her case study of Auerbach, Szymaniak also explores the
self-definitions and ideologies of multilingual Yiddishists and their relation to
other projects of Jewish modernity to ultimately reflect on key challenges of the
Yiddish-speaking intelligentsia in Eastern Europe in an age of catastrophe and
utopia.
Part I: The Rupture of 1933
and New Expressions of Jewishness
in the Age of Nazi Germany
Ines Koeltzsch
Utopia as Everyday Practice
Jewish Intellectuals and Cultural Translation in Prague before
and after 1933
Introduction
In October 1933, eight months after the National Socialists came to power in
neighbouring Germany, a new German intellectual weekly titled Die Welt im
Wort appeared in the Czechoslovak capital, Prague. On the title page of the first
issue was a large cartoon by the Czech leftist artist Adolf Hoffmeister that de-
picted a relaxed and lively gathering of writers, translators and journalists at a
virtual Parnassus of Prague. The eleven intellectuals1 – Jewish and non-Jewish,
German-speaking, Czech-speaking and bilingual – were introduced to the read-
er in short self-portraits beneath the cartoon. The two editors of the new weekly,
Willy Haas and Otto Pick, are not in the picture, but could have been part of the
gathering, as could have many other Prague writers and translators. Haas, a
Prague native, German-Jewish publicist and editor of the famous Weimar repub-
lican intellectual journal Die literarische Welt, had lived in Germany since 1919,
and was forced into exile in the summer of 1933. Otto Pick was a Prague writer
and translator with a Jewish background who mainly worked for the German
daily Prager Presse.
1 Hoffmeister takes on the well-known motif of the Parnassus, drawing particularly on the
representation of the Parnassus by the painter Anton Raphael Mengs, who placed 11 person-
alities – Apollo, Mnemosyne and the 9 muses – at the mountain in his famous classicist fresco
in the Villa Albani (1760/61). Hoffmeister might have also been familiar with the cartoon Wie-
ner Parnass (The Viennese Parnassus, 1862) by Franz Gaul, who depicted numerous non-Jewish
and Jewish writers and journalists, among them the Bohemian Jewish writers and journalists
Leopold Kompert and David Kuh. I would like to thank Štěpan Zbytovský and Dieter Hecht for
pointing out the references to Mengs and Gaul. On Gaul see Dieter Hecht, ‘Self-Assertion in the
Public Sphere: The Jewish Press on the Eve of Legal Emancipation’, Religions 7, no. 8 (2016):
109–19.
Annotation: Research on this article is partly based on my book Geteilte Kulturen: Eine Ge-
schichte der tschechisch-jüdisch-deutschen Beziehungen in Prag 1918–1938 (published in 2012);
my additional research in 2014 was enabled by the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech
Academy of Sciences (research scheme: RVO 67985921) and the Viennese Wiesenthal Institute
for Holocaust Studies in 2014/2015.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-002
16 Ines Koeltzsch
It was not a matter of chance that Haas and Pick founded the journal in the
autumn of 1933. About 20 years earlier they had edited a short-lived, but very
important literary and philosophical magazine on Bohemian culture: the Her-
der-Blätter. The magazine had published German fiction and poetry as well as
Czech works in German translation. Neither journal reported on the politics of
the day, but as Haas wrote to the office of Czechoslovak President Tomáš G. Ma-
saryk in 1933, the new journal aimed to stimulate discussion on ‘literary, cultur-
al and artistic problems of all nations and countries with a special emphasis on
Slavic literatures’.2 Like the Herder-Blätter, the new journal failed after just a
few issues.
What does the seemingly naïve cartoon tell us about the cultural, social
and political visions of intellectuals in the Czechoslovak capital in the 1930s?
Does it represent an immediate reaction to the rise of Nazi Germany, or should
it be viewed in the broader context of intellectual life in Prague in the first deca-
des of the twentieth century?
As I will show in the following, Die Welt im Wort was one example of the
intensifying attempts of intellectuals to mediate between German and Czech
culture and German and Slovak literature in and after 1933. Intellectuals en-
gaged in cultural mediation wanted to help create a new Czechoslovak culture
based on cultural creativity and the principles of democracy, a culture that was
supposed to include local intellectuals, returning expatriates, and refugees. In
the autumn of 1933, Haas and Pick could build on an already existing network
of Czech- and German-speaking intellectuals, which had its roots in the decades
before the First World War and was bolstered in the 1920s. As Scott Spector has
pointed out, Prague writers, translators and journalists formed a loose ‘network
of mutual promotio’.3 that was not identical with the Prager Kreis, the label Max
Brod retrospectively attached to the circle around Franz Kafka. Rather, the loose
network consisted of several circles of German- and Czech-speaking, Jewish and
non-Jewish writers.4
The huge range of cultural activities of Bohemian Jewish intellectuals – and
especially their literary translations from Czech into German and vice versa –
have stoked the interests of scholars since they began in the second decade of
2 Archiv Kanceláře prezidenta republiky [Archive of the office of the President of the Czecho-
slovak Republic, in the following AKPR], box 140, D 13444/38, Složka B – redaktoři [File B –
editors], Willy Haas to Antonín Schenk, 4 September 1933.
3 Scott Spector, ‘Mittel-Europa? Some Afterthoughts on Prague Jews, “Hybriditiy”, and Trans-
lation’, Bohemia 46, no. 1 (2005): 28–38. For his concept of a ‘middle ground’ see also Scott
Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de
Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
4 Spector, ‘Mittel-Europa?’, 17–20.
Utopia as Everyday Practice 17
the twentieth century. Some contemporary studies describe the Prague Jewish
writers and translators as marginalized yet influential intellectuals, as ‘voices of
dissent’ in times of rampant nationalism.5 Others have suggested that their ac-
tivities were doomed to fail from the very beginning because of the seemingly
sharp national division of Prague society.6 In both cases, the protagonists are
often highly romanticized. Yet Scott Spector has warned against romanticizing
Jewish cultural mediators in Prague. According to Spector, ‘these translations
and translators can be understood not as pluralistic attempts to render closed
cultural spheres more open to one another, nor as creatively hybridized prod-
ucts of cultural interaction, but as the very tension between identity and other-
ness itself’.7 Arguing against Homi Bhaba’s concept of ‘hybridity’, Spector
claims that Jewish intellectuals in Prague created a subversive (not Jewish) liter-
ature and a ‘middle ground’ as an alternative ‘to the ideological complex bind-
ing essential peoples to eternal literatures and sovereign territories’.8 Spector’s
concept of a ‘middle ground’ or a ‘middle nation’ remains somewhat abstract,
similar to Bhaba’s ‘third space’. In contrast to Spector, I argue that we should
consider cultural translation in early twentieth-century Prague not only as a
concept or ‘ideological complex’, but as an everyday practice that took place in
a nationalistically charged, multi-ethnic society.
Cultural translation has recently been analyzed both as an approach to and
as an object of history. As historian Simone Lässig shows, the concept was de-
veloped in reaction to the limitations of (early) conceptions of cultural transfer
and their (implicit) presupposition of a linear (and often successful and harmo-
nious) exchange between two cultures within the nation-state framework. Simi-
lar to revised conceptions of cultural transfer and the concept of histoire croisée,
the notion of cultural translation addresses complex processes ‘of negotiating
and appropriating ideas and practices and the production of meaning’ as well
as ‘the political, cultural and social environments in which these processes take
place’.9 The analysis of cultural translation covers transfer and transformation
10 Ibid., 200.
11 On the lack of theoretical reflections on translation among the Prague ‘German’ writers, see
Lucy Topol’ská, ‘Die Prager deutschen Dichter als Lyrik-Übersetzer’, in Beiträge zur deutsch-
sprachigen Literatur in Tschechien, ed. Lucy Topol’ská and Ludvík Václavek: (Olomouc: Uni-
versity of Palackeho, 2000), 215–25 (Czech original 1973).
12 Lisa Silverman has suggested the term ‘Jewish difference’ to signify the invisible ‘relation-
ship between the socially constructed categories of “Jew” and “non-Jew”’ as an alternative to
studying conceptions of Jewish self-identification or the ‘Jewish content’ of a work. Lisa Silver-
man, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012), 7.
Utopia as Everyday Practice 19
13 See above all, Michaela Wolf, Die vielsprachige Seele Kakaniens: Translation als soziale und
kulturelle Praxis in der Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2012), esp. 67–72.
There are also a number of studies dealing with the politics of language, the use of languages
in state institutions and the decline of bilingualism in the Bohemian lands and Czechoslovakia.
See Hannelore Burger, Sprachenrecht und Sprachengerechtigkeit im österreichischen Unterrichts-
wesen 1867–1918 (Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1995);
Klaas-Hinrich Ehlers, Marek Nekula, Martina Niedhammer and Hermann Scheuringer, eds,
Sprache, Gesellschaft und Nation in Ostmitteleuropa: Institutionalisierung und Alltagspraxis
20 Ines Koeltzsch
census in Cisleithania and later in Czechoslovakia, which did not record the
multilingual skills of the population. However, bilingualism and translation re-
mained an important everyday experience of many Bohemians and Moravians,
both Christians and Jews.14 The prominence of bilingualism among Bohemian
(and to a lesser degree, Moravian) Jews can be traced back to the beginning of
the emancipation process, when Joseph II introduced German as the official
language of the Habsburg Empire. German was also welcomed by most of the
Jewish enlighteners as the primary language of Jewish education and communi-
cation (rather than Hebrew and Judendeutsch) in the Bohemian lands. Given
that the vast majority of Bohemian Jews had lived in the Bohemian countryside
where Czech speakers were in the majority, Czech-German/German-Czech bilin-
gualism became a widespread phenomenon. Taking the example of Prague
Zionists, Dimitry Shumsky has demonstrated that the bilingualism of Jewish in-
tellectuals in fin-de-siècle Prague was caused by two distinct factors: while
those from the Czech countryside learned German, Jewish natives of Prague em-
braced Czech because of their opposition to a hegemonic concept of German
(Jewish) liberal culture and their growing empathy with Czech language and
culture. Thus, many of Prague’s Jewish intellectuals – who were widely per-
ceived as ‘German-Jewish’ because they attended German schools – were edu-
cated in Czech (as their second language). Furthermore, the Czech language
was part of their everyday experience in the Bohemian capital with its mostly
Czech inhabitants, similar to the countryside (with the exception of the border
regions).15 Five of the poets in Hoffmeister’s Parnassus were primarily educated
in German but had knowledge of Czech: Oskar Baum (Pilsen, 1883–1941), Max
Brod (Prague, 1884–1968), Paul Kornfeld (Prague, 1889–1942), Paul Leppin
(Prague, 1878–1945) and Walter Seidl (Troppau, 1905–1937). Three writers were
educated in Czech with some knowledge of German: Karel Čapek (Úpice, 1890–
1938), František Kubka (Prague, 1894–1969) and František Langer (Královské
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014); Jaroslav Kučera, Minderheit im Nationalstaat: Die
Sprachenfrage in den tschechisch-deutschen Beziehungen 1918–1938 (Munich: de Gruyter, 1999);
Ines Koeltzsch, Geteilte Kulturen: Eine Geschichte der tschechisch-jüdisch-deutschen Beziehun-
gen in Prag (1918–1938) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012), 29–46.
14 Robert Luft, ‘Zwischen Tschechen und Deutschen in Prag um 1900: Zweisprachige Welten,
nationale Interferenzen und Verbindungen über ethnische Grenzen’, brücken 4 (1996): 143–69;
Ingrid Stöhr, Zweisprachigkeit in Böhmen: Deutsche Volksschulen und Gymnasien im Prag der
Kafka-Zeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 2010). On publicly staged lingual ‘conversions’ of bilingual writ-
ers see Václav Petrbok, ‘“Sprache als Waffe”: Deutsch-tschechischer Sprachwechsel im literar-
ischen Leben in den böhmischen Ländern 1860–1890’, in Ehlers, Nekula, Niedhammer and
Scheuringer, Sprache, Gesellschaft und Nation, 185–200.
15 Dimitry Shumsky, Zweisprachigkeit und binationale Idee: Der Prager Zionismus 1900–1930
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), especially 89–109.
Utopia as Everyday Practice 21
16 Ines Koeltzsch, Michaela Kuklová and Michael Wögerbauer, eds, Übersetzer zwischen den
Kulturen: Der Prager Publizist Paul/Pavel Eisner (Cologne: Böhlau, 2011).
17 For a critical and nuanced approach to cultural mediation/translation between Czech and
(Austrian) German intellectuals in the early twentieth century see Lucie Kostrbová, Kurt Ifko-
vits and Vratislav Doubek, Die Wiener Wochenschrift Die Zeit (1894–1904) als Mittler zwischen
der Tschechischen und Wiener Moderne (Prague/Vienna: Österreichisches Theatermuseum,
2011). See also Gary B. Cohen, ‘Cultural Crossings in Prague, 1900: Scenes from Late Imperial
Austria’, Austrian History Yearbook 45 (2014): 1–30, especially, 21–8; Lucie Merhautová, Pa-
ralely a průniky: Česká literatura v časopisech německé moderny (1880–1910) [Parallels and
intersections: Czech literature in German modernist journals (1880–1910)] (Praha: Masarykův
ústav AV ČR, 2016).
18 Rudolf Illový, ‘Němečtí básníci pražští a Češi’, Veřejné mínění 2, no. 8 (16 November 1913),
Národní archiv (National Archive, in the following NA), Collection of Rudolf Fuchs.
19 On the first generations of writers who also worked as professional literary translators see
Otto Pick, ‘Poznámky překladatelovy’ [Translator’s notes], Přítomnost (24 April 1924): 232–3.
20 Franz Pfemfert, ed., Jüngste tschechische Lyrik. Eine Anthologie (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Verlag
der Wochenschrift Die Aktion, 1916).
22 Ines Koeltzsch
Paul Eisner, Rudolf Fuchs, Otto Pick, the now almost forgotten J. V. Löwen-
bach,21 Ernst Pollak, Emil Saudek and Hans Janowitz all contributed to the an-
thology as translators. In the same year, the Leipzig publisher Kurt Wolff
printed Rudolf Fuchs’ German translation of the Slezské písně [Silesian Songs/
Schlesische Lieder] by Petr Bezruč, whose work was banned by the Austrian au-
thorities because of its social criticism. Fuchs’ translation and the foreword by
Franz Werfel were well received by Czech political exiles in Switzerland. 22
Despite the fact that some German-language writers left Prague (e.g. Willy
Haas, Franz Carl Weiskopf and Egon Erwin Kisch), the network of Czech- and
German-speaking translators and writers grew after the establishment of the
Czechoslovak state. Some writers born in the 1880s and 1890s who had held
rather marginal positions as students before and during the First World War
now became successful artists and journalists. It is not by chance that the two
friends František Langer and Karel Čapek were positioned at the very centre of
the cartoon Parnassus of Prague. Both became key figures in Prague intellectual
life and Czechoslovak cultural politics, and Karel Čapek’s role was so significant
that a whole generation of Czech modernist writers were influenced by him.23
As influential journalists of the liberal daily Lidové noviny [People’s Newspa-
per], as the founder (Čapek) and a member (Langer) of Pátečníci [Friday Men] –
a group of President Masaryk’s intellectual advisers, called Friday Men because
they met on Friday afternoons in Čapek’s flat – and as founders and members
of the Czechoslovak PEN club, they strongly supported the political ideas of Ma-
saryk. Čapek, Langer and their colleagues and friends fought against Czech
chauvinism and for ‘an inclusive and democratic, if Czech dominated, state’.24
In opposition to conservative Czech artistic circles, Jewish writers like Langer,
Fischer (who converted but was still perceived as Jewish by the public), Karel
Poláček and Josef Kodíček were an integral part of these circles. And in opposi-
tion to the younger generation of radical leftist artists around the avant-garde
21 On the interesting, but almost forgotten translator J. V. Löwenbach, a friend and mentor of
Max Brod who worked in both languages see Barbora Šrámková, ‘Max Brod und die tschechi-
sche Kultur’, in Juden zwischen Tschechen und Deutschen: Sprachliche und kulturelle Identitäten
in Böhmen 1800–1945, ed. Marek Nekula and Walter Koschmal (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006),
249–71, especially 254–5.
22 Otto Pick, ‘Die kulturelle Annäherung zwischen Deutschen und Čechen’, Union 58, no. 195
(15 July 1919): 1–2; Otokar Fischer, ‘Ein deutscher Blumenstrauss: Deutsche Übersetzung eines
Artikels in Tvorba’, 1927. Both in NA, personal collection of Rudolf Fuchs.
23 Thomas Ort, Art and Life in Modernist Prague: Karel Čapek and His Generation 1911–1938
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). On the Friday Men see Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the
Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 88–92.
24 Ort, Art and Life, 22.
Utopia as Everyday Practice 23
group Děvětsil – among them the illustrator of the Parnassus cartoon, Adolf
Hoffmeister – Čapek and Langer defended liberalism as the answer to the mili-
tarism and autocracy experienced in First World War.25 Together with their
brothers Georg (Jiří Mordechai) Langer and Josef Čapek, they maintained close
professional contacts and friendships with their German-speaking colleagues
and translators, above all with Rudolf Fuchs, who is depicted as a fisherman
close to the centre of the cartoon, and to Otto Pick, the second editor of Die Welt
im Wort. Čapekʼs inclusive politics is also reflected in his engagement for the
Czechoslovak PEN Club. Without transforming the club into a supranational in-
stitution, Čapek did invite a dozen German-speaking writers as full members in-
to the club, a move that was not welcomed by some of the Czech-speaking mem-
bers.26
Similarly, Otokar Fischer and his colleagues tried to make the translational
and literary activities of their German-speaking colleagues more public and por-
tray them as important cultural-political contributions to the founding of a dem-
ocratic Czechoslovak culture. For instance, in a review of the anthology Ein Ern-
tekranz aus hundert Jahren tschechischer Dichtung published in the Czech
weekly Tvorba [Creation] in 1927, Fischer wrote:
The German writers who deal with Slavic questions are engaged with translation not only
as an activity, but as a problem. … The majority of those who translate from Czech to Ger-
man are of Jewish origin. … It is moving to see how these writers of German – who feel
foreign among the Germans in Bohemia and resist and feel ashamed of the war and post-
war ideology of the Germans in the Reich – support Czech nationalism and affirm its sym-
bols.27
Indeed, translators into German like Fuchs, Pick and Brod (who is sitting in an
armchair close to the fishpond in the cartoon) explicitly supported the new
democratic order and were seen by their Czech democratic colleagues as ʻGer-
man activistsʼ avant la lettre. But the German-speaking intellectuals perceived
themselves first and foremost as writers and poets. They also became transla-
tors and journalists for financial reasons and because these professions compli-
mented their artistic activities. Translators like Pick and Fuchs, however, were
well aware of the cultural-political functions of translation in the Bohemian
25 Ibid.
26 Andrea Orzoff, ‘Prague PEN and Central European Cultural Nationalism, 1924–1935’, Na-
tionalities Papers 29, no. 2 (2001): 243–65, especially 248–51; Orzoff, Battle for the Castle,
160–165. See also Petra Krátká, Český PEN-klub v letech 1925–1938 [Czech PEN-Club in the years
1925–1938] (Prague: Libri, 2003), 42–5.
27 Quoted after the German translation: Otokar Fischer, ‘Ein deutscher Blumenstrauss’, Tvorba
(1927), NA, personal collection of Rudolf Fuchs.
24 Ines Koeltzsch
lands and in Czechoslovakia before and after the First World War, even if they
understood the cultural-political dimension of their work as secondary to its
aesthetic dimension – at least in the 1920s. As Otto Pick wrote in the article
‘Poznámky překladatelovy’ [Remarks of a Translator] for the Czech intellectual
journal Přítomnost [Present] in 1924:
The fact that translation serves the grand idea of the comity of nations is a fruitful side-
effect that I as a free-thinking person have always welcomed with joy. However, the hu-
manistic, social and pacifist motivations of my work as a translator have nothing in com-
mon with the work’s artistic foundations.28
By the end of the 1920s, the Prague writers and translators had developed
plenty of strategies for mutually promoting one another’s work, including book
reviews, translations of short stories and poetry for dailies and weeklies such as
the Prager Tagblatt, Prager Presse, Die Wahrheit, Lidové noviny, Právo lidu [The
Right of the People], and Přítomnost, and the publication of anthologies.29 Otto
Pick’s translation of Karel Čapek’s plays and Grete Straschnov’s translation of
Jaroslav Hašek’s Die Abenteuer des braven Soldaten Schwejk introduced Czech
literature to a wider European public. Female translators like Grete Straschnov,
Milena Jesenská, Jarmila Haasová-Nečasová and Anna Auředníček/Auředníčko-
vá were not as visible as their male colleagues in the intellectual public, and
did not belong to the core of the loose network depicted in Hoffmeister’s car-
toon. While Jesenská became posthumously known as one of Franz Kafka’s girl-
friends and less as his first translator, the other women remained almost un-
known. Nevertheless, Grete Straschnov’s business card with a handwritten mes-
sage for Otokar Fischer asking for a meeting is one of the few personal docu-
ments left by her, which indicates that the female translators were also part of
the network depicted in the Prague Parnassus, even if they were mostly invisi-
ble.30
Besides gender, Jewishness was another category of invisibility in the net-
work of writers and translators. Seven of the eleven writers depicted in the car-
28 Otto Pick, ‘Poznámky překladatelovy’, Přítomnost 1, no. 15 (1924): 232–3, here 232.
29 Paul Eisner, ed., Tschechische Anthologie: Vrchlický – Sova – Březina (Leipzig: Insel, 1917);
Otto Pick, ed., Deutsche Erzähler aus der Tschechoslowakei (Reichenberg/Prague: Heris Verlag,
1922); F. C. Weiskopf, ed., Tschechische Lieder (Berlin: Malik Verlag, 1925); Rudolf Fuchs, ed.,
Ein Erntekranz: Aus hundert Jahren tschechischer Dichtung (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1926); Rudolf
Fuchs, ed., Deutsche Lyrik aus der Čechoslovakei (Prague: Státní nakladatelství, 1931); Anna
Auředníček, Dreissig tschechische Erzähler (Darmstadt: Darmstädter Verlag, 1932).
30 Business card of Grete Straschnov, dated 9 November 1923, Literární archiv Památníku nár-
odního písemnictví [Literary Archive of the Memorial of National Writings, in the following LA
PNP], personal collection of Otokar Fischer.
Utopia as Everyday Practice 25
toon and both editors of Die Welt im Wort were born into Jewish families. How-
ever, their affiliations with Jewish religion and culture varied widely. Max Brod
represented one specific form of Prague’s Zionism(s): a ‘national humanism’
[Nationalhumanismus] that he formulated together with the philosopher Felix
Weltsch as a moderate, anti-imperialistic, social form of Zionism.31 Yet others
like Willy Haas were more attracted to a kind of diaspora nationalism in the
years immediately after the First World War. Similar to the Zionists, he and his
friends who penned the manifesto of the short-lived Jüdische Aktion in 1919
aimed for an ethical ‘Jewish self-consciousness’, not in the Land of Israel, but in
the diaspora.32 In most cases, the writers and translators pursued varying con-
ceptions of Czech-Jewish or German-Jewish integration – or ‘assimilation’ in the
language of the time – that were attached to Czech or German liberalism. Thus,
Jewishness was for them mainly a private concern. In some cases, as with Oto-
kar Fischer and Paul/Pavel Eisner, it also led to conversion. However, their con-
version did not mean that they had wholly dispensed with their sense of belong-
ing to Jewish culture. Especially when confronted with the limits of integration,
many returned to their Jewish roots. The ambivalent feeling of ‘being at home
in no-man’s land’ [Zuhause(sein) im Niemandsland], as expressed in Paul Eis-
ner’s ironic self-description at the bottom of the cartoon, was especially sympto-
matic of those writers who worked towards Czech- and/or German-Jewish ‘as-
similation’ and at the same time experienced the limits of integration into Cze-
choslovak society, which was perceived as one of the most tolerant towards
Jews in Central Europe at the time.33 Several years after his conversion, Paul/
Pavel Eisner wrote an essay for the Zionist publication Židovský kalendář [Jew-
31 On the general history of Zionism in Prague see Kateřina Čapková, Czechs, Germans, Jews?
National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 171–240;
Shumsky, Zweisprachigkeit; Scott Spector: ‘“any reality, however small”: Prague Zionisms be-
tween the Nations’, in Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond, ed. Mark H. Gelber (Tübingen: Max Nie-
meyer, 2004), 7–22.
32 Čapková, Czech, German, Jews?, 84–6.
33 Although there is good research on the liberal politics of the Czechoslovak government and
above all, of President Masaryk, there is only little extant research on the attitudes of Czechs,
Slovaks and Germans towards the Jewish population in interwar Czechoslovakia. See above all,
Martin Schulze Wessel, ‘Entwürfe und Wirklichkeiten: Die Politik gegenüber den Juden in der
Ersten Tschechoslowakischen Republik 1918 bis 1938’, in Zwischen großen Erwartungen und
bösem Erwachen: Juden, Politik und Antisemitismus in Ost- und Südosteuropa 1918–1945, ed.
Dittmar Dahlmann and Anke Hilbrenner (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoeningh, 2007), 121–36.
For a critical perspective on Czechoslovak politics and anti-Semitism, see Michal Frankl and
Miloslav Szabó, Budování státu bez antisemitismu? Násilí, diskurz loajality a vznik Českosloven-
ska [State-building without anti-Semitism? Violence, loyalty, and the foundation of Czechoslo-
vakia] (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2015).
26 Ines Koeltzsch
I don’t speak a word of Hebrew. Like you, I took assimilation as far as possible, I reject
Zionism, and yet I know that today WE are more than THEM and that we will outlive them
in the last life of spirit if we want to … We are higher, we are deeper, we are outside: one
can be friends with them and trust them, but it is imperative to go one’s own way. And
they are completely different than their relatives. Higher, deeper, outside.35
Ambivalent feelings towards their Jewishness were not unique to those writers
who subscribed to varying conceptions of ‘assimilation’. They were also promi-
nent among those writers and translators who sympathized with socialism and
communism, such as Rudolf Fuchs and the more famous writers Egon Erwin
Kisch and Franz Carl Weiskopf, who are not depicted in the cartoon. However,
according to Scott Spector, it was Rudolf Fuchs who embodied ‘the paradig-
matic example of the Prague Jewish translator’ because of ‘his close identifica-
tion with the spiritual and historical base of Judaism, his tireless attachment to
Czech culture and a Bohemian culture that included the Germans, and his ulti-
mate commitment to socialism’.36 Rudolf Fuchs also became politically engaged
in the intellectual circles of locals and emigrants from Nazi Germany in 1930s
Prague and tried to formulate a rigorous concept of translation. As I will show
in the next section, the growing political engagement of Fuchs and his col-
leagues in the 1930s was an explicit reaction to the rise of National Socialism
and its persecution of political opponents and Jews as well as to the radicaliza-
tion of German, Czech and Slovak nationalisms in Czechoslovakia. However,
their cultural and cultural-political activities faced certain limits.
34 Pavel Eisner, ‘Básník a asimilace’ [The poet and assimilation], Židovský kalendář 10 (1929/
1930): 49–52.
35 Pavel Eisner, Letter to Otokar Fischer, 21 November 1928. Quoted after the German trans-
lation in: Jarmila Mourková, ‘Von Paul Eisner zu Pavel Eisner: Einige von der Korrespondenz
Pavel Eisners mit Otokar Fischer inspirierte Gedanken’, brücken 5 (1988/89): 11–24, 17, capital-
ization in original.
36 Spector, Prague Territories, 207.
Utopia as Everyday Practice 27
In these words, Willy Haas described his return to Prague in the summer of
1933. Although he had been away from his birthplace for more than ten years,
he still had contact with friends and former colleagues who helped him re-es-
tablish a professional life in Prague, the most important of which was his
friendship with Otto Pick. Despite all the difficulties he experienced and the fail-
ure of Die Welt im Wort, Haas managed his professional ‘restart’ in Prague re-
markably well. Equally successful was the communist writer and translator
Franz Carl Weiskopf. However, other intellectuals were less successful, such as
Ernst Weiss and Paul Kornfeld, the former co-editor of Haas’s Literarische Welt
in Berlin who was also depicted in the Parnassus of Prague. Both Kornfeld and
Weiss returned to Prague, but they did not actively take part in Prague’s literary
and social life during and after 1933. They experienced depression and loneli-
ness. As Ernst Weiss wrote in a letter to his friend Hermann Kesten in November
1933:
Here I am living in great loneliness and depression, but I do not give up my hope that
everything will be better and that our ideas, even if probably not spoken by us, will take
up their due reign during our lifetime. Here, Willy Haas edits a decent, purely literary
journal called Welt im Wort which disrespects the political movements by remaining silent
about them. Thus, the journal has an uncanny presence: it could have just as well been
written 3,000 years before the common era; one cannot turn a blind eye to the events
going on now.38
Weiss’s criticism of the apolitical nature of the new weekly Die Welt im Wort is
to the point. The few issues published before the paper’s collapse in early 1934
37 Willy Haas, Die literarische Welt: Erinnerungen (Munich: Fischer, 1957), 187. On his return to
Prague see Willy Haas, ‘Za třináct let z Prahy do Prahy. II. část’ [In 13 years from Prague and
back, part 2], Přítomnost 13 (25 March 1936): 188–91.
38 Ernst Weiss, Letter to Hermann Kesten, Prague, 19 November 1933, in Deutsche Literatur im
Exil: Briefe europäischer Autoren 1933–1949, ed. Hermann Kesten (Vienna: Fischer, 1964), 63.
28 Ines Koeltzsch
did not explicitly refer to the politics of Nazi Germany, nor to the situation of
the refugees from Germany in Czechoslovakia. The readers got to know much
about the literary oeuvre of humanistic writers and poets from Germany as well
as from Czechoslovakia. The paper also published on literary life in other parts
of Europe, such as France and the Soviet Union, but failed to say anything
about its relation to political life. According to a letter Willy Haas sent to the
office of president Masaryk in September 1933, it seems that the journal’s apolit-
ical nature could have been a (self-)perceived precondition for receiving finan-
cial support from the government. In this letter, Haas refers to the fact that Kar-
el Čapek had told the president about the idea for the new weekly. Čapek had
underlined that the new journal wanted to focus on literary and cultural prob-
lems ‘without intervening in politics’.39 The apolitical orientation of the weekly
also had to do with the convictions of translator Otto Pick. In their editorial, Ot-
to Pick and Willy Haas painted an idealistic portrait of Prague and Bohemia as
the centre of humanism and cultural crossings since the renaissance. They re-
called the tradition of the humanists Jan Amos Komenský and especially of the
Catholic thinker Bernard Bolzano, who was the spiritual founder of Bohemism
[Bohemismus], an intellectual concept based on the idea of Landespatriotismus
which included all inhabitants of Bohemia irrespective of their language (and
faith).40 Even if indirectly, Haas and Pick expressed their utopian vision of an
encounter of literatures and cultures, a vision they had already pursued with
their journal Herder-Blätter about 20 years before. Referring to Adolf Hoffmeis-
ter’s cartoon – which was printed instead of an interview with Masaryk, who
had refused to give an interview to the new German weekly – the editors under-
lined the ‘multicultural’ condition of Prague, the capital of Bohemia, and now
of Czechoslovakia, by stressing the importance of place:
For us, so many things are knotted together in this place, our native city. And so it is not a
matter of chance that the name ‘Prague’ is printed on our paper and above its first article.
And it is not unintended that this first issue – seemingly against our agenda, which aims
to be a paper with very broad appeal and not just a local one – speaks to all people of this
country. It is not just an homage to our native city, but a vow to our youth, to the dreams
and plans of this youth.41
This passage shows that while Haas and Pick did not formulate a rigorous con-
cept of cultural pluralism and translation, they were well aware of the origins
and the impact of their translational activities. At about the same time, in the
autumn of 1933, the Zionist intellectual Felix Weltsch published an essay de-
scribing Prague as a ‘point of intersection of many cultures’ [Schnittpunkt vieler
Kulturen] located at the ‘borders between East and West, … North and South’.
Weltsch continued that Prague was ‘a real city of the centre’, in which ‘German
and Czech and Jewish culture’ stood in close contact. From Weltsch’s Jewish
perspective, the ‘encounter of intellects’ [Zusammenstoß der Geister] was alive
and well: ‘the obvious differences increase awareness, sharpen the critical fac-
ulties, refine empathy’.42 In contrast to Pick and Haas, Weltsch refers to the spe-
cial connection between cultural creativity and the experiences of Prague’s
Jews. Of course, Weltsch’s essay was primarily addressed to a Jewish audience,
namely the members of the philanthropic order B’nai B’rith in Czechoslovakia,
who played an important role in cultural politics and supported numerous liter-
ary and scientific projects that mediated between Czech and German, Jewish
and non-Jewish cultures.43
In a lecture titled ‘Židé a literatura’ [Jews and Literature] held at the Prague
public library for the bilingual Zionist student organization Lese- und Redehalle
jüdischer Hochschüler in February 1933, Otokar Fischer claimed that the Jewish
writers of Prague had an ethical responsibility to mediate between cultures. Be-
cause of their ‘language skills and cultural richness’, it was their task to ‘go be-
yond their time and seek something that can overcome the madness and friction
of the chaotic days of Europe’s darkest hour’.44 In his lecture, which was imme-
diately published by the socialist journal Čin [Action], Fischer outlines a plural-
istic concept of ‘Jewish literatures’ that comprise Hebrew, Yiddish and the given
42 Felix Weltsch, ‘Der Geist des čechoslovakischen Judentums’, B’nai B’rith 12, no. 10 (1933):
397–9, here 399.
43 Čapková, Czech, German, Jews?, 74–83.
44 Otokar Fischer, ‘Židé a literatura. Přednáška proslovená 20: února 1933 spolu s projevem
Arnolda Zweiga’ [Jews and Literature: Lecture held on 20 February 1933 together with an ad-
dress by Arnold Zweig], Čin 32 (6 April 1933): 747–58, here 758, reprinted as Otokar Fischer,
‘Židé a literatura’, in Slovo a svět (Prague: Francis Borový, 1937), 230–43. See also Oskar Do-
nath, ‘O Židech v literatuře’ [The Jews in literature], B’nai B’rith 12, no. 6 (1933): 210–5. Fischer’s
lecture was held together with a lecture by the German-Jewish émigré writer Arnold Zweig on
anti-Semitism in contemporary Europe, which was not published in Czechoslovakia, as far as I
know. See also the Archive of the Capital Prague, Magistrate I, Executive committee of the
council and the magistrate, box 746, 2284/14/2302, Čtenářská beseda židovských akademiků
v Praze/Lese- und Redehalle jüdischer Hochschüler in Prag Presidiu městské rady hlavního
města Prahy [Jewish student’s association to the executive committee of the council of Prague],
14 February 1933.
30 Ines Koeltzsch
about Fischer in his obituary for the weekly Selbstwehr in a similar vein.50
Although the socialist writer Franz Carl Weiskopf did not mention Fischer’s Jew-
ish origins like other authors did, he emphasized that Fischer had noticeably
intensified his engagement for the mediation of German culture in Czechoslova-
kia since 1933.51
Indeed, most of the writers and translators represented at the Parnassus
and their colleagues and friends supported German and German-Jewish writers
and artists from Nazi Germany in Czechoslovakia through organizations like
Deutsche Schriftsteller-Schutzverband in der ČSR, Thomas-Mann-Gesellschaft, Os-
kar-Kokoschka-Bund, the Bert-Brecht-Klub, the Liga für Menschenrechte and the
Liga gegen Antisemitismus. Some of them also worked for charity organizations
like the Hilfskomitee für deutsche Flüchtlinge, which was initiated by the trans-
lator Grete Reiner and named after the Czech literary critic F. X. Šalda. However,
the history of the Šalda-Comitee shows that the collaboration between writers
and translators of different political beliefs did not last for long, because com-
munist activists began taking control most of the activities.52
The intellectuals and artists also organized a growing number of official
events. The organized lectures often took place in the public library of Prague.
German and Czech, Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals and artists, locals and
(re)emigrants also contributed to various publications and theatrical produc-
tions. Publications like the book Prag heute, which was edited by the émigré
writer Frank Warschauer in collaboration with local Czech and German writers,
and the special issue of the bilingual journal Die Brücke/Most on the occasion
of Otto Pick’s 50th birthday represented the intensified network of ‘mutual pro-
motion’, now made larger by the returning expatriates who needed every
chance they could get to publish and earn money. Just as well, these publica-
tions served as positive indicators of the health of Czechoslovakia’s democratic
culture.53
Rudolf Fuchs in particular promoted an inclusive Czechoslovak culture
based on his socialist beliefs, but he did not officially break with Masaryk’s po-
50 Viktor Fischl, ‘Otokar Fischer’, Selbstwehr 13 (1 April 1938): 3. See also his memories on
Fischer and Eisner: Viktor Fischl, Setkání [Encounters] (Prague: Martin, 1994), 22–34.
51 fcw [Franz Carl Weiskopf], ‘Am Morgen des 13. März’, Das Wort 3, no. 6 (1938): 149.
52 On the activities of intellectuals and the frictions between communist and non-communist
activists see Kateřina Čapková and Michal Frankl, Unsichere Zuflucht: Die Tschechoslowakei
und ihre Flüchtlinge aus NS-Deutschland und Österreich 1933–1938 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2012),
90–4, 111–2, 133, 155–62.
53 Frank Warschauer, ed., Prag heute (Prague: Orbis, 1937); Otto Pick zum 50. Geburtstag, 1937
(special edition of the journal Die Brücke, with contributions by Paul Eisner, Oskar Baum, Max
Brod, Karel Čapek, Otokar Fischer, Rudolf Fuchs and others).
32 Ines Koeltzsch
litical order. In his lecture on ‘Czech and German Poetry and Literature in Cze-
choslovakia’, which he held at the Bert-Brecht-Klub for a crowd mostly made up
of émigré writers from Nazi Germany, Fuchs compared both literatures from an
‘inner perspective’. He highlighted the richness of Czech literature from an aes-
thetic and political point of view, mentioning his favourite social poet, Petr Bez-
ruč, and the ‘cosmopolitan’ liberal literature of Karel Čapek. He also explained
the shortcomings of German literature in Czechoslovakia. In Fuchs’ view, Ger-
man literature in Czechoslovakia suffered from a lack of common cultural foun-
dations with Czech writers as well as from the divisions between writers from
Prague and those from the borderlands, who generally subscribed to provincial,
nationalist and in some cases National Socialist agendas. In contrast, the
(mainly Jewish) writers and translators from Prague ‘have shown by their [trans-
lational, I. K.] activities their tie to their homeland (vlast) and rendered a service
not only to Czech but also to German poetry’.54 Thus, Fuchs, who was raised in
a Czech Jewish family in Poděbrady and later became a German-Jewish writer in
Prague, did not believe that the primary division was between German and
Czech writers, but between both literatures as a whole. Due to its internal divi-
sions, German literature in Czechoslovakia lacked the liveliness and plurality of
Czech literature. The writers from the borderlands, as well as some Prague-born
writers did not perceive Czechoslovakia as their homeland and did not create
their art with a focus on Czechoslovakia. The bitterness of Fuchs’ words, in par-
ticular towards his (Sudeten) German colleagues, was in part fed by (Sudeten)
German agitation against his work and the work of other Jewish writers and
translators. German nationalists campaigned against Fuchs and others in 1935
because of the fact that the Ministry for Public Education had bought Fuchs’
translation of the Schlesische Lieder by Petr Bezruč and his anthology of Czech
poetry and distributed them to German schools in Czechoslovakia. The nation-
alists criticized the Jewish authors and translators – and particularly Fuchs and
Werfel – for admiring Bezruč in spite of the latter’s anti-Semitic views.55 The re-
cipient of the 1937/38 Herder-Preis, Fuchs believed that the only way German
literature could undergo a renaissance in Czechoslovakia and the only way
‘brotherhood’ could be established between the nations was if German and
Czech workers came together to create a common union.56
54 Rudolf Fuchs, České a německé básnictví v Československu. Přednáška pro německé spiso-
vatele v klubu Berta Brechta v Praze v únoru 1936 [Czech and German poetry in Czechoslovakia:
lecture for German writers in Bert-Brecht-Klub in Prague in February 1936] (Prague: Borový,
1937), 18.
55 Rudolf Fuchs, ‘Deutsche Lehrer und tschechische Dichter’, Die Wahrheit 34 (4 December
1935): 6.
56 Fuchs, České a německé básnictví, 28–9.
Utopia as Everyday Practice 33
Rudolf Fuchs left out these political views in his essay on translation pub-
lished in 1938 in the journal Das Wort, a communist émigré journal in Moscow.
This was the first time he had written on translation as a creative practice, but
the article did not appear in the Czechoslovak German or Czech press. In his
essay ‘Translating as Art and Fate’, Fuchs was primarily interested in the artistic
and individual dimensions of translation,57 discussing his own conception of
translation and the more poetic theories of Otto Pick and Otokar Fischer. In his
poem Der Übersetzer, Pick focused on the tragedy and the shortcomings of the
translator, ‘because he has to follow in foreign footsteps’ and work in a time
and context different from his own. By contrast, Fischer understood translation
first and foremost as a ‘mission’. In his poem Překladatel [Translator], Fischer
used the metaphor of a sailor: ‘Like a wind coming from the ocean to carry fra-
grant pollen from very far countries into the country that I love most of all.’58
Similar to Fischer, Fuchs understood translation as a mission, and believed that
the translator had an important message to give to his homeland as a gift. In
contrast to Fischer, he used the metaphor of a ferryman: ‘Translating is also fer-
rying across the river, across division. He who translates has to be a good ferry-
man. He has to know both banks.’59
Later in his essay, Fuchs discusses how he came to literature and transla-
tion, emphasizing the importance of his Czech Jewish ‘roots’ and explaining
how he became a German writer and translator from Czech into German in
Prague: ‘Although I might not be a German man according to the rules of the
“Third Reich”, I am a German poet. And as a German poet, I became a translator
of Czech poets.’60 Fuchs’ essay remains metaphorical when he reflects on trans-
lation. He underlines the need for good translations, writes about his competi-
tion with another translator of Petr Bezruč, Georg Mannheimer, whose transla-
tions he found dilettantish, and claims that the task of the translator is to medi-
ate between cultures. His essay demonstrates that while Fuchs and his col-
leagues were aware of the cultural-political impact of their translations, they
did not want to be misunderstood as (cultural) politicians. Instead, they primar-
ily understood themselves as artists. However, their awareness of the cultural
political function of their translations grew during the 1930s. As Otokar Fischer
pointed out in Lidové noviny in 1937:
57 Rudolf Fuchs, ‘Übersetzen als Kunst und Schicksal’, Das Wort 3, no. 12 (1938): 96–107.
58 Ibid., 102–4, here 103–4.
59 Ibid., 104. Original: ‘Übersetzen ist auch das Hinübersetzen über einen Strom, über Tren-
nendes. Der, welcher übersetzt, muß ein guter Fährmann sein. Er muß beide Ufer kennen.’
60 Ibid.
34 Ines Koeltzsch
One cannot but recognize that Rudolf Fuchs’s long-standing efforts to translate the na-
tional works of our poetry – and in particular Erben and Bezruc [sic] – are not only moti-
vated by his artistic convictions, but also by his role as a non-egoistic, non-profit-oriented,
militant, in a word, heroic mediator.61
61 Otokar Fischer, ‘Bezruč německý’, Lidové noviny (22 November 1937), quoted after a copy of
the Czech original and its German translation in: NA, personal collection of Rudolf Fuchs.
Utopia as Everyday Practice 35
Why is everybody ashamed when somebody accuses him of not having a fatherland? Is it
not more honourable to be a human being (or a Christ) than a German, a French, an Eng-
lishman? To stand between the races seems to me more acceptable than to be rooted in
one of them – and if only for the reason that it makes it easier to go above the races. And
probably this is one of the causes of anti-Semitism: it is the envy of the prisoners, for
whom the freemen are an anathema.62
Most of the published readers’ reactions rejected the essay from a Zionist per-
spective. According to them, the ‘migration’ [Wandern] and ‘dispersion’ of the
Jews was a bad thing. For instance, the Zionist Michael Rosenbaum noted in his
reaction that the ‘homecoming to Palestine’ was the only way in which to real-
ize ‘the divine within humankind’ and the ‘constitution of a community be-
tween true humans’.63 Not one of the authors agreed with Roth’s conception of
the Jewish community as a ‘supra-nation’ [Übernation]. In contrast to the lead-
ing Zionists in Prague like Brod and Weltsch, Roth did not use this term to signi-
fy an ethical exaggeration of the national. Rather, according to the historian To-
bias Brinkmann, he was referring to a nation beyond the nation, a non-territori-
al ‘trans-nation’.64 Although none of the more prominent intellectuals, writers
and translators in Prague took part in the discussion of the article in Die Wahr-
heit, the predominantly Zionist reactions underlined once more the importance
of national belonging in Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual debates in interwar
Czechoslovakia. The writers and translators in Prague did not go as far as Jo-
seph Roth and radically question the concept of nation or national culture. But
this also had to do with their rootedness in Prague. In contrast, Roth was a mi-
grant who had met people of different backgrounds and identities during his
migration.65 In most cases, this rootedness hindered the intellectuals of Prague
from fully transcending the nation-state paradigm of their time. They thus failed
to formulate a clear concept of a pluralistic culture not only in public state-
62 Joseph Roth, ‘Der Segen des ewigen Juden: Zur Diskussion’, Die Wahrheit 35 (30 August
1934): 4–5, here 5.
63 Michael Rosenbaum, ‘Die Sendung des Judentums’, Die Wahrheit 38, no. 5 (22 September
1934): 5; see also Felix Stössinger, ‘Assimilation und Zionismus’, Die Wahrheit 38 (22 September
1934): 6; Paul Kohn, ‘Der Segen des ewigen Juden am Ziel’, Die Wahrheit 37 (15 September
1934): 5–6.
64 On Roth’s term Übernation, see Tobias Brinkmann, ‘Topographien der Migration – Jüdische
Durchwanderung in Berlin nach 1918’, in Synchrone Welten: Zeitenräume jüdischer Geschichte,
ed. Dan Diner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 175–98, especially 192–4.
65 On Roth’s reflections on being a migrant in Berlin see also Anne-Christin Saß, Berliner
Luftmenschen: Osteuropäisch-jüdische Migranten in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: Vanden-
hoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 130 and 203. On diasporic identities of Jewish intellectuals in interwar
Europe, see Ilse Josepha Lazaroms, The Grace of Misery: Joseph Roth and the Politics of Exile,
1919–1939 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 52–4.
36 Ines Koeltzsch
66 Fischer was the second of the writers and translators depicted in Hoffmeister’s Parnassus to
die; the first was the writer Walter Seidl, who died in 1937 at the age of 32 on a trip in Italy.
67 On Čapek’s death see Ort, Art and Life, 24. On fascist and anti-Semitic propaganda in
Prague in the autumn of 1938 and the accusations against the democratic establishment see
several documents in NA, Presidium Ministerstva vnitra – Archiv Ministerstva vnitra (PMV–
AMV), sign. 225–1324–1.
68 For instance, see the Czech letters from Max Brod and Jiří Langer to František Langer from
1941 and 1942 in: LA PNP, personal collection of František Langer.
69 Sabine Dominik, ‘Oskar Baum (1883–1941), ein Schriftsteller des “Prager Kreises”: Mono-
grafische Untersuchung zu Leben und Werk von Oskar Baum’, unpublished Dr. phil. disserta-
Utopia as Everyday Practice 37
The other writers from Hoffmeister’s cartoon – Paul Eisner, František Kubka
and Paul Leppin – survived in Prague. While the non-Jewish writers Kubka and
Leppin were shortly imprisoned by the Gestapo and then returned to ‘normal’
life, Eisner’s marriage to a Christian woman made it possible for him to elude
deportation. In the final months of the Second World War he survived in a hid-
ing place in Prague,70 as did his colleague and friend Jiří Weil, a Czech-Jewish
writer and former communist.71
Despite the physical dissolution of the loose network in Prague after 1938,
some of their visible and invisible ties were preserved. Some of the writers and
translators intensified their translational work and writings even during the cat-
astrophe. In Palestine and later Israel, Max Brod, Felix Weltsch and others tried
to promote the legacy of German-Jewish literature and culture from Prague, and
especially the works of Franz Kafka.72
The illustrator Adolf Hoffmeister, the young Czech Jewish author Egon Hos-
tovský and the prominent socialist writer Franz Carl Weiskopf all emigrated to
the United States, where they remained in close contact with other Czechoslo-
vak German and Czech, Jewish and non-Jewish émigrés. Weiskopf published an
anthology of Czech and Slovak literature in English and continued working to
bring Czechoslovak culture to international, mainly socialist, audiences.
Although he placed socialist writers at the centre of his anthology, he also se-
lected a few pieces by liberal Czech and Slovak writers. Significant is the fact
that he discussed the legacy of Tomáš G. Masaryk in his introduction. Weiskopf
understood his anthology as the confession of a Czechoslovak German to his
homeland. However, his anthology makes clear that his activities as a literary
translator and mediator were not exclusively motivated by artistic interests, but
that his socialist convictions played an important role as well. For Weiskopf, lit-
erature and translation were important instruments of socialist cultural poli-
tics.73
74 Rudolf Fuchs, ‘Kulturprobleme der Deutschen in der Tschechoslovakei’ (lecture held at the
Czechoslovak-British Friendship Club on 15 October 1941), in Ein wissender Soldat: Gedichte
und Schriften aus dem Nachlass von Rudolf Fuchs (London: Einheit, 1943), 108–19; Rudolf
Fuchs, ‘Der tschechoslowakische PEN-Klub…’, (manuscript): NA, personal collection of Rudolf
Fuchs.
75 Fuchs, ‘Kulturprobleme der Deutschen’, 116–7.
Utopia as Everyday Practice 39
create a cultural home abroad and failing to recognize the importance of intel-
lectual and artistic work.76
Rudolf Fuchs died in February 1942 in a car accident. František Langer de-
livered an important eulogy at his funeral in London. It demonstrated that
Fuchs played an important role not only for the socialist émigré writers with
whom he felt the most affinity, but also for Czechoslovak liberals. Langer hon-
oured Fuchs as an outstanding Czechoslovak poet and translator because of
both his creativity and his humanism.77 Just as in the autobiographical and lit-
erary writings Fuchs composed while in exile, Langer’s eulogy did not mention
Fuchs’ Jewish roots. While Judaism played a role in Fuchs’ early writings, he
rarely mentioned his connection to Jewish religion and culture in his later
works (with one exception: his 1938 essay on translation). After his death, Cze-
choslovak socialists held up Fuchs as a symbol of Czech-German anti-fascist re-
sistance in interwar Czechoslovakia and in the Czechoslovak exile community.
Studies on Czechoslovak Germans of the 1960s also wrote about the importance
of his work,78 and he was ‘rediscovered’ by the official literary historiography of
the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s.79 The German socialist narrative
on Fuchs focused on his commitment to anti-fascist activities, leaving out his
relation to Judaism and his contacts with non-socialist Jewish colleagues and
friends. At the same time, Fuchs was mostly forgotten in non-socialist post-war
studies on German-Jewish literature and literary life in Prague. He did not be-
long to the most famous poets of the Parnassus and did not fit into a fixed eth-
nic identity, a fact which became even more important after the Second World
War, the Holocaust and the post-1945 forced migrations.80
While Fuchs focused on cultural politics and his own literary work, Pavel
Eisner intensified his translational activities ‘at home’ in Prague. Constantly
harassed by the police and living in social isolation, translation became a strat-
76 Rudolf Fuchs, ‘Mit brennender Sorge’, 8 June 1941, NA, personal collection of Rudolf Fuchs.
77 František Langer, ‘Za Rudolfem Fuchsem’ [In memoriam Rudolf Fuchs], in Tvorba z exilu
(Prague: Akropolis, 2003), 186–7.
78 Fuchs, Ein wissender Soldat; Paul Reimann, ed., Von Herder bis Kisch: Studien zur Ge-
schichte der deutsch-österreichisch-tschechischen Literaturbeziehungen (Berlin: Dietz, 1961),
116–29. Paul (Pavel) Reimann, born in 1906 to a Czech German Jewish family in Brünn/Brno,
was the head of the Institute of the History of the Czech Communist Party in the 1960s and one
of the organizers of the 1963 Kafka conference in Liblice.
79 Rudolf Fuchs, Die Prager Aposteluhr: Gedichte, Prosa, Briefe, ed. Ilse Seehase (Halle/Leip-
zig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1985).
80 For instance, František Langer, who gave the aforementioned eulogy at Fuchs’ funeral, did
not mention his colleague in his memoirs at all. See Langer, ‘Za Rudolfem Fuchsem’; František
Langer, Byli a bylo: Vzpomínky [They were and it was: memories] (Prague: Acropolis, 2003). On
the reception of Fuchs, see also Spector, Prague Territories, 207–10.
40 Ines Koeltzsch
egy of survival for him. Eisner translated numerous books from different Euro-
pean languages into Czech, some of which were published under pseudonyms.
He also wrote his most important linguistic studies on the Czech language,
which were published shortly after the war. His work as a publisher and trans-
lator also enabled him to re-establish himself in intellectual circles in post-war
Czechoslovakia. However, things did not always go smoothly. Although Eisner
had only survived in the Protectorate’s Prague because of a small, but function-
ing network of colleagues and friends who supported him with work and had
officially ‘rejected’ German culture after the Second World War, he became a
person of ‘suspicion’ in 1945/46. In his letter to Václav Černý, an influential lit-
erary critic, Eisner mentioned a list that contained the names of all the ʻGer-
mansʼ in Prague. The list was published by the magistrate of Prague on the ba-
sis of the census data from 1930: this ‘list of Germans’ included all the Czecho-
slovak citizens of Prague who declared German nationality in 1930, and who
were now forced to reapply for Czechoslovak citizenship – among them, Jewish
survivors and Nazis, as well as Eisner who saw himself forced to explain why
he was declared as a ‘German’.81 He wrote:
I feel that I owe you an explanation. Here it is: I am the son of Jewish parents whose moth-
er tongue was German. My mother and father also spoke Czech, and my father in particu-
lar had a close relation to normal Czech people. … Thus, one can say that I have two moth-
er tongues.82
Eisner wrote to Černý that the list had incited constant harassment not only
from Czech colleagues, but also from German communists, who hardly knew
any Czech. Eisner asked his non-socialist colleague to support him in his appli-
cation for membership to the Union of Writers since he was not a member of the
Czechoslovak Communist Party, which had already become an important crite-
ria for participating in cultural life.83
Like other translators and writers from Jewish backgrounds, such as the
Holocaust survivors Anna Auředníčková and Norbert Fried (who changed his
last name to Frýd after the Second World War), Eisner repeatedly affirmed his
‘Czechness’ and his engagement with socialist ideas in various public state-
ments after 1945.84 These statements demonstrate that Czech-German Jews did
not believe that acceptance in the newly proposed, ethnically homogenous Cze-
choslovak nation was a given for them. At the same time, these intellectuals –
some of whom had broken with the Jewish religion a long time before the Holo-
caust – tried to live and work in Czechoslovakia without neglecting their Ger-
man-Czech-Jewish identities. For instance, in a 1946 article for Věstník židovské
obce náboženské v Praze [Journal of Jewish Religious Communities in Prague]
titled ‘Heine and Us: In the Name of all Pariahs of the World’, Eisner wrote: ‘It
is time to declare ourselves members of the droves who find themselves rejected
again and again by their surroundings. Everything failed and fails, but that is
not our fault.’85 Pavel Eisner was also one of those most engaged in promoting
the work of Franz Kafka in Czechoslovakia and, after 1945, abroad. His efforts
long preceded the famous 1963 Liblice Kafka conference, which officially incor-
porated Kafka into the socialist literary canon.86 In 1950, Eisner wrote an influ-
ential essay on Franz Kafka for a New York publisher, and in 1958 – shortly be-
fore his death – his Czech translation of The Trial was published for the first
time. In his essay on Kafka, Eisner continued to develop his concept of a ‘triple’
or ‘multiple ghetto’, an idea he had already developed in the 1930s to help ex-
plain the outstanding character of the work of Franz Kafka and other German-
Jewish writers in Prague. Last but not least, his analysis of the various social,
cultural, lingual and national forms of isolation might also be seen as an at-
tempt to come to terms with his own multiple identities and his role as a ‘cultur-
al mediator’.87
Eisner and others continued to publish on Jewish topics, even after Febru-
ary 1948 and the Communist take-over, when it became more difficult to freely
express. Many younger writers like Jiří Weil and Norbert Frýd wrote about their
Jewish family backgrounds and above all about the Holocaust, about those who
were murdered and about survivors. While some of their books gained a broad-
84 See above all, Lisa Peschelová, ‘Touha po milované vlasti. Svědectví o české kultuře v ter-
ezínském ghettu a o poválečné reintegraci’ [The desire for the beloved homeland: testimonies
of Czech culture in the Terezín ghetto and of post-war reintegration], Česká literatura, 58, no. 4
(2010): 444–63.
85 Quoted in: Ibid., 445.
86 Veronika Tuckerova is currently working on a book based on her PhD manuscript ‘Reading
Kafka during the (Cold)War’ (Columbia University 2012), which critically examines the inter-
pretation of Kafka after 1945 in the East and West and the self-mythologization of some of his
interpreters. The book will also include a chapter on Eisner. On Liblice see Ines Koeltzsch,
‘Liblice’, in Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, vol. 3, ed. Dan Diner (Stuttgart: Met-
zler, 2012), 511–5.
87 For a critical discussion of Eisner’s concept of the ‘triple/multiple ghetto’ see Georg Escher,
‘“But one cannot live without a people”: Paul/Pavel Eisners Kafka-Lektüre und die Literatur-
wissenschaft’, in Koeltzsch, Kuklová and Wögerbauer, Übersetzer, 257–70.
42 Ines Koeltzsch
The very categories German, Czech, Jew; liberal, Communist, patriot; mystic, rationalist,
Orthodox, and assimilationist, which were reported to be present in the Langer apartment
(in body or spirit) on that June day in 1964, existed in a state of perpetual movement –
seeming to appear only to collapse, regroup, and melt away.89
88 See for example Pavel Eisner, ‘Otokar Fischer’, VŽNOvČs 20, no. 4 (1958): 2; Lev Brod,
‘Pražský spisovatel dr. Max Brod pětasedmdesátníkem’ [The Prague-born writer dr. Max Brod
on his 75th birthday anniversary], VŽNOvČs 21, no. 7 (1959): 5–6; ‘U hrobu Rudolfa Fuchse’ [At
the graveyard of Rudolf Fuchs], VŽNOvČs 29, no. 10 (1967): 8; Oskar Baum, ‘Odvracená kletba’
[A defeated curse], Židovská ročenka 4 (1957/58): 104–7; František Langer, ‘Můj bratr Jiří’ [My
brother Jiří], Židovská ročenka 6 (1959/60): 83–99; Otto Pick, ‘Na předměstí’ [In the suburbs],
Židovská ročenka 7 (1960/61): 76.
89 Hillel J. Kieval, Languages of Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000),
224.
Utopia as Everyday Practice 43
The encounter between Max Brod and František Langer, who were at the very
centre of the Prague Parnassus, was one of the last times that members of the
loose network of writers and translators of pre-war Prague came together. By
the summer of 1964, the Parnassus had already become a memorial.
91 Hannah Arendt, ‘Creating a Cultural Atmosphere’, in Hannah Arendt: The Jewish Writings,
ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007), 298–302.
92 Victor Karady, Gewalterfahrung und Utopie: Juden in der europäischen Moderne (Frankfurt
am Main: Fischer, 1999), 18.
Marija Vulesica
‘What Will Become of the German Jews?’
National Socialism, Flight and Resistance in the Intellectual
Debate of Yugoslav Zionists in the 1930s
Introduction
In September 1930, after the Nazis and the National Socialist Party (NSDAP)
won the election, Židov [The Jew], the official journal of the Yugoslav Zionists,
commented that the Jews in Germany were now facing hard times. The journal
said they would have to ‘confront the new threats resolutely and vigilantly in a
united defence front’.1 Several weeks later, Meier Weltmann, a Zionist who ori-
ginated from Serbia, wrote an article for Židov describing the situation in Ger-
many and Austria. He warned that ‘brutal anti-Semitism’ was becoming increas-
ingly dominant, not only in Central European political culture, but gradually on
the streets as well. At the same time, he noted that both Zionists and non-Zion-
ists in the two countries were ‘disoriented’ by the recent developments.2
Židov, which began publication at the end of 1917, had thus far consistently
monitored, discussed and debated incidents and acts of anti-Semitism occur-
ring across Europe. The authors and editors of Židov and its predecessor Židov-
ska smotra [The Jewish Review] which was in print from 1906 to 1914, were very
aware of anti-Jewish events and declarations and consistently called on the
Jews to react militantly. Moreover, Yugoslavia’s Zionists – who were mostly
male – invariably recommended how this battle should be fought and what the
Jewish reaction should be. Following the enormous success of the Nazis in Ger-
many from 1930 onward, they pointed out that the Jews should start to position
themselves decisively and consciously as Zionists and should defend them-
selves as such against any attacks. Meier Weltmann’s observation that German
and Austrian Jews were ‘disoriented’ must have also been seen as a warning by
Yugoslav Zionists at that time, because only a determined attitude toward all
1 Anonymous, ‘107 nacionalnih socijalista u Reichstagu’ [107 National Socialists in the Reich-
stag], in Židov (22 September 1930): 6.
2 Meier Weltmann, ‘Alarm antisemitizma. Trijumf brutalnog antisemitizma u Centralnoj Evro-
pi’ [Alarming anti-Semitism: triumph of brutal anti-Semitism in Central Europe], Židov (17 Oc-
tober 1930): 2.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-003
46 Marija Vulesica
attacks against Jews and the boosting of Jewish self-confidence could prevent
this disorientation and simultaneously serve as a resolute reaction to anti-Semi-
tism and Nazism. Almost every internal intellectual debate within Jewish
circles, or rather, Zionist circles in Yugoslavia, focused on these positions.
These initial reactions to the Nazis’ electoral successes were just the begin-
ning of an extensive and broadly based debate within Yugoslav Zionism about
Nazi policy toward the Jews, the reaction of German (and European) Jewry, and
the specific results of this policy and the reaction it evoked. Nearly everybody in
Yugoslavia could see the consequences: by March 1933, German Jewish refugees
and emigrants had already started arriving in several Yugoslav cities.
In the following article, I shall present and analyze the positions, opinions
and demands of three leading Zionist figures on this cluster of themes. I shall
also examine whether the topic of ‘catastrophe’ played a part in the intellectual
debates regarding the situation of German Jews. After the realization that some
kind of ‘great misfortune or disaster’ had struck the Jews in 1933, was there an
idea, or concept, or answer as to how this misfortune could be overcome? Did
the catastrophe have an intellectual counterpart? A utopia perhaps?
The journal Židov served the Zionists as a forum for arguments, ideas and
debates. Throughout its existence this Zionist publication and its editors
claimed to illustrate and represent not only the interests of Zionism but also
those of Yugoslav Jewry as a whole. In fact, Židov included many reports and
news items relating to the Jewish community and Jewish individuals that can-
not be described as primarily Zionist. For this reason, Židov is also the most im-
portant source in the present article for reconstructing and analyzing the rele-
vant intellectual contributions.
Zionism was the dominant tendency and political position in Yugoslav
Jewry from the 1920s onward.3 Beginning with a closer look at prominent Zionist
men and women and their way of reasoning, especially those who were en-
gaged in the debates at the time, seems a clear starting point; indeed, there is
no doubt that many Yugoslavian intellectuals with Zionist sympathies ex-
pressed their opinions on the burning issues of the period. This is evidenced by
private literary estates and correspondence, and pamphlets and magazines that
were published nationwide and are preserved in various international archives
today.4 As examples, I would like to present three outstanding individuals and
the scope of their political thought: Aleksandar Licht (1884–1948), the undis-
3 Harriet Pass Freidenreich, The Jews of Yugoslavia: A Quest for Community (Philadelphia: The
Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 157–8.
4 It is certainly indicative of Yugoslavian Jewry that public statements or private notes by non-
Zionists are rarely found in the archives.
‘What Will Become of the German Jews?’ 47
the historical background may help to contextualize the social and intellectual
framework in which the Zionist protagonists in the 1930s made their contribu-
tions. Finally, I will discuss the contributions and patterns of thought and emo-
tion that were publicly expressed after 1933.
6 See, Holm Sundhaussen, ‘Jugoslawien: Zahl und räumliche Verteilung der Juden im Jahre
1941’, in Dimension des Völkermordes: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, ed.
Wolfgang Benz (Munich: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 1991), 311–30, particularly 311.
Around 65,000 Jews lived in the territory according to the first national census in 1921 in
the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
7 Cited from Adolf Benau and Oskar Grof, ‘Mrtvim drugovima’ [The dead comrades], in Gideon
(18 June 1922): 176.
8 CAHJP [Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People], Eventov-Archiv, B-138, Fuhr-
mann to the Action Committee; CAHJP, Eventov-Archiv, B-138, Schön to Mihael Agmon.
‘What Will Become of the German Jews?’ 49
bers in Zagreb and Budapest.9 The Zagreb members included Aleksandar Licht,
who was immediately elected as president of Bar Giora in 1905 during his aca-
demic year abroad in Vienna.10 The membership was exclusively male until the
academic year 1911–1912. In that year, Erna Hofmann, a medical student from
Zagreb, became the first female member to join. She was the half-sister of Lavo-
slav Schick.11
By 1914, Bar Giora’s political and literary gatherings in Vienna, and the at-
traction it held for students from Slav countries, resulted in the founding of
many Zionist organizations and other Zionist activities in the South Slav coun-
tries. For example, the first congress of Jewish university students from the
South Slav countries was held in Osijek in 1904. Speakers from Croatia-Slavo-
nia, Bosnia, Serbia and Bulgaria reported on the situation of Zionism in their
respective countries. At that time, Zionist meetings in the region still roused the
anger of non-Zionists. Indeed, during Lavoslav Schick’s speech on the necessity
of the Zionist movement, the Zionists and their opponents came to blows, which
resulted in the intervention of the authorities and the cessation of the meeting
altogether.12
Despite such protest among Jews, in the following years several Zionist
clubs, associations and shekel groups were set up in all the South Slav coun-
tries.13 The Zionists’ level of organization in these countries grew steadily until
the outbreak of the war. Further conferences were held in 1908 in Zemun, in
1909 in Brod na Savi (now Slavonski Brod) and in 1910 in Sarajevo. The sched-
uled conference in Belgrade in 1912 had to be cancelled because the outbreak of
the first Balkan War put a stop to the plans of the local association there.14 One
of the most important signs of intensified Zionist organization was the founding
of the Zionist publication Židovska smotra in November 1906 by Aleksandar and
Hermann Licht. Until 1914, when it had to stop publication, it gave full coverage
9 Izvještaj društva Židova akademičara iz jugoslavenskih zemalja ‘Bar Giora’ u Beču, 1903–
1904 [Report of the society of Jewish academics from the South Slav countries, ‘Bar Giora’,
in Vienna], 21.
10 CAHJP, Eventov-Archiv, A-18, Nachruf von Robert Veith: Novi Omanut (1999) 32/331–6.
11 Mihael Agmon, ‘Sa članovima Bar Giora od prije I. svjetskog rata’ [With the members of Bar
Giora before the First World War], Bilten Hitahadut Olej Yugoslavya (subsequently Bilten), 30
September 1976. Erna Hofmann studied medicine and immigrated to Palestine in 1936 with
Josip Cohen, whom she later married.
12 HDA (Hrvatski državni arhiv/ Croatian State Archive], PRZV, Document No. 3578, Box 698.
13 ’Izvještaj društva Židova akademičara iz jugo-slavenskih zemalja ‘Bar Giora’ u Beču. Za god-
inu 1911–12. [Report of the society of Jewish academics from the Yugoslav countries ‘Bar Giora’
in Vienna. For the year 1911–12.], 10.
14 Odgoda kongresa [Motions rejected by the congress], in Židovska smotra [ŽS] (1 August
1912); CAHJP, Eventov-Archiv, B-138, Report on the beginnings of Bar Giora.
50 Marija Vulesica
15 Anonymous, ‘Cijonizam i jugoslavenski pokret’ [Zionism and the Yugoslav movement], Ži-
dov (23 October 1918): 2.
16 Marija Vulesica, ‘Antisemitismus im ersten Jugoslawien 1918–1941’, Jahrbuch für Antisem-
itismusforschung 17, (2008): 131–52, particularly 135–8.
17 Ibid.
18 Freidenreich, The Jews of Yugoslavia, 56; Sundhaussen, ‘Jugoslawien. Zahl und räumliche’,
311–30, particularly, 311–12.
19 Ante Sorić, ed., Jews in Yugoslavia: A Catalogue (Zagreb: Muzejski proctor, 1989), 69.
‘What Will Become of the German Jews?’ 51
Aleksander Licht
Aleksandar Licht was not only the intellectual leader of Yugoslav Jewry, but al-
so undoubtedly the leading Jewish intellectual in Yugoslavia of his time. Born
20 Cvi Loker, Začeci i razvoj cionizma u južnoslavenskim krajevima [The beginning and the
development of Zionism in the South Slav regions], in Dva stoljeća povijesti i kulture Židova u
Zagrebu i Hrvatskoj, ed. Ognjen Kraus (Zagreb: Jewish Community Zagreb, 1998), 166–78, par-
ticularly 174.
21 Ivo Goldstein, Židovi u Zagrebu 1918–1941 [Jews in Zagreb 1918–1941], (Zagreb: Novi liber,
2004), 108–24, 230–58.
22 Freidenreich, The Jews of Yugoslavia, 146–54.
52 Marija Vulesica
23 Anonymous, ‘Biografija Dra. Lichta’ [Biography of Dr Licht], Židov (6 April 1934): 7. Special
supplement for Aleksandar Licht’s 50th birthday.
24 Vulesica, Antisemitismus im ersten Jugoslawien, 131–52.
‘What Will Become of the German Jews?’ 53
his passionate speeches at the First Zionist Congress of Yugoslav Zionists in Jan-
uary 1919.25 Licht’s honest, untiring commitment to supporting the interests of
the Jews and spreading Zionist ideas earned him great respect and prestige in
Yugoslav Zionist circles. In time, he became a universally admired and recog-
nized leadership figure. An acknowledgement in Židov on the occasion of his
50th birthday in April 1934 described him as ‘Dr Licht: Yugoslavia’s greatest
Zionist intellect and best Zionist orator.’ His non-Jewish contemporaries also ap-
preciated his intellectual acuity and presumably his delightful company. Nota-
ble among them were the Croatian intellectual Ivo Politeo and the Croatian ar-
tist Ivan Meštrović, who was internationally renowned – Licht had close friend-
ships with both men.26
Aleksandar Licht held several offices in Zionist organizations until 1933
when he was elected president of the Federation of Yugoslavian Zionists. He
held this office until the beginning of the Second World War in Yugoslavia in
April 1941. In the period of Nazi rule in Germany in the 1930s, when open hatred
against the Jews increasingly spread across Europe, Licht tirelessly gave
speeches and wrote articles in the campaign against unjust treatment and ar-
gued for a firm Jewish position. On 6 April 1941, Nazi troops invaded Yugoslavia
and divided up the country, which resulted in the founding of the fascist puppet
state, the Independent State of Croatia (ISC). Thus began the process by which
Jews were deprived of their rights, persecuted and eventually murdered
throughout the entire former Yugoslav territory. At the outset, Aleksandar Licht,
along with many other prominent Jews, was arrested by the Gestapo and taken
to Graz in April 1941. The Gestapo did not release him until March 1942. Follow-
ing his release, Licht went to Ljubljana, where his wife and daughter were wait-
ing for him, and where he met up with a group of children and young people
(led by the Croatian Zionist Josef Indig) who had fled the ISC.27 Helped by DELA-
SEM, a Jewish-Italian refugee aid organization, Licht and the group managed to
escape to Italy and eventually reach Switzerland.28
25 Lav Stern, ‘Naš vođa Aleksandar Licht’ [Our leader Aleksandar Licht], Židov (6 April 1934):
3; Anonymous, ‘Biografija Dra. Lichta’, 7. Special supplement for Aleksandar Licht’s 50th birth-
day.
26 Jakir Eventov, ‘Nostalgije evropljanina. Uz desetgodišnjicu smrti Aleksandra Lichta’ [Nos-
talgic feelings of a European: on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the death of Alek-
sandar Licht], Jevrejski Almanah: 1957–1958, (1958): 197–205.
27 Klaus Voigt, ed., Joškos Kinder, Flucht und Alija durch Europa 1940 –1943: Josef Indigs Be-
richt, (Berlin: Das Arsenal, 2006).
28 CAHJP, A-18-II-B/C; ‘Bericht von Aleksa Arnon über die Verhaftung und Flucht von Alek-
sandar Licht’.
54 Marija Vulesica
Until his death on 8 June 1948, Licht remained in exile in Switzerland where
he wrote many letters of correspondence with comrades and supporters; letters
which shed light on his critical analysis of the situation of the Yugoslav and
European Jews. These letters, which are held today in the Central Archive for
the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP) in Jerusalem have not yet been studied
in detail. Even in exile, after all the Yugoslav Zionist organizations had been
disbanded and thousands of Yugoslav Jews had been murdered in the death
camps, Licht’s comrades (already in Switzerland, Italy or Palestine) continued
to see him as the beloved and respected Zionist leader he had once been. His
former followers never forgot his words and his influence, and in 1955, a group
of them finally had his mortal remains transported to Israel, where they were
buried on 10 November 1955.29 Although Licht never visited Palestine in his life-
time, some of his followers felt it their duty to bring their esteemed leader to the
‘Promised Land’ and to continue nurturing his memory there. After the war, in
his home country of Yugoslavia, it was explicitly prohibited to support the
cause of Zionism or to honour former Zionist leaders.30 In 1934, Lavoslav Schick
made the prediction that, ‘as long as Yugoslav Jews exist, the name of Aleksan-
dar Licht will always mean something great and illustrious, and it will remain
alive for many, many generations to come’.31 Schick was mistaken. It was not
just the succeeding Zionist generations of Israel that forgot Aleksandar Licht,
but also the Jews of Yugoslavia in particular. Not a single scholarly work is de-
voted to his charismatic personality and his influential role in Jewish Zionist
history in Yugoslavia. The present article is an initial exception.
The lawyer, journalist and Judaic scholar Lavoslav Schick was less popular but
was certainly an equally respected figure in Yugoslav Zionism.32 Schick was
born into a Viennese Jewish family on 27 November 1881; at the age of 10 he left
29 CAHJP, A-18-II-K/h; Booklet to mark the ceremonial transfer of his mortal remains to Israel.
30 Ari Kerkkänen, Yugoslav Jewry: Aspects of Post-World War II and Post-Yugoslav Develop-
ments, (Helsinki: Finish Oriental Society, 2001), 43–4.
31 Lavoslav Schick, ‘Marginalije uz Jubilej’ [Mariginalia on the occasion of a jubilee], in Židov
(6 April 1934): 6. Special supplement to mark Aleksandar Licht’s 50th birthday.
32 On the spelling of his second name, Schick himself used both variations: Schick and the
Slav variant of his name, Šik. He also signed many publications with the pseudonym Jehuda
Arje. That name was most probably a reference to the early modern Jewish scholar and author
Leone di Moden (Jehuda Arje di Modena). This would have concurred with Schick’s idea of
himself as a scholar of Yugoslav-Jewish themes.
‘What Will Become of the German Jews?’ 55
Vienna with his widowed mother, her new husband, and his older brother Otto,
and moved to the Croatian capital of Zagreb. In 1909, after studying law in Za-
greb, Vienna and Budapest, Schick opened his own law office in Zagreb.33 While
studying, he mostly earned his money as a journalist. In 1903 he was already
writing for publications such as the Zionist newspapers Die Welt and the Wiener
Jüdische Volksblatt. He also worked for the Croatian newspaper Agramer Tag-
blatt and later co-founded the daily paper Der Morgen.34 By the end of the
1930s, Schick had published a large, as of yet uncounted, number of articles
and essays. He also published several monographs including the works Slovenci
i Židovi [The Slavs and the Jews] in 1919 and Jüdische Ärzte in Jugoslawien [Jew-
ish Doctors in Yugoslavia] in 1931.35
Schick’s first writing on Zionism appeared in the Bericht des Vereins jüdisch-
er Akademiker aus den südslawischen Ländern ‘Bar Giora’ in 1903–04 in Vien-
na.36 Like Aleksandar Licht, he had already come in contact with Zionist ideas
as a high school student in Zagreb, primarily through the group he jointly initi-
ated, the Literary Club of Jewish Middle School Students.37 Establishing a home
for the Jews in Palestine, the education of young people toward the goals of
Jewish nationalism and the reinforcement of Jewish self-confidence were major
themes that dominated Schick’s work as a journalist and author. He saw the re-
search and reappraisal of Jewish history in the Yugoslav countries as a way to
consolidate and expand Jewish self-confidence. Many of his published essays
were devoted to different aspects of Jewish history, including some dealing with
family history or histories. He also researched his own genealogy and published
the results in 1928 in the German journal Jüdische Familien-Forschung.38
Schick lived a full private and professional life, busy with the re-appraisal
and presentation of Jewish history, with substantial work for Zagreb’s Jewish
community (he was their vice-chairman from 1920 onwards) and his work in the
Zionist organizations. He was a gifted speaker who enjoyed lecturing on histor-
ical events at various types of gatherings.39 He was also a passionate collector
of books about Jewish history and he had hoped to create a Jewish library. In
1941, when Croatian Jews were forced to surrender all their possessions, Schick,
with the help of a Croatian friend, managed to save his private library of five
thousand volumes from seizure by the Ustasha (the radical nationalist regime
in the ISC). Today, this library is the property of the Jewish Community of Za-
greb.40
The Croatian National Library houses Schick’s personal estate, which in-
cludes over three thousand letters and items of the correspondence he main-
tained with people all over Europe. The estate is regrettably incomplete and the
question as to the whereabouts of the missing correspondence will probably
never be answered. Nevertheless, the estate offers a unique glimpse into the
world of Schick’s ideas and his Zionist work. He sincerely believed in Palestine
and in the creation of a Jewish state there; to be sure, he was aware of the daily
sacrifices people would have to make, yet he did not allow for any doubts about
the goal. This sentiment pervades the correspondence with his younger half-
brother, Srećko Hoffmann, who did in fact immigrate to Palestine.41
Schick himself had visited Palestine at least once, staying there for a period
of several weeks. He wrote a fairly long report on this trip that appeared in Ži-
dov in July 1938. After his return, he pursued more concrete plans for Palestine.
His aim was to create business ties between Yugoslavia and Palestine that
would allow him to alternate working in both countries. He had also deposited,
for the purposes of his immigration, a ‘capitalist certificate’ and the reserve sum
of one thousand pounds in an English bank in Palestine.42 His plans and goals
could not be fulfilled, however. Schick was arrested in 1941 and deported to the
Croatian extermination camp Jasenovac, where he was eventually murdered.
The Ustasha confiscated all of his property. The Yad Vashem databank gives his
date of death as 2 January 1942.
His wife Ela Schick, née Friedrich – the couple married in Zagreb in 1911 –
survived the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel after the war. The circumstan-
ces of her survival are unknown.
The memory of Lavoslav Schick has been obscured to a greater degree than
that of Aleksandar Licht. In 1974 Lavoslav Glesinger (1901–1986), a doctor and
historian of medicine, wrote about Schick’s life and work in the Yugoslav Jewish
journal Jevrejski Pregled [Jewish Review]. In Glesinger’s opinion, if Schick had
died in ‘normal times and under normal circumstances’ a great number of me-
40 Julia Koš, ‘Lavoslav Šik i njegova knjižnica’ [Lavoslav Schick and his library], in Kraus
(ed.), Dva stoljeća povijesti i kulture, 78–83.
41 NSK, R7883 a) Letter to Srećko Hoffman.
42 HDA, Ponova, Schick file.
‘What Will Become of the German Jews?’ 57
morial events would have been held, and several foundations bearing his name
would have been created in his honour. Instead, there is very little offered in
memory of Lavoslav Schick.43 Glesinger knew Schick, had spent many hours in
his library as a young man and had enjoyed Schick’s friendship and hospitality.
Yet, hardly anyone today, most notably in the field of research, is aware of Lav-
oslav Schick’s commitment to the interests of the Jews and to Zionism.
Vera Stein-Ehrlich
Vera Stein-Ehrlich came from a well-known and established Jewish family in Za-
greb. In contrast to Licht and Schick, she expressed her Zionist views less force-
fully and publicly, which may have been because she was a woman. Although
Jewish women were taken seriously in the communities and in Zionist organiza-
tions, and their work and dedication were both needed and valued, their gener-
al presence and their scope for action were clearly limited in comparison with
their male counterparts. Indeed, since the nineteenth century in Croatia and
Slavonia, Jewish women had been very active in their communities and in-
volved in social work, particularly in the Slavonian capital, Osijek. Such in-
volvement, while normal in Europe, was considered unusual in the South Slav
regions. However, the male Zionists in the region realized very early on that
they had to persuade women to support the idea of Jewish nationalism.44 In
1908, at the third congress of Jewish university students from the South Slav
countries in Zemun, for instance, they stressed ‘the equal status of woman in
the Zionist movement’.45 The first Zionist women’s club in the South Slav coun-
tries was organized the previous year in the Slavonian city of Đakovo. It was
called Moriah (the Hebrew name for Temple Mount), numbered around 50
founding members and was led by Frida Kaiser, who was its first president.46
Zionist women were involved more actively and in larger numbers, however,
during the interwar period. The first Yugoslavian branch of WIZO [Women´s In-
52 Ibid.
53 For various reports on the situation in Germany, see Židov (11 March 1932): 1; Židov (18
March 1932): 1; Židov (1 April 1932): 1.
60 Marija Vulesica
several hundred people when he gave a public lecture in February 1932 titled
‘Judaism and Present-day Ideological Tendencies’ in which he spoke of the con-
stitution of Judaism and Zionism in that period and explored the challenges of
fascism, Nazism and ‘Hitlerism’. Židov commented that the meeting was more
popular and had aroused more interest than any other recent event.54 In the lec-
ture, Licht warned against underestimating the dangers of those political move-
ments. Yet, he urged the Jews not to organize in reaction to the negativity in
their environment. He said they – meaning especially the Zionists – had to af-
firm their positive values and come together on this positive basis.55 In saying
this, Licht was trying to give Yugoslav Zionism a specific spiritual and intellec-
tual orientation in the face of the dangerous and anti-Jewish movements in Eu-
rope.
This orientation – the process by which Yugoslav Zionists established and
aligned their own personal positions – defined the public debates in the subse-
quent period. The Yugoslav Zionists’ fears came true at the beginning of 1933.
The Nazis gained power, bringing with them their policy of ‘bloodthirsty anti-
Semitism’. Many Jewish men and women in Yugoslavia, all the Zionist organiza-
tions and most of the Jewish communities were shocked and horrified by the
news from Germany. At the same time, the publications of the various groups
began to feature more intensive debates on the questions raised by the political
change in Germany. The main topic was the issue of Jewish emigration and the
positioning of Zionists in Europe.
On 14 February 1933, a large Jewish audience gathered again on the prem-
ises of the Jewish National Association in Zagreb to hear Aleksandar Licht’s lec-
ture on Leo Pinsker’s book Self-emancipation.56 Licht had not chosen this topic
by chance: rather than summarizing and presenting the principal statements of
Pinsker’s book, a proto-Zionist work dating back to 1882, he was evidently con-
cerned with studying the analogies between the historical events of 1881 and
1933. Pinsker made his demands for Jewish self-emancipation under the impact
of the pogroms in Russia. Referring to those demands, Licht also emphasized
that the idea of legal emancipation granted by others had to be replaced by
emancipation based on conviction and led and achieved from within Jewry it-
self. According to Licht, ‘the dignity of a human being’ was linked to his ‘na-
tional dignity’. The ‘national regeneration’ of the Jews could only develop from
54 Lecture on ‘Judaism and Present-day Ideological Tendencies’, appeared in Židov (26 Febru-
ary 1932): 1.
55 Ibid.
56 Leo Pinsker (1821–1891) wrote Self-emancipation in 1882. He called for the self-emancipa-
tion of the Jews as a nation. See, Michael Brenner, Geschichte des Zionismus, (Munich: C. H.
Beck, 2005), 15.
‘What Will Become of the German Jews?’ 61
that.57 This was the interpretation of a convinced Zionist. Licht argued that, 50
years after Pinsker, the need for self-assertive liberation was as urgent as it had
been then. Just as it had happened 50 years earlier in Russia, Germany was now
gripped by a ‘psychosis of anti-Jewish phobia’. All attempts to overcome this
psychosis with speeches and explanations had failed.58 Referring to the Russian
pogroms of 1881 that had shocked the European world, Licht noted that 50
years later, they – the non-German Jews – would experience the same thing
and would have to stand by and watch what Pinsker had witnessed in his time.
Licht used this historical analogy to emphasize the importance of Zionist action.
Indeed, he went one step further in expressing the question or warning: ‘Can
any Jew anywhere say that what is happening to the German Jews at the mo-
ment will never happen to him?’59 It is difficult to judge how much Licht really
believed that Nazi politics would reach beyond the German border, or if it
would fail to find imitators in other European countries. Nonetheless, his words
should be interpreted first as an expression of deep concern, and second, as
showing precise awareness of the political realities in Europe. His task as the
intellectual and spiritual leader of the Yugoslav Zionists was evidently to recog-
nize and identify the dangers and present a solution: a goal to be achieved.
Without a doubt, this goal involved making people aware of the encroaching
dangers and called for the Jews to militantly assert their status as a nation.
At the beginning of April 1933, Licht’s advice came to fruition in the form of
concrete action. Following the Nazi boycott of Jewish shops and businesses on 1
April 1933, and only two days after the Nazi ‘Law for the Restoration of Profes-
sional Civil Service’ was passed on 7 April (the law that removed Jewish civil
servants from public office), the Jewish National Association in Zagreb organ-
ized a protest meeting. In light of the events in Germany, what was originally
planned as a ‘shekel event’ (a fundraiser for Palestine), turned into a spontane-
ous political demonstration. The sports hall of the Maccabi-Zagreb Club was
crowded. Aside from Aleksandar Licht, Lav Stern (the association’s chairman),
and Cvi Rothmüller gave fiery speeches demanding the construction of Pales-
tine and repeatedly reminding the audience of the ‘catastrophe of the German
Jews’.60
Indeed, by April 1933 the Zionists had already chosen the term ‘catastrophe’
to describe the situation of the German Jews. We can assume that this was more
than a mere slogan. By that time, the Zionists of Yugoslavia had been watching
the rise of the Nazis and their increasing demands for many years. They had al-
ways taken Nazi proclamations and threats seriously. The speed and resolve
with which the German Jews at that time were already being disenfranchised
and persecuted ultimately opened the way for the Zionists in Yugoslavia to de-
fine the catastrophe as such; and by 1934, if not before, catastrophe had become
the general term used for the situation of the German Jews.61 The issue of how
to counter it and the nature of a solution was already being negotiated during
the course of 1933. To be sure, in his speech during the protest meeting in April
1933, Licht made firm demands for tackling the catastrophe that the Jews of Ger-
many were then facing. He described the situation of the German Jews knowl-
edgeably and in detail, he reported on the raids in Berlin and he affirmed that
non-German Jews were justifiably outraged. His personal outrage was also di-
rected at German scholars, none of whom had stood up against the anti-Jewish
measures in that situation. He asked whether it was a matter for the Jews alone
and demanded, if that were true, that they think about their ‘self-defence’ all
the more urgently. ‘Our protest’, Licht went on, must be aimed at this ‘shame-
less barbarism’, it must show ‘solidarity’ and it must also be ‘a protest that takes
action’. This time Licht repeated again the concern he had already expressed in
February: ‘if a nation with a great culture can fall into the trap of such phobia
against Jews … who can claim that existing relationships cannot change else-
where as well?’62 He ended by appealing to the audience, who appear to have
frenetically cheered him on, to build the future ‘firmly and resolutely’ in their
pioneering movement.63 Licht’s initial proposal for the Jewish response to the
catastrophe involved a self-confident position as Jews and a realistic assess-
ment of the events in Germany. He did not explicitly mention Palestine and it is
not entirely clear what he meant by building the future – a homeland, or the
continuing consolidation of Jewish self-confidence in the galut. Both variants
are possible. However, his demands were unambiguous, and his attitude to-
wards protest and resistance, against the anti-Jewish measures and against the
indifference and passivity of non-Jews was clear. Licht underlined his demands
for a militant attitude by describing their ‘present’ situation while simultane-
ously issuing a warning or a call for critical reflection on the conditions in
which they – the non-German Jews – would live. He evidently wanted to raise
the awareness and sensitivity of the audience to the anti-Jewish policies, to the
legal and political measures and positions.
61 Cvi Rothmüller, ‘Jevrejska katastrofa’ [The Jewish catastrophe], Židov (26 January 1934): 1.
62 Aleksandar Licht’s speech at the protest meeting on 9 April 1933, Židov (14 April 1933): 2–3.
63 Ibid.
‘What Will Become of the German Jews?’ 63
The concept of making the Yugoslav Jews more sensitive and aware was un-
ambiguously confirmed by the coverage in Židov. Each edition of the magazine
contained detailed reports from Germany and critical discussions about recent
events there. Licht – together with the Yugoslav Zionist leadership – advocated
that the Yugoslav Jews should by no means relativize or ignore the German pol-
icies, nor should they dismiss them altogether as a German affair. Quite the op-
posite: they should adopt a position of protest. Licht, as leader of the Zionists,
took a clear line on this and further clarified and endorsed this approach at an-
other protest meeting at the end of May 1933. Unlike his previous speeches, this
time Licht spoke of Palestine as a concrete geographical goal. He specifically
mentioned aid for the German Jews and explained that working for them was
equivalent to working for the future of the whole Jewish nation. The only correct
way to protect European Jews from persecution was not by the granting of
‘night shelter’ – Licht used the German word ‘Nachtasyl’ here – but by helping
the persecuted people reach Palestine. At the end of his speech Licht made the
demand for a Jewish state more explicitly than ever before, postulating its es-
tablishment ‘around Zion, around Jerusalem, up to the River Jordan and across
the Jordan’.64 This state would be the home base and safe haven for all perse-
cuted Jews. Palestine, and the foundation of a Jewish state there that would of-
fer protection and a homeland to all persecuted Jews, ultimately represented
the utopia that would allow them to overcome the catastrophe.
Licht spelled out his response to the consequences of the Nazi policy more
clearly in the early months after the Nazis took power. Whereas his speeches
and demands were at first shaped by intellectual defensiveness and the attempt
to boost self-confidence, he soon after changed his position to that of concrete
support for Jewish immigration to Palestine. The concept of utopia was trans-
formed from an intellectual position into a political vision. There is no doubt
that this vision was enhanced by the arrival of German Jews and by the future
questions raised by their fate and their presence in Yugoslavia.
‘What will become of the German Jews?’ asked the headline of Židov on 3
March 1933. This recurring question would dominate articles and reports in the
following year. Aside from taking an intellectual position against Nazism and
its politics, this concrete question, which demanded a very concrete answer,
was particularly challenging for Yugoslavia’s Zionists. During the fifth congress
of the Federation of Jewish Religious Communities of Yugoslavia, which was
held in Belgrade at the beginning of April 1933, federation representatives not
only discussed numerous internal Yugoslavian topics, but also the events tak-
64 Speech by Aleksandar Licht at the protest meeting in Zagreb on 21 May 1933, appearing in
Židov (26 May 1933): 3.
64 Marija Vulesica
ing place in Germany and their consequences. Along with the proclamations of
concern and solidarity in relation to their ‘Jewish brothers’ in Germany, the fed-
eration resolved to set up a Central Aid Committee for the German Jews. In his
speech to the congress, Lavoslav Schick – a delegate from the Zagreb commun-
ity and a member of the new aid committee – reminded listeners of how much
the Jews had suffered in their history and warned against a repetition of this
suffering. In his opinion, the only way to prevent or at least minimize this was
to ‘build [the] Palestinian homeland’.65
Leading Zionists were united on the basic principle that the refugees had to
immigrate to Palestine and create a new homeland there. Židov repeatedly
wrote that the ‘honour, the life, and the future of our people’ had to be saved by
their own strength.66 The phrase ‘their own strength’ stood for the immigration
and construction of the Jewish utopia in Palestine. Alternatives, such as the
choice to remain in Yugoslavia were not openly discussed; in fact, they were
not even mentioned. But the reality of the everyday treatment of the refugees
often looked different.
The coordination of aid for the Jewish refugees from Germany in the spring
of 1933 certainly defined Zionist activity, especially in Croatia. This was where
most of the refugees came from and where the first spontaneous committees
emerged. At the beginning of May 1933, Aleksandar Licht also wrote to the Fed-
eration of Jewish Religious Committees to pledge his support and to make sev-
eral demands to the aid committee. Licht gave clear instructions on the way to
approach and handle the refugee question. He said it was particularly impor-
tant that aid for the German Jews did not dissipate into simple ‘philanthropy’
because this would only cause renewed ‘psychological and economic crises’. In-
stead, Licht urged that philanthropic help should be kept at a minimum and he
said it was essential for every Jew to understand that ‘Eretz Yisrael’ is the only
territory where it will be possible to accommodate the German refugees in a
way that would satisfy them morally, socially, and ultimately economically,
now and in the future.67
In Licht’s Zionist worldview it was easy to deal with the disenfranchised,
persecuted German Jews: only the most urgently needed aid was to be provided,
and within a specific time limit. Each refugee had to be made to understand that
he or she would soon have to leave Yugoslavia and travel to Palestine to realize
the goals of the Zionists. Admittedly, Licht did not say this explicitly, and per-
haps it never occurred to him. However, his opinion, attitude and intellectual
perception, as well as the demands he made, certainly allow for this conclu-
sion.
Despite, or rather because of the intellectual debates on the problem of the
Jewish refugees which leading Zionists engaged in in their publications, at con-
gresses and during public events, Yugoslavia’s Jewish communities and Zionist
organizations provided excellent refugee aid. The few existing scholarly contri-
butions on Yugoslav Jews’ aid to refugees claim that more than 55,000 German
and Austrian Jews fled to Yugoslavia between 1933 and 1941. More than 50,000
of them were able to escape safely to Italy, Bulgaria and overseas, or to Turkey
and Palestine.68 In the years 1933 and 1934 alone, around 8,000 German Jews
are estimated to have passed through Yugoslavia.69 Most of them actually left
the Kingdom of Yugoslavia again after only a few months. Nevertheless, feeding
and housing each individual fugitive who registered through the Jewish com-
munity required considerable effort and work. For example, The Central Aid
Committee for the German Jews was responsible for material aid and accommo-
dation. At the beginning of 1934, the Zionists founded another organization, the
Central Office for Social and Productive Aid. Its aim was to persuade both Yugo-
slav and foreign Jews, younger ones in particular, to move on from the tradi-
tional professions: young people were to devote themselves to factory produc-
tion and farming as their contribution to the construction of the Jewish utopia
in Palestine, with new professional structures devoted to subsistence in order to
prevent the impoverishment of Jews in bleak economic periods.70 By November
1933 the Federation of Zionists had already set up a hachshara [training] farm in
Croatia where around 80 young people from Germany (and 20 from South Ser-
bia) were prepared for life in Palestine.71
Lavoslav Schick was undoubtedly one of the most active and committed
helpers. Many of the letters he wrote to individuals and organizations in Berlin,
Wrocław or Munich show the effort he made for the refugees.72 He organized job
opportunities, donated money, invited refugees to dinner and ordered German-
68 Milan Ristović, ‘Jugoslavija i jevrejske izbeglice 1938–1941’ [Yugoslavia and the Jewish ref-
ugees 1938–1941], Istorija 20 veka 15, no. 1 (1996): 21–43; Freidenreich, Jews of Yugoslavia, 188;
Katrin Boeckh, ‘Jugoslawien’, in Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945, eds,
Claus-Dieter Krohn, Patrik von zur Mühlen, Gerhard Paul and Lutz Winckler (Darmstadt: Wis-
senschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 279–84.
69 Goldstein, Židovi u Zagrebu, 448. I assume that these figures are overstated.
70 See various articles, in Židov (16 February 1934): 1, 3–4
71 See various articles, in Židov (15 June 1934): 3; Židov (16 November 1934): 3.
72 NSK, Personal Estate of Lavoslav Schick, R 7883 a) und R7883 b). Letters from the years 1933
and 1934.
66 Marija Vulesica
language newspapers and magazines for them to read in his library, which was
famed throughout the city. Regardless of his daily activities as a helper and
even though he was certainly aware of the individual situation and emotional
state of the people he met, in his opinion, their only salvation was to emigrate
and help to build a Jewish state in Palestine. He condemned the refugees for
not being sufficiently aware of their Jewish identity and, despite their experien-
ces in Germany, for still seeing themselves as members of the German nation
and wanting to return to Germany.73 He was particularly critical of the Germans
during a speaking tour in Banja Luka in Bosnia in May 1933. In a speech to Zion-
ist youth he said, ‘In some ways the German Jews are responsible for their own
downfall. They wanted to be Germans with a Mosaic religion, some even had
themselves baptized, but it didn’t help them. Today these Jews are suffering
more than the ones who had confessed honourably to being Jewish. Now they
are starting to see their errors and now they all see Palestine as their salva-
tion’.74 In the following months and years, Schick continued stubbornly to de-
mand that Jewish refugees should identify with Judaism and immigrate to Pal-
estine. Speaking to the editors of the Jüdische Rundschau in Berlin in October
1933, he repeated his position and appeared almost outraged at the ‘expatriates
who sneer when I explain the benefits of immigration to Palestine to them. They
say this is the political party spirit and that they have suffered enough in Ger-
many, they don’t need lectures … Some women in particular get very angry
when they are urged to leave Europe and retire to the uncultivated backwater of
Asia’.75
Schick’s Zionist philosophy was influenced by the romantic nationalist idea
of Jewish immigration to Palestine that prioritized the construction of the new
homeland over any kind of individual difficulty – such as people’s emotional
and cultural bonds with their former home country. In this attitude and position
Schick represented and propagated the Zionist line of his comrades, especially
Aleksandar Licht. The same was true in Schick’s intellectual worldview: the task
of the German Jewish refugees was to fulfil the goals of the Zionists. There was
no room in the public discourse of the male Zionist world for the refugees’ per-
sonal destinies, traumas and problems.
In November 1933, then ethnologist and psychologist Vera Stein-Ehrlich,
publicly intervened in this one-sided debate with a series of articles titled Prob-
73 NSK, Lavoslav Schick, R 7883a): Letter to Gustav Cohn, 14 November 1933; Letter to Julius
Dessauer, 4 May 1933; Letter to Sally Guggenheim, 25 September 1933; Letter to the Jüdische
Rundschau, 5 October 1933.
74 Speech by Lavoslav Schick in Banja Luka on 13 May 1933, excerpts printed in Židov (19 May
1933): 7.
75 NSK, R7883a): Letter to the Jüdische Rundschau of 5 October 1933.
‘What Will Become of the German Jews?’ 67
lems of Jewish Emigration. She depicted the situation of the refugees in a far
more differentiated way and with a degree of humanism. She unequivocally
criticized the male Zionists’ general, publicly propounded view that German-
Jewish refugees should immediately travel to Palestine and help build the Jew-
ish state there. Stein-Ehrlich wrote, ‘The tendency of pushing emigrants across
a border somewhere as quickly as possible is not even a solution for the present
because … all the emigration centres are doing the same thing at the same time
… it is not possible to hide 60,000 Jews.’76 Stein-Ehrlich argued in a manner
completely different from the way the Zionists had done up to that point. She
also deliberately used other terminology, consistently describing the Jewish ref-
ugees as ‘emigrants’. In the first part of her series she focused on the psycholog-
ical condition of the expelled people. She described their former life in Germany
as well-regulated and usually under comfortable circumstances, and she
pointed out that these people were now trying to keep their pride and fight so-
cial decline. By writing this, Stein-Ehrlich offered a different perspective on the
Jewish refugees. At the same time, she criticized the majority position of the lo-
cal Yugoslav Jews – and explicitly women involved in welfare associations –
who kept saying, ‘we have to do something’, but hardly did anything at all. In-
stead they even accused the new arrivals of provoking anti-Semitic attitudes in
the resident population by worsening the economic situation, and speaking
German, which meant spreading German culture. It was also said that the refu-
gees lacked Jewish consciousness, that they were not Zionists and had therefore
not known how to oppose the Nazis. Stein-Ehrlich called on the indigenous
Jews of Yugoslavia to help the refugees unconditionally and not to make the
importance of anti-Semitism and Palestine a condition of their willingness to
help. She argued that although these questions were historically linked, the
main point at that moment was to prevent the emigrants from becoming unor-
ganized, unpolitical lumpenproletariat – she used the German word ‘Lumpen-
proletarier’.77
In the second article of the series, Stein-Ehrlich tackled the problem of anti-
Semitism in Yugoslavia and Germany. She warned against the adoption of eco-
nomically determined anti-Semitism and, above all, the Nazi slogans that facili-
tated this. In the same article, she made it clear that ‘Palestine cannot be the
solution for the lives of this entire generation’ because the settlement and con-
struction of the new Jewish nation would occur at a far slower rate than every-
76 Vera Stein-Ehrlich, ‘Problemi jevrejske emigracije I’ [Problems with Jewish emigration I],
Židov (3 November 1933): 3.
77 Ibid.
68 Marija Vulesica
body imagined. ‘Not to recognize this fact would mean closing our eyes to the
real difficulties’.78
Vera Stein-Ehrlich’s contribution to the refugee debate and all matters re-
lated to their arrival was more coherent and realistic than anything before it. As
a woman and an academic, she called to both Zionists and non-Zionists to begin
by first developing empathy and understanding for the emigrants, to demon-
strate solidarity and willingness to help, and not to further burden them with
the issue of emigration to Palestine.79 At the same time, she clearly demon-
strated to the Zionists that, from a distance, the real conditions in Palestine cer-
tainly looked different than the desired image.
It is difficult to estimate the impact of her arguments within the Zionist
movement. Examining the arguments and demands made by the Zionists in the
following years, however, confirms that they remained loyal to their idealized
concept that the task of the refugees was to re-establish the Jewish homeland in
Palestine. Stein-Ehrlich’s proposals and observation came from everyday prac-
tice and her knowledge of the emotional state of the individual, knowledge that
was, in part, scientifically based. The ‘great’ intellectual debates, contributions
and ideas of the years 1933 and 1934 simply overlooked the everyday experience
of people – in this case that of Jewish people.
Conclusions
What will become of the German Jews? This question, which Yugoslav Zionists
were faced with from 1933 onward, and which resonated with sincere concern
for their Jewish brothers and sisters, not only stimulated solidarity and a will-
ingness to help within Yugoslav Jewry, but also stimulated debates and made
demands on the German Jews. Only a few weeks after the Nazis came to power
in Germany, several hundred Jewish refugees from the German Reich arrived in
Yugoslavia – mostly in Croatia. Local Jewish communities and Zionist organiza-
tions very quickly began to create an infrastructure; a number of aid committees
were formed and many individuals joined the effort to help the newly-arrived
refugees. The personal distress of these people, as well as the political and cul-
tural dimension of the Nazi policies toward Jews, conditioned and fostered a de-
78 Vera Stein-Ehrlich, ‘Problemi jevrejske emigracije II’ [Problems with Jewish emigration II],
Židov (10 November 1933): 5.
79 Vera Stein-Ehrlich, ‘Problemi jevrejske emigracije III’ [Problems with Jewish emigration III],
Židov (17 November 1933): 3; Stein-Ehrlich, in Židov (1 December 1933): 5. She emphasized
psychological aspects of emigration mainly in the third and fourth parts of her series of articles.
‘What Will Become of the German Jews?’ 69
bate within Yugoslav Zionism. During 1933, Zionist publications – primarily the
flagship journal Židov – published countless articles, news items, reports, anal-
yses and speeches on the topic of Jewish refugees and the necessary, adequate
response of the German, European and Yugoslav Jewry to Nazism. In the
present article, I have outlined the debate, particularly the Zionist position on
these questions. Using three selected biographies, little known to researchers
thus far, I have presented the essential standpoints of Yugoslav Zionism as they
were expressed in the period immediately after the Nazis seized power. The Yu-
goslav Zionist leader and intellectual pioneer Aleksandar Licht was initially
concerned with defining the Zionist position in relation to Nazism and anti-
Semitism. His idea of a defensive position was based on Jewish self-assertion
and he urged the Jews to be self-confident and proud. Licht’s ideas became sol-
idified as the Nazi measures against German Jews became increasingly tangible.
The evident catastrophe of the German Jews – as it was described – evoked a
specific response: Licht defined the construction of the Jewish homeland in Pal-
estine as the clear goal of the European Jews. In his view, the possession of a
homeland and international acknowledgement of the Jewish nation would be
the protective shield needed to provide security for the Jews who were perse-
cuted and victimized by discrimination. Licht thought the Jewish refugees
should also fall in line with this overarching idea. For Licht and his Zionist com-
rades, Palestine was the utopia that could save them. It was a dream that would
come true with hard work and Jewish self-assertion. The majority of Jewish refu-
gees in Yugoslavia, however, saw Palestine as a utopia that was too far removed
from their present living situation, but their doubts and their individuality were
not addressed in Licht’s public speeches and contributions. His convictions and
explications were designed for European Jewry as a whole. He had frequently
warned people not to dismiss events in Germany as isolated or to think they
were safe from anti-Jewish policies. In light of the events of the 1930s and
1940s, and given our knowledge of the radicalization of Nazi policies against
the Jews which culminated in the systematic extermination of a large part of the
European Jewry, Licht’s standpoints and warnings could be interpreted as wise,
prescient and realistic. He did not take his own warnings and demands to heart,
however. He survived the Holocaust in exile in Switzerland. Only his mortal re-
mains reached Palestine in 1955.
Lavoslav Schick – Licht’s comrade from Zagreb – maintained a position that
was very close to that of Licht. Despite his great commitment to the refugees,
Schick seems to have had relatively little interest in their actual, individual sit-
uations. Instead, in his public speeches and private correspondence he, too, de-
manded unconditionally that the Jewish people who had been forced to leave
Germany should travel onward to Palestine. Like Aleksandar Licht, Schick ad-
70 Marija Vulesica
Milán Füst1 kept a diary from 1905 to 1944. The irregular entries are particularly
valuable not only because they were written by one of the most important au-
thors of modern Hungarian literature, but above all, because they give us a
highly-educated intellectual’s perspective on a historical period that continues
to have a profound impact on the political and cultural mentality of the country
even today. Studying the diary brings us into the domain of microhistory. Füst
belonged to the social class that expressed itself most frequently – as opposed
to the silent masses of society. And yet, macro-historical approaches have
taught us precious little about the conceptual world of individuals and motives
for change in individual mentalities even among the upper classes of Hungarian
society. The value of Füst’s text for this kind of microhistorical research is diffi-
cult to overestimate, since ‘we know very little about what contemporaries in
the twentieth century noticed about the processes and changes that influenced
their lives and how they interpreted the historical events that subsequently
came to be regarded by posterity as symbolic.’2
Modern historical research has been characterized by a turn to the history
of experience, compelling historians to begin focusing on those types of sources
‘that allow the most direct access possible to individual and collective interpre-
tations, evaluations and social knowledge’.3 Diaries, however, are a highly
nuanced form in which psychological, aesthetic, and socio-historical points of
view can hardly be separated from one another. In investigating this form, we
have to reckon with the continuing presence and intersection of these different
perspectives, which, for this reason, poses a considerable methodological chal-
lenge, thus making room for interdisciplinary interpretations.
1 Milán Füst (1888–1967) was one of the most important authors of twentieth-century modern
Hungarian literature. He debuted as a poet in 1909 in the literary journal Nyugat, and his work
was praised for its singular voice. He went on to publish significant works as a dramatist and
author. His most successful work was The Story of My Wife, a novel that has been translated
into more than forty languages. Following the publication of the French edition by Gallimard in
1967, Füst was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
2 Gábor Gyáni, Budapest—túl jón és rosszon [Budapest: beyond good and evil] (Budapest: Nap-
világ, 2008), 7.
3 Winfried Schulze, ed., Sozialgeschichte, Alltagsgeschichte, Micro-Historie (Göttingen: Van-
denhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 9.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-004
72 Gábor Schein
This chapter will focus on the ways in which the diary constructs the figures
of the ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewess’, and the concept of ‘Jewishness’. The ethno-typical and
racist-biological symbolism used to construct the figure of ‘the Jew’ or ‘the Jew-
ess’ played a significant role in Hungarian cultural and political life. I follow
Bryan Cheyette in placing the word in quotes: in his book Constructions of ‘the
Jew’ in English Literature and Society (1993) and in an article in the volume Mod-
ernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’ (1998), Cheyette treated the notion of ‘the Jew’ as a
social-psychological and cultural construct,4 placing the word in quotes to
avoid essentializing use. Cheyette’s aim was to understand the representations
of the ‘Jewish race’ formulated by proponents of the liberalism predominant
during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, meticulously analyzing works by au-
thors like Matthew Arnold, James Joyce, George Eliot, John Buchan, George Ber-
nard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, and T. S. Eliot. In his analysis, Cheyette used lan-
guage that aimed to break the traumatic silence following the Holocaust,5 com-
bining perspectives from cultural theory, historiography, and discourse analy-
sis. Bracketing moral judgments, he was able to demonstrate how representa-
tions of ‘the Jew’ and ‘the Jewess’ mobilized entire systems of political discourse
such as those of imperialism or socialism, and that they thus represented the
conscious and unconscious political and cultural priorities of individual au-
thors. Works that consciously grapple with the representation of ‘Jewishness’ or
place it centre stage – such as the figure of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s
epochal novel Ulysses – simultaneously take on all the important questions of
nationalism, religiosity and bourgeois liberalism.6
With the use of scare quotes inspired by Cheyette, I would like to distance
myself especially from the assumption that the meaning of the words ‘Jewish’,
‘Jew’ and ‘Jewess’ is static and given, and that who should be regarded as a
‘Jew’ or ‘Jewess’ is a trans-historical constant. The socio-political view of the
‘Jew’, the ‘Jewess’ and ‘Jewishness’ as the ‘other’ has its origins in the age of
4 Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Represen-
tations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xi. ‘In an attempt to redress
the balance, this book demonstrates the extent to which race-thinking about Jews was, in fact,
a key ingredient in the emerging cultural identity of modern Britain. From Matthew Arnold’s
Culture and Anarchy onwards, I have located Semitic racial representations at the centre of
literary production and more widespread social and political discourses. Instead of a colonial
or genocidal history of racism and antisemitism, this book is at pains to show the way in which
racialized constructions of Jews and other “races” were at the heart of domestic liberalism.’
5 Ibid., xii. ‘I wish to use a language that is generally enabling and not morally loaded. Instead
of the uneasy silence that currently surrounds the subject of this book, I have tried to develop
ways of reading that allow other literary critics and cultural theorists to discuss the question of
racial representations in different social and political contexts.’
6 Ibid., 267.
‘Jewishness’ in the Diary of Milán Füst 73
7 Marvin Perry and Fredrick M. Schwitzer, Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the
Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 74.
8 Andrei Oişteanu, Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East-European Cul-
tures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 1–7.
9 Rhoda Rosen, ‘Die Inszenierung des jüdischen Körpers: Zwischen Identifikation und Projek-
tion’, in ‘Der schejne Jid’: Das Bild des ‘jüdischen Körpers’ in Mythos und Ritual, ed. Sander L.
Gilman, Robert Jütte and Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz (Vienna: Picus Verlag, 1998), 11–22.
74 Gábor Schein
another person in order to injure it, control it, or take possession of it.10 Klein’s
concept, which continues today to provoke a sustained and quite diverse recep-
tion in the various psychoanalytic schools,11 has been taken from its roots in the
psychoanalysis of small children and made fruitful in other domains of psychol-
ogy and even social psychology. Here, as well, the issue is the social-psycholog-
ical phenomenon of anti-Semitism.
Psychoanalytic developmental psychology has succeeded in bridging indi-
vidual and social psychology. Understanding anti-Semitism as a defence mech-
anism for social conflicts is, of course, not a new idea, and one of the key as-
pects of this notion is that the defence mechanism is bound up with the ideal-
ization of power. Arno Gruen has drawn a direct connection between a trau-
matic childhood and the subsequent readiness to aggression:
It has often been presumed that childhood for many people occurs traumatically. [Otto]
Rank thought that it was the trauma of birth. Melanie Klein assumed there was an evil
mother; [Joseph] Rheingold even saw a death complex in mothers, as they themselves
feared their own mothers. However, what unified all of these pioneers was the attention
to the traumatization bound up with early-childhood development. And it is the idealiza-
tion of power that promotes this, that separates people from empathy and in this way,
creates a division of consciousness. This then leads to aggression, violence and murder.12
Milán Füst was very young when his father died, and thus had hardly any mem-
ories of him. When Füst spoke of his father – which he did very rarely – he re-
counted a gravely ill man, an invalid who could not be spoken to. For his entire
life, he identified as the only son of a poor widow, with whom life could easily
have become burdensome because she was always dissatisfied with him. By the
time Füst was a well-known writer and thus able to fulfil her maternal expect-
ations, she was no longer alive. Was this one reason for his self-hatred as a Jew,
or rather, for distancing his own personality from the symbolic alien, the hated
‘Jew’?
Despite the insights of psychoanalysis, I am hesitant to simplify the matter
in this way. There is no doubt, however, that identity construction always
changes most where one’s personality is forced to experience the greatest dis-
ruptions, which impede the interpretation of social space or even cause a crisis
of interpretation. Such disruptions occur, for example, when the demarcation of
‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ is no longer tenable.
Constructions of ‘Jewishness’ emerge very early in Füst’s diary and do not
change for a long time. His negative attitude toward ‘Jewishness’ is also sup-
ported by narcissism: the diary entries make clear that from the beginning, the
author’s personality exhibited a strong desire for dissimilarity and autonomy,
which can be seen in his emphatically distanced self-determination. In certain
cases, however, narcissism can also be traced back to the fear of being overpow-
ered, persecuted, tormented and destroyed by an alien, non-integrated object.
Füst always wanted to distance himself from ‘Jewishness’. Although anti-Semit-
ic stereotypes permeated Füst’s diary from the beginning, anti-Semitic laws and
the Jewish hatred that spread throughout society led to the emergence of new
figures of identification in the diary over the course of the 1930s, and these rela-
tivized the previous demarcations.
Anti-Semitism incorporated ‘the Jew’ and ‘the Jewess’ into the referential
framework of a discursive system in which individual members of ethnic groups
became carriers of ethno-typical characteristics. Increasingly influenced by Nazi
eugenics, Hungarian anti-Semitism constructed ‘Jewishness’ as an ugly and
hated social body. Anti-Semitic rhetoric and body politics also shaped the self-
perception of ‘Jews’ and ‘Jewesses’ who often regarded themselves as flawed or
diseased.13 It will probably surprise no one that even one’s own body, ‘without
which a person would not exist and which thus belongs entirely to that person,
13 Sander L. Gilman, ‘“Die Rasse ist nicht schön” – “Nein, wir Juden sind keine hübsche
Rasse!” Der schöne und der häßliche Jude’, in Gilman, Jütte and Kohlbauer-Fritz, ‘Der schejne
Jid’, 57–74, here 62; Sander L. Gilman, Franz Kafka, the Jewish Patient (New York: Routledge,
1995), 5.
76 Gábor Schein
14 Hans-Jürgen Wirth, ‘Fremdenhass und Gewalt als familiäre und psychosoziale Krankheit’,
Psyche – Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen 11 (2011): 1217–44, here 1226.
15 Hans Günther, Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes (Berlin: J. F. Lehmann, 1930), 9.
16 Cited in Gilman, Franz Kafka, 106.
17 Milán Füst, Teljes Napló [Complete diary] (Budapest: Fekete Sas, 1999), vol. 1, 78.
‘Jewishness’ in the Diary of Milán Füst 77
dinner she led him to the other room. She stood naked before him: I am yours.’18
In another passage he writes:
Jews in the train, wealthy young men and a woman. All of their phrases have a clearly
sexual character. The woman spoke of a good stick with which she could have beaten her-
self. The young men amused themselves about this with Jewish levity: they sang: exhibi-
tionism and rivalry could be heard very precisely from the voices … When I entered the
compartment I found them in the midst of an operetta-like insanity. The Jewish-warped
mood and the boisterous manners of intimate society.19
Siófok was the headquarters – it was horrible to see what primitive idiots can obtain the
leader’s staff. Dr. P. J. Commissioner: he walked around the beach as if he were an army
commander. Loud, almost shouting, he gave orders like a Napoleon. He organized public
festivals and horse races and imitated the emperor. He was in his element: the Jewish fel-
low assumed power and was completely obsessed with it; he enjoyed it, posing ridicu-
lously and tastelessly. And moreover, he was deaf, like a copulating animal – one week
before the downfall he had no idea of the crisis. And the careerists around him, how odi-
ous they were.34
Until 1919, Füst’s depictions of ‘Jewishness’ stood entirely under the influence
of anti-Semitic stereotypes, which he used to separate himself from ‘Jewish-
ness’. His depictions of himself included no ‘Jewish’ character traits. For Füst,
‘the Jews’ were always ‘they’. He never included himself in a collective with
them. This is evident even in cases in which ‘the Jew’ or ‘the Jewess’ elicited
compassion from him: ‘Two Jews sit motionless on a bench. Jews from Hallstatt,
a fat man with a cap and a withered, scrawny old woman. They sit dead still
and they look straight ahead. The Jews may indeed be everywhere – I pity them
that they have to live here.’35
Despite Füst’s own heritage, ‘the Jew’ and ‘the Jewess’ embodied the alien
for him. In his diary, the alienness of ‘the Jews’ can be traced back to their pro-
vocative, often confusing placelessness. Following Merleau-Ponty, the place-
lessness of the alien means not simply that ‘the Jew’ or ‘the Jewess’ is else-
where, but that they themselves are the elsewhere,36 whereby Waldenfels em-
phasizes that ‘the alien does not represent a deficit in the sense of everything
that we do not yet know, but that awaits being known and in itself is knowable;
we are dealing here rather with an incarnate absence.’37 Merleau-Ponty’s formu-
lation of the problem can also contribute to an examination not only of psycho-
logical representations of ‘Jewishness’, but also cultural representations. In his
aforementioned work, Cheyette notes that T. S. Eliot produced a Semitic dis-
course at precisely the point at which he wanted to demarcate his poetics from
a shocking identification with the racist ‘other’.38 As we will see below, a cultur-
al-poetic concern informed Milán Füst’s response to Lajos Fülep’s critique of his
novel The Story of My Wife: ‘I belong nowhere. (Least of all to the Jewish peo-
ple.)’39
Positive remarks about ‘Jewish’ mentality and culture first appear in Füst’s
diary in October 1919.40 While there may not have been a direct connection be-
tween this and the anti-Semitic violence that followed the collapse of the Hun-
garian Soviet Republic, the two are perhaps not entirely unrelated. Even though
Füst had treated ‘the Jew’ as an alien and does not himself identify with ‘the
Jews’, several diary entries make clear that others perceived him as a ‘Jew’ and
that strangers’ eyes constructed his personality as that of a ‘Jew’.
Witnessing acts of anti-Semitic violence increasingly influenced Füst’s self-
image during the first half of the 1920s, and not only in general terms: Füst also
experienced this hatred in very concrete situations. This experience split the in-
ternal and the external aspects of his notion of the self. Expressions of anti-Sem-
itism offended Füst in an increasingly profound way because his own self was
constructed externally as a ‘Jew’, while ‘Jewishness’ played no affirmative part
at all in his own self-interpretation; his own ego arose through a demarcation
from it.
‘I had an experience unlike any before.’41 Thus begins Milán Füst’s long
and detailed narrative about what happened to him during the Romanian occu-
pation. He had wanted to go to Síp Street with a female acquaintance, but she
told him that they should avoid the area because it was too dangerous. Síp
Street is located in a district of the Budapest city centre where many poor ‘Jews’
lived. For this reason, the police frequently checked people’s identification pa-
36 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 259–60.
37 Bernhard Waldenfels, Topographie des Fremden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 26.
38 Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’, 267.
39 Milán Füst, Összegyűjtött levelek [collected letters] (Budapest: Fekete Sas, 2002), 402.
40 Füst, Teljes Napló, vol. 1, 488.
41 Ibid., vol. 1, 476.
80 Gábor Schein
pers there. However, Füst replied that there was no reason for them to be afraid,
so they proceeded unnoticed. In the meantime, the police had cordoned off a
passageway in the street, detained all of the pedestrians there, and refused to
tell them what was going to happen to them. Occurrences like this were not un-
common in Budapest at the time. However, armed Romanian soldiers suddenly
pushed into the passageway. The sound of gunshots from the upper stories of
the house could be heard. In the passageway below the Hungarian police lined
up the people who had been detained. It looked as if they were preparing to
execute them. Füst recalled:
Another policeman shouted at those who had hidden. They were beaten horribly. But they
are innocent. Without interrogation it is a pogrom! ‘You abominable dirty Jew, I’ll stomp
you to death, I’ll drink your blood.’ … A young physician asked what they actually wanted
from him; he was simply trying to go through the passageway. The same policeman hit
him over the head with an iron bar. His face was covered with blood.42
Afterwards the entire group was taken to the Romanian garrison that had been
set up in the Hotel Royal. The Hungarian policemen tried to convince the Roma-
nian officers that they had arrested Bolsheviks who had conspired against the
Romanian Army and the group was then taken to the high command. When
they arrived, the police beat them again, as did some of the gawking passers-
by. At the high command, it turned out that there were four rabbis and religious
teachers among those arrested. Fortunately, Füst’s acquaintance was released,
thus sparing her family an unpleasant scandal. The prisoners were registered as
‘Jews’ with the high command, although a number of them were ‘Christians’.
They were still in prison the next morning.
We squatted there like suffering animals – we could not even complain because no one
understood us. Several times I was filled with a boundless hatred of life: all of life seems
to be only a hopeless and arduous struggle. Why does one cling to it? – The soldiers are
coarse and harsh. They lead an animal existence. They make fun of us. Now I see how we
humans treat the poor animals.43
In the afternoon, Füst almost fainted. The Romanians insulted him by calling
him Moishi. He suddenly realized that they intended to search his house and
that his papers would certainly be scattered. He was finally interrogated in the
evening. He had to confess that he was the main organizer of the conspiracy.
They threatened that if he didn’t do it, they would send him to jail. He con-
fessed to everything that the interrogator told him to say. Then, completely un-
expectedly, he was released. On the way home, he passed by a church.
Why can’t I believe that they are doing something good when they hold their devotions?
Why does it send shivers up and down my spine? Because they bring with them hatred
from the church – the bright flame of the oil lamp irradiates ghastly eeriness – because
they transfer their egoism, the hatred of their ignorance, onto the world; they worship the
god of egoism. And not the symbol of love, Jesus.44
A long diary entry written in September 1919 shows how profoundly the experi-
ence of placelessness had permeated the author’s identity.45 Here, for the first
time, Füst raises the possibility of converting to Christianity. In the entries after
September 1919, anti-Semitic stereotypes play a less prominent role in Füst’s
self-representation, although they do not disappear entirely. When they do ap-
pear, they are in part contradictory and contain significant disruptions.46 In the
first half of the 1920s, Füst’s concrete experience of anti-Semitism also affected
his self-image and his self-determination. He was firmly convinced that he had
been fired from the economics school where he had taught from 1912 to 1921
because of an anti-Semitic campaign against him.
Direct experience of anti-Semitic violence would have made it impossible
for Füst to construct a positive self-image if he had continued to depict ‘Jewish-
ness’ on the basis of generally-accepted anti-Semitic stereotypes. Social-psycho-
logical factors are always very significant in the personality structure of a nar-
A healthy self integrates not only libidinally invested self-representations, but also ag-
gressively invested ones. In contrast to this, a grandiose self, as characterized by the nar-
cissistic personality, is incapable of such an integration of aggressively invested self-rep-
resentations and accordingly fails also to integrate libidinally and aggressively invested
object representations.47
Jews! … Jewish heritage … Today it is a blemish, as if with this word ‘Jew’ one wanted to
identify demonized, stigmatized people and their inferiority. But no one wants to be re-
minded that Jesus Christ and his apostles as well as the prophets whose sculptures stand
in the churches were Jews, yes, red-haired, Hebrew-speaking Jews! One assumes that
among the Jews living today no one comes from the line of the apostles and the prophets,
but instead descends only from those who had been enemies of Jesus and who mali-
ciously persecuted him … And that I, for example, could be an heir of King David or the
Prophet Zacharias – who thinks of this possibility? This life is incomprehensible idiocy.49
47 Otto F. Kernberg, ‘Eine zeitgenössische Interpretation von “Zur Einführung des Narziss-
mus”’, in Über Freuds ‘Zur Einführung des Narzissmus’, ed. Joseph Sandler, Ethel Spector Per-
son and Peter Fonagy (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2000), 187.
48 Sebastian Stauss, Zwischen Narzissmus und Selbsthass (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 44.
49 Füst, Teljes Napló, vol. 2, 16.
‘Jewishness’ in the Diary of Milán Füst 83
The Jewish face is characteristic … Judaism, too, must have its own character, however
inexpressible it may be, however contradictory its components are as well. Do not let
these character traits in yourself disappear … You would like to wipe away completely the
traces of your Jewish heritage in your accent and clothing… because this heritage is harm-
ful to you, because you must be ashamed of it … You regard all its manifestations as ugly.
Why? You are tied to conventions … You should remain what you are all the more so be-
cause you cannot be otherwise … do not run back and forth like a degenerate mutt.50
In this passage, Füst presumes that a person, including all of his or her charac-
teristics and behaviour, is simply the objectification of genetics. That is the ba-
sic premise of every form of racism. In perceiving himself as a ‘Jew’, Füst dis-
penses with autonomy, with the individual’s freedom of identification. This re-
sults in a crisis of self-perception: by adopting the Jewish identity provided for
him, he internalizes the norms and the conceptions of anti-Semitism even more
profoundly than before.
This charged issue of social-psychological identification also appears in
Füst’s literary works and literary relationships. We now turn to the poetic-cul-
tural parameters of the position – implied by Merleau-Ponty and Bernhard Wal-
denfels – of the incarnate absence of one’s own being. In 1930, Zsigmond Mór-
icz, one of the most important novelists in the history of Hungarian literature,
wrote an article on András Komor’s novel Fischmann S. utódai [Successors of S.
Fischmann]51 in which he argued that Komor had finally succeeded in depicting
the ‘Jewish soul’ beyond all the imposed falsehoods. The novel, Móricz contin-
ued, was of high literary quality because Komor had written about what he
knew best: ‘Hungarian literature opens its gates to you, too, when you write
about your Jewish self, and when you write about yourself you will also be able
to write better. The interest of art demands of you that you write about yourself.’
With these words, Móricz sought to provide a cultural programme for his col-
leagues of Jewish descent and to integrate them into Hungarian literature ac-
cording to a predetermined position. This misguided attempt at integration was
made more dubious by the fact that many authors and editors of modern Hun-
garian literature were ‘Jewish’ writers who, of course, had not written about
their ‘Jewish selves’ and had not published literary journals as ‘Jews’.
The article sparked a debate in Nyugat [West], an important journal of mod-
ern Hungarian literature. Milán Füst took no public position on the debate.
However, he reflected on it two years later in a diary entry. The entry also gives
us insights into the artistic dilemma and the problems of identity that inform
the poetic resolutions of his novel The Story of My Wife:52
And to pretend to me that I don’t like the present world, that I flee into the past. Why
should I take flight? Because I don’t know this world as well as a writer should know it. –
Whoever knows his surroundings well has an easy time of it. He discovers thousands of
subjects for himself. He can write about everything that he knows well. (By knowledge I
do not mean information and observations, but rather imagination capable of creating
something new on the basis of observations.) – And the Jewish author: in vain he consid-
ers an event interesting; he can’t even begin to write. He has to wait until he comes across
a subject that enables him to write the novel of worldlessness … He can engage in psycho-
logizing and philosophizing. He can also be a good stylist … Yes, he may well be that.53
As suggested above, the poetic aspects of the absence of one’s own being were
articulated most clearly at the time that Füst was completing the novel The Story
of My Wife. He finished the work in April 1942. The novel appeared in the same
year despite the fact that it was almost impossible for a Jewish author to be pub-
lished at that time. Lajos Fülep, a well-known art theorist and a close friend of
the author, wrote about the novel in several letters to Füst in April and May of
1942. Füst had sent his friend extensive reports about the most important devel-
opments in composing the novel, about the process of selecting the title, and
about how he decided on the narrator’s name. In his letter from April 20, Lajos
Fülep initially praised the novel as a remarkable accomplishment, only to pro-
ceed to sharp criticism. One important point of criticism was that the novel
spoke in the ‘language of Budapest’, which Fülep not only regarded – in accord-
ance with widespread views of the time – as degenerate, depraved, and deca-
dent; he even disputed its national character. Fülep stated quite openly that it
could not be called Hungarian. The language that one speaks in Budapest, he
continued, is a dialect of Yiddish, whose unpleasant smell he could never bear
anywhere.54 The association of an unpleasant smell with ‘Jewishness’ or, in this
case, with Yiddish was a common part of the vocabulary of coded anti-Semi-
tism. Milán Füst emphatically rejected this position. He understood the accusa-
tion clearly: as an author, he was not even capable of writing in Hungarian
without a foreign accent, to say nothing of his novel being of high aesthetic
quality. According to the literary standards of 1940s Hungary, the task of litera-
ture was to employ the Hungarian language in an exemplary way in order to
express the cultural ideals of the nation.
52 The novel was published in English as The Story of My Wife: Reminiscences of Captain Storr,
trans. Ivan Sanders with an introduction by George Konrad (New York: PAJ Publications, 1988).
53 Füst, Teljes Napló, vol. 2, 371–2.
54 Füst, Összegyűjtött levelek, 399.
‘Jewishness’ in the Diary of Milán Füst 85
In his response, Füst pointed out that he had sought to imitate the actual
living language, in which words could be used incorrectly, and that for this rea-
son one should not expect him to use language in a proper way. Füst wanted to
make absolutely clear to his friend Fülep that what the latter was hearing in the
novel was not Füst’s own language, but rather the voices of the protagonists in
the narrative. This did not mean, however, that Füst’s work was lacking in
beauty and aesthetic quality in comparison to traditional models. Furthermore,
he accused Fülep of failing to hear ‘the wonderful melody of the Hungarian lan-
guage’ in the novel. Füst believed he had composed ‘veritable sonnets, and in-
deed the sonnets of the Hungarian language’.55
The second point of Fülep’s criticism appears to have nothing to do with
the first. ‘A private matter between two people is not sufficient to fill out the
form of the novel,’56 Fülep argued. He claimed that a world full of ephemeral
things and particularities had to populate the background, while in the fore-
ground the protagonists of the novel are made recognizable as contemporary
psychological entities. Fülep’s expectations were derived from the characteris-
tics of bourgeois-realist novels. Fülep did, however, connect the lack of objec-
tivity to the issue of placelessness, one of the key themes of the work.57 Füst’s
response brought together Lajos Fülep’s and Zsigmond Móricz’s expectations of
a novel, thereby giving a completely new poetic meaning to the phenomenon of
the lack of objectivity, an aesthetic choice that was intimately bound up with
Füst’s personal identity:
For decades I believed that the major form of a novel should sprout up from the ground
upon which the writer lives, that it is therefore the task of a novel to reflect the world, to
depict the society from which he comes. It is therefore entirely appropriate – Gogol writes
about Russians, Flaubert speaks about the French, and so on. But what can someone do
who has always been alone, whose gaze has never been directed outwards, who has al-
ways had only his own internal world, who belongs nowhere, from whose mouth loca-
tion-specific particularities would have a very bad ring. I belong nowhere. (Least of all to
the Jewish people).58
55 Ibid., 400.
56 Lajos Fülep’s letter of 20 April 1942 to Milán Füst, in Szellemek utcája, ed. Imre Kis Pintér
(Budapest: Nap Kiadó, 1998), 148.
57 Milán Füst’s response to Lajos Fülep’s letter: ‘It is remarkable, my dear friend, how easily
this work has passed you by without you noticing it.’
58 Füst, Összegyűjtött levelek, 402.
86 Gábor Schein
ical force, both in Nazi Germany and in other European countries, and anti-Se-
mitic violence committed by common people became an everyday occurrence.
It provided the possibility and the platform from which to humiliate one’s fel-
low human being both spiritually and psychologically, and it greatly disrupted
personal relationships. In his diary, Füst increasingly capitulated to the prosaic
practices of anti-Semitism and resigned himself to a world open to evil and the
psychological and spiritual degradation of others at the hands of racial theory.59
Füst was well aware that the ‘Jew’ and the ‘Jewess’ are constructed through so-
cial stereotypes by those who view their bearers as ‘other’. At the time, anti-
Semitism was also the official policy of a state that denied ‘Jews’, as inferior
people, legal guarantees to defend their rights, their property, and their very
lives. Füst relates the structure of the anti-Semitic public – which denied the
object of its hatred the freedom to lead a civil existence – to himself as if the
ontological premises of the Kantian understanding of the autonomous subject
still had binding validity. For this reason, there is nothing for him to do but try
to wipe away the ‘Jew’ from himself. He no longer wanted to be a Jew either
internally or externally. In the oppressive environment in which he was living,
however, this was impossible:
If I observe myself carefully and I am honest, I must admit that I even pay attention to the
face of the policeman at the streetcar station to see whether or not he regards me as a Jew.
I try to make an expression on my face such that he cannot despise me, and I attempt to
speak Hungarian as correctly as I can. I want to evoke sympathy and compassion, and I
would like to assuage the hatred of the world against me, even that of the simplest peo-
ple – I have come this far.60
59 Füst, Teljes Napló, vol. 2, 426. ‘And when someone on the street spits in my eyes, I no
longer think that I have equal rights, that it was therefore an extraordinary insult. Previously
I would have prayed to vengeful gods because I thought that I was a Hungarian, that I thus had
the same need for dignity, recognition, and proper treatment as all of my fellow humans. But
today? It is a world movement. And as far as its injustice is concerned, I have gotten used to the
fact that this world is made up of few persecutors and many victims … Why should the fate of
the Jews surprise me? – There is only one thing about my behaviour that I cannot affirm: that I
am prepared to understand anti-Semitism and to accept that degenerate Judaism deserves to be
rejected a little.’
60 Ibid., vol. 2, 457.
61 Füst, Összegyűjtött levelek, 332.
‘Jewishness’ in the Diary of Milán Füst 87
count of the event. The baptism, which Füst prepared rather festively in accord-
ance with the occasion, was a great disappointment to him. Striking is the way
he describes the priest’s use of the stereotypes of anti-Semitic body politics:
During the preparations I was somewhat touched, as the New Testament was the most
important book of my youth … The face of the priest today, however, was so fat; the entire
man was so fleshy and thick, almost unclean and grey. His face was avaricious, his behav-
iour insidiously submissive … And all the others who were present there! The poor peo-
ple!62
The baptism could not prevent Füst’s psychological collapse.63 His soul gave
way in the end: ‘There are tiny plants on the meadow’, he wrote in his diary at
the end of 1938:
They manage to survive thanks to all kinds of intrigues … – Look, you Jews, that was your
fate, to engage in shady tricks and business deals in the ghetto because everyone else was
ashamed to perform them … Now the Germans have made this impossible as well … You
are probably supposed to die … But today I say it is not worth preserving this hybrid char-
acter at such a heavy cost and serving as a target for human vileness because of your spe-
cial position.64
Today I say already that the Jews are to be exterminated. Because of this fate! I hear of gas
chambers near Dresden, where they were transported to die due to the will of a single
man. And here? In their own country they were despised and hounded … and now the
Jews, as the most important enemy, will be eradicated from the world … Like a hunted
animal – everywhere … Why exist in this way? Oh, if only this minute lay behind me!65
This was one of the last entries in Füst’s diary. In the literary works he com-
posed between 1905 and 1944, he hardly reflected at all on the part of his inter-
nal history alluded to here. Even the diary disappeared during the occupation
of Budapest and Füst thought it had been lost. The Füst family home, a nice
villa in Buda, was hit by a bomb and almost completely destroyed. In the
pauses between air raids the isolated remains of the building were looted.
Everything of value was taken. At the time, Füst was living with the relatives of
his wife in Budapest, and it was almost impossible to travel across the Danube
from one side of the city to the other. The collapsed bridge frames jutted out of
the river up toward the gloomy skies. Füst experienced the painful lack of per-
sonal solidarity. He wrote to Fülep on 12 May 1945:
Today it no longer matters how it happened; the only fact that counts is that the world let
me perish. No word, no voice, no compassion reached me; no friends, no enemies who
succeeded in surviving the difficulties; no fellow authors asked me if I was still alive. And
that is a great lesson.66
Milán Füst and his wife survived the Holocaust. The diary entries were discov-
ered again only decades later. The suitcase in which the dairy had been placed
was returned, but the author never opened it. Not once after the Second World
War did Füst write about the ‘Jewish’ side of his personal and social identity.
During the 1950s and 60s, questions of personal identity were not discussed in
public in Hungary. There was no language for them.
Few historians would deny that ‘Jewish Communism’, a variant of the ‘Jewish World Con-
spiracy’, has been one of the most powerful and destructive political myths in early-twen-
tieth century Europe.1
1 André Gerrits, The Myth of Jewish Communism: A Historical Interpretation (Brussels: PIE Peter
Lang, 2009), 9.
2 The ‘bourgeois radicals’ were a group of radical intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth
century whose members later formed the Sociological Society. See Attila Pók, A magyarországi
radikális demokrata ideológia kialakulása. A ‘Huszadik Század’ társadalomelmélete 1900–1907
[The formation of radical democratic ideology in Hungary: ‘Twentieth Century’ social theory
1900–1907] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990).
3 The Galileo Circle was founded in 1908 by radical and leftist students at Budapest University.
It was also a cultural and scholarly movement supported by workers and high-school students.
4 György Litván, ‘Szellemi progresszió a századelőn’ [Intellectual progressiveness at the begin-
ning of the 20th century], in Zsidók a Magyar társadalomban, ed. Géza Komoróczy (Pozsony:
Kalligram, 2015), 633–42.
5 The leading functionaries of the Republic of Councils did not view themselves as Jews of
course, but the non-Jewish environment perceived them as such.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-005
92 Eszter Gantner
tor Karády6 and Enzo Traverso,7 the radical Jewish intelligentsia at the turn of
the twentieth century was drawn to socialist ideas, social democracy and com-
munism because they offered an alternative to marginalized Jewish intellectuals
who found themselves on the periphery of Hungarian society. Walter Pietsch8
and Michael Löwy9 asked if it was the ‘messianic’ legacy of Judaism manifesting
itself in ‘reformist’ and ‘revolutionary’ ambitions. William McCagg and Hans Di-
eter Hellige,10 on the other hand, advocated the theory that the phenomenon
was explained primarily by a father-son conflict, i.e. the conflict between a lib-
eral, assimilated, well-off generation of fathers and their sons who (at the turn
of the century) rebelled against their fathers’ success by turning to radicalism.
Still others, such as György Litván and to some extent Enzo Traverso, focused
on the marginal social position of aspiring Jewish intellectuals and, following
Hannah Arendt, looked deeper into the historical causes of this.11 More recent
research, by contrast, tends to ignore this aspect completely. As André Gerrits
put it: ‘given the impact of Jewish Communism, remarkably little research has
been conducted on the subject.’12
As different as these answers and explanatory models may be, they all over-
lap on one point, at least in the older literature: all the historians cited above
construe Judaism as an independent and homogeneous entity. It is from this
conception that they approach the initial question using the terms, ‘Judaism’,
‘Jewishness’ at the turn of the twentieth century, and ‘assimilation’ as starting
points for their argumentation. A different picture emerges, however, when the
basic question is inverted, as Stanislaw Krajewski has done: ‘the correct ques-
tion is … Why was communism so attractive to Jews?’13
Taking this question as a starting point, this essay will attempt to provide
some kind of answer to this complex question by reconstructing and reflecting
on the biography and selected works of Béla Balázs.
14 Béla Balázs, Die Jugend eines Träumers (Berlin: Das Arsenal Verlag, 1949), 183
15 Béla Balázs, Napló 1903–1914 [Diary 1903–1914], vol. 1 (Budapest: Gondolat, 1982), 490.
16 Balázs, Die Jugend eines Träumers, 165.
17 Eötvös College was founded in 1895 by physician Baron Lóránd Eötvös after the model of
the École normale supérieure.
94 Eszter Gantner
famous composer Béla Bartók. The three of them went on a number of excur-
sions around Szeged with the aim of ‘collecting’ folk songs. These excursions
left a deep impression on Balázs and were later incorporated into his semi-auto-
biographical novels, Impossible People and The Youth of a Dreamer. In a posi-
tion paper about the question of belonging, written in the Soviet Union and un-
published, he recalled: ‘No music could be more rooted in the soul of a people
than Zoltán Kodály’s in the Hungarian.’18
Balázs soon became well known in Budapest circles of the progressive
movement,19 having contacts to both the Sociological Society20 as well as to The
Eight21 and the Galileo Circle.22 His success continued in the 1910s. Two of his
plays were set to music by Béla Bartók and were performed in the opera,23 books
of his poetry24 were published and reviewed in Nyugat [West],25 his fairy tales26
appeared in Nyugat, and his play Doctor Margit Szelpal27 was performed in the
national theatre. In his autobiographical sketches, he later reflected (in the
third person) on his role as an ambassador of modernity, or even as the ‘em-
bodiment’ of modernity: ‘besides being considered the first so-called ‘modern
playwright’ in Hungary, Béla Balázs was also one of the leading and most re-
spected Hungarian poets.’28 Balázs had ties to virtually all the movements of
Hungarian modernism, his network – reconstructed using the names in his dia-
ry – ranged from The Eight to Lajos Kassák’s, artist group, Ma [Today]. As a high
school teacher, however, he was just as active in the progressive teachers’ asso-
ciation as he was in the Freemasons. This network was not just centred in Buda-
pest but extended to Berlin, where his contacts, as of 1906, included the likes of
Georg Simmel. Balázs lived in Berlin for one year, from 1906 to 1907, studying
18 Unpublished manuscript, Balázs estate in the archives of the Hungarian Academy of Sci-
ences (MTA), Budapest, call no.: Ms. 5024/2, p. 3.
19 See Eszter Gantner, Budapest–Berlin: Die Koordinaten einer Emigration (Stuttgart: Steiner,
2011), 177.
20 Ibid., 178.
21 Ibid., 178.
22 Ibid., 179.
23 The opera Bluebeard’s Castle was based on the libretto Kékszakállú [Bluebeard, 1911] by
Béla Balázs and premiered in 1918; the ballet The Wooden Prince premiered in Budapest in 1917.
24 Béla Balázs, Trisztán hajóján [On Tristan’s Ship] (Gyoma: Kner I., 1916).
25 György Lukács, ‘Megjegyzések Balázs Béla új verseiről’ [Comments on the new poems by
Béla Balázs], Nyugat 2 (1916): 751–759.
26 Béla Balázs, Halálos fiatalság [Deadly Youth] (Gyoma: Kner, 1917).
27 Ibid.
28 Béla Balázs, Einige biographische Fakten. Unpublished manuscript, Balázs estate in the
MTA archives, Ms. 5020/145, p. 2.
The New Type of Internationalist 95
with the help of a state scholarship of a thousand crowns per month.29 He de-
scribed his first encounter with the city in his diary entry of 22 October 1906:
My room is one and a half paces wide and six and a half paces long. … I’m struggling.
Foreign noises, foreign lights … unknown droning, flames glowing through fog and
smoke, a giant riptide. Even the large buildings are giant brown surging waves of stone. …
I must overcome and master all of this.30
Balázs achieved what he set out to do. He soon belonged to the inner circle of
philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel, who supervised his dissertation on
the aesthetics of death.31 Balázs, like many of his contemporaries, was not only
impressed by Simmel’s human qualities, but also by his erudition and rhetorical
brilliance.
Finally I have the opportunity to meet people steeped in hyper-cultivation, intellectual re-
finement, aestheticism and symbolism – and at Simmel’s I can even keep company with
them at his private lectures on the ‘philosophy of art’. He holds them in his apartment,
and only admits ten [students], who along with his wife and some female doctor make up
his audience. … Simmel is an exceptionally interesting man with a wonderfully subtle re-
ceptivity. … The thoughts he expresses are delicate and surprising.32
The fact that both men were of Jewish descent and may have had similar experi-
ences of being Jewish was probably not openly discussed between them.33 Their
experiences could have indeed been similar, since both the Simmel and Balázs
families had turned their backs on religious Judaism, a phenomenon described
by Oszkár Jászi in his biographical sketches published in 1955.34 Jászi, the
founder of the Sociological Society at the turn of the century, and one of the
most important political thinkers of the bourgeois radicals in Budapest, had no
ties to Judaism as a child. His Jewish ancestry was even kept secret from him.
Like Simmel and Balázs, he was raised in the ‘spirit of the Enlightenment’ and
the ideals of Goethe and Schiller, an intellectual space which left no room for
Judaism. György Lukács reported having similar experiences. In this respect Ba-
lázs’ conversion seems logical. In 1913 he married a woman from a wealthy as-
29 Balázs shared the one-year scholarship with composer Zoltán Kodály, who wasn’t studying
at the university. See Hilda Bauer, Emlékeim [My Memories] (Budapest: MTA Filozófiai Intézet,
1985), 19.
30 Balázs, Napló, 355.
31 Balázs’ dissertation was published in 1907 under the title Halálesztétika [The Aesthetics of
Death].
32 Balázs, Napló, 365.
33 There is no mention of it in Balázs’ diary.
34 Oszkár Jászi, ‘Emlékeimből, szülőföldemen’ [From My Memories], in Jászi Oszkár publicisz-
tikája, ed. György Litván, (Budapest: Magvető 1982).
96 Eszter Gantner
similated Jewish family, Edit Hajós, and together they converted to Catholicism.
Whereas Lukács viewed this step as a purely ‘administrative’ measure35 (he con-
verted to Protestantism), Balázs endeavoured to explain his decision as some-
thing emotional: ‘I did it out of conviction. If you must have a religious affilia-
tion, then this one was the most sympathetic to me.’36 He was nonetheless
aware of his ambivalent situation:
I’ve been baptized, changed my name and gotten married. I’ve entered a new skin. I’m
now Roman Catholic and my official name is Béla Balázs. … The baptism has brought me
no advantages. Only disadvantages. The Jews are angry with me, and the ‘Christians’ still
consider me little more than a Jew. My brother has even lost his Jewish scholarship be-
cause of it.37
35 See György Lukács, Gelebtes Denken: Eine Autobiografie im Dialog, eds, István Eörsi and
Erzsébet Vezér (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981).
36 Balázs, Napló, 602–603.
37 Ibid., 602–3.
38 Ibid., 604.
39 Béla Balázs, Menj és szenvedj te is! [Go and suffer too!], Nyugat 1 (1915): 13.
40 Ibid., 13.
41 Béla Balázs, Lélek a háborúban [Soul in the war] (Gyoma: Kner I., 1916).
42 Béla Balázs: Napló 1914–1922 [Diary Vol. 2], (Budapest 1982), 164.
The New Type of Internationalist 97
once again embraced the idea of internationalism as his true home, which he
had often pondered before in his diaries. ‘They say that, in general, wars
strengthen the spirit of nationalism and chauvinism. I’m convinced that this
war will have the opposite effect. … After this war, the time will come for me to
found the sect of the internationalist spiritual worldview.’43 This, combined
with his newly experienced disappointment and rejection, resulted in the pro-
gramme he had formulated for himself in August 1916: ‘I have no ‘nationalist’
hopes anymore. Nothing will become of me here. I have no nation/nationality
anymore. Europe is my nation/nationality.’44
This ambivalence and rejection, which can also be found in other contem-
porary Jewish biographies, was reinforced by a renewed interest in the ‘Jewish
question’ during the war years. This public debate fostered a sense of unease
towards Judaism and one’s own ‘Jewishness’, as a 1917 survey in the periodical
Huszadik Század [Twentieth century]45 shows. The editors of the magazine, one
of the most important organs of the Hungarian progressives, surveyed about
150 intellectuals – politicians, artists, scientists and leading academics – asking
them to answer the following questions as representatives of an elite social
group: is there a Jewish question in Hungary, and if there is one what do you
think is at its core? What are the reasons for the Jewish question in Hungary?
Which phenomena of Hungarian society, which social relationships, institu-
tions, characteristics and customs of Hungarian Jews and/or Gentiles play a role
in the formation of the Jewish question? What do you think is the solution to
the Jewish question in Hungary? Which social and legal reforms do you consid-
er necessary?
The answers were a representative cross-section, both socially and in terms
of this discourse. They not were not only a compendium of the existing argu-
ments and the opinions current in public debate with respect to the Jewish
question, they also offered a picture of the varied ideas concerning the essence
of Judaism and the interpretation of Jewishness in Jewish society. The respond-
ents were, of course, for the most part ‘successful’ and well known Jewish intel-
lectuals (i.e. assimilated and Hungarian-speaking), but their responses still
gave an impression of how varied their identities and self-images were. Anna
Lesznai, one of Béla Balázs’ closest friends and an important figure in the Sun-
day Circle, can be cited here as an example. Her written response contained
such terms as ‘cultural Jew’, ‘Jewish psyche’, and ‘Jewish nervousness’ – terms
that, to her mind, adequately described the precarious status of ‘cultural Jews’.
She felt acutely that the cultural Jew, who had left the ghetto and embraced the
culture of mainstream society, had nonetheless still not arrived. This ‘nervous-
ness rooted in insecurity’ was, in her opinion, the specific quality of the assimi-
lated Jew. Lesznai wrote about this existence between two cultures, between
two dispositions:
In the dense pipe smoke of respected ‘gentlemen’, those who went hunting and talked
about politics, I, an eight-year-old, was the ‘little Hungarian aristocratic child’ who grew
up in a patriotic atmosphere, nay, much more – as far as I was capable of absorbing it
unconsciously at all – with the ‘sentiments of the ruling class’. And, at the same time, in
the Budapest home of my religious Jewish grandparents. Their strict rules, the old man
with the white beard who observed the prohibitions of the Day of Atonement, were also
part of my mental inventory. Fasting on Yom Kippur and Good Friday were entirely com-
patible in my mind. The tolling bells of the Catholic Church regulated my prayers.46
The answers to this survey clearly indicate that the universal belief in the suc-
cess of assimilation had begun to falter.47 The uncertainty about one’s alle-
giance and social status was becoming more and more pronounced, especially
for the generation born around the turn of the century.48 The Jewish question
and the question of identity was not only to be found in personal diaries like
those of Béla Balázs or his close companion the artist and writer Anna Lesznai;
it was also a matter of heated debate within the Sunday Circle. This is evident
in the frequently-quoted diary entries of Balázs from 1913, referring to the ‘Has-
sidic’ books of Martin Buber discussed at the Sunday Circle: The Tales of Rabbi
Nachman (1906) and The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1908). ‘Gyuri [György Lu-
kács] has discovered the Jew in himself and openly accepts it! The search for his
ancestors. The Hassidic sects. Baal Shem.’49
Balázs and his friends were under the influence of the Europe-wide New
Kantian movement and the new, romantic-mystical ideologies. Aware of their
‘conflicting nature’ – consciously converted but still ‘not belonging’ – they cre-
ated a spiritual home for themselves in the form of the Sunday Circle or, as Lu-
kács called it, ‘romantic anti-capitalism’.50
of backgrounds and cultural influences and a varied social status, but were
bound together by their sympathies, friendship, and sometimes marital ties.
Their lives as intellectuals, which for many of them was linked to an ambivalent
relationship to their own Jewishness, also brought these individuals together.
Béla Balázs’ guests came from his own circle of friends.54 The topics they
discussed were usually of a philosophical nature, in keeping with the spirit of
German idealism. It did not remain a closed circle of friends for long, however,
and was not just devoted to idealistic themes, e.g. the possibility of re-founding
a total metaphysics;55 rather, its members wanted to spread their ideals and
ideas of high culture, using their networks to reach a wider audience. In the
spring of 1917 the circle established the Free School of the Humanities, with the
aim of spreading a new philosophical spiritualism and metaphysical idealism.56
In the year of its founding, the school had presentations, among other things,
on the following subjects: dramaturgy (Béla Balázs), the theory of philosophical
thought (Béla Fogarasi), the problems of aesthetics according to Kant (Arnold
Hauser), ethics (György Lukács), and the problems of aesthetic impact (Emma
Ritóok).57
I had started reading Ervin Szabó, Zsigmond Kunffy, Oszkár Jászi a few years before, when
I was fifteen … I had been interested in socialism, in social issues, and so I came into con-
tact with the lectures at the Sunday and the Humanities Society [sic] … The first lecture
was held by Károly Mannheim, I believe. I don’t remember what it was about. The talks
continued, two to three a week, and I soon took part in all of them. Mannheim, György
Lukács, Arnold Hauser, Frigyes Antal – I remember these speakers. After the lectures
came a question-and-answer session, and I, a young child, asked questions they must
have found interesting, because they invited me to their coffeehouse table. … After I’d
been there a couple of times they invited me to their Sunday meetings, which was purely
54 The Sunday Circle demonstrates that even non-Jewish intellectuals had found the path to a
certain radicalism. Philosopher Emma Ritóok and art historian Lajos Fülep were core members
of the group. Emma Ritóok was the daughter of an eminent Hungarian aristocratic intellectual
family. She was among the first female students at the philosophy department of Budapest
University, studied under Georg Simmel in Berlin together with Béla Balázs, and later earned
a name for herself as a philosopher and feminist writer. The family of Lajos Fülep lived in a
small town in the south of Hungary where they were part of the local elite. Fülep studied in
Italy, had a strong Protestant background, and was later active as a Calvinist minister and
theologian after the Republic of Councils.
55 See Hanno Löwy, Medium und Initiation. Béla Balázs: Märchen, Ästhetik, Kino (PhD diss.,
Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 265, http://d-nb.info/958461252/34 (accessed 20 April 2017).
56 Éva Karádi and Erzsébet Vezér, A Vasárnapi kör [The Sunday circle] (Budapest: Gondolat,
1980), 10.
57 Ibid., 10.
The New Type of Internationalist 101
a circle of friends with nothing institutional about it. The four of us were the ‘young ones’
there.58
About 70 listeners on average took part in our lectures, and didn’t stop coming as we’d
originally expected. We were surprised by our own capabilities, as Fogarasi put it. Fogara-
si’s talks (on the theory of philosophical thought) were first-rate. Hauser’s (on the aes-
thetics of Kant), by contrast, were less so, but he put in an impressive amount of work.
Antal’s lecture was a little bit weak. Mannheim’s (epistemology, logic), though, was won-
derful, exciting, magnificent – the first performance of a budding philosopher and future
great. … The school provided for heated debate at university and other philosophical
circles.59
The Free School of the Humanities was disbanded in 1918, since many of its lec-
turers were able to continue teaching at Budapest University after the demo-
cratic revolution, rendering an alternative to the ‘official’ university and ‘offi-
cial’ scholarly life unnecessary. All the members of the Sunday Circle, with the
exception of Emma Ritoók, took part in the subsequent revolutionary events of
1918–19. When this communist revolution failed, all of the Sunday Circle mem-
bers – with the exception of Fülep und Ritoók – were forced to emigrate, not
only because of their political activities, but also for fear of anti-Semitism in the
wake of counterrevolution. Just how intensely the Sunday Circle had preoccu-
pied contemporaries can be seen in the extent to which the individuals in-
volved, their discussions, meetings, and salons became the subject of Hungar-
ian literature. Some of these are still considered important romans à clef to help
us understand the atmosphere of that era.60 The members of the circle later em-
phasized in their memoirs that they held great debates in 1918 during the bour-
geois-democratic revolution and did ‘not belong to those who wanted to wage
their adolescent revolution by joining the Communist Party and fighting against
their fathers.’61 Their statements challenge the notion put forward by some his-
torians that the radicalization of the Sunday Circle can be reduced to a genera-
tional conflict.62 Rather, participation in the events was a conscious decision.
58 Beszélgetés Gergely Tiborral [Interview with Tibor Gergely led by Áron Tóbiás, Ágnes So-
mogyi, Lóránd Kabebó, Görgy Tverdota], 7 October 1974. Sign: 659/5/B, Archiv des Petőfi Lit-
erarischen Museums.
59 Balázs, Napló, vol. 2, 224.
60 See Ervin Sinkó, Optimisták [The optimists] (Budapest: Magvető, 1979); Anna Lesznai, Kez-
detben volt a kert [In the beginning was the garden] (Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1966).
61 Karádi and Vezér, A Vasárnapi kör, 64.
62 Such as Hans Dieter Hellige and Mary Gluck. See M. Gluck, György Lukács and his gener-
ation, 76.
102 Eszter Gantner
The meetings of the former Sunday Circle members were continued in Vien-
na, in emigration. There were new members, and some of the older ones, such
as Arnold Hauser and Károly Mannheim, left the circle. ‘Now we are really scat-
tered. Edith is in Milan, and the Antals are [somewhere] in Italy. … Fogarasi is
in Prague, Máli in Körtvélyes, Mannheim and Juliska Láng in Bavaria, Hauser in
Italy, Tolnay, Káldor and Lampérth in Berlin, Gyuri in Vienna. But the bonds
don’t break. A strong network now extends across Europe,’ wrote Béla Balázs in
his diary from Vienna, his next station in life. What the Sunday Circle meant to
its members was summed up forty years later by the artist and writer Anna Lesz-
nai, who died in the United States: ‘The Sunday meetings remained the most
beautiful memories, not only in my life but in the lives of many others as
well.’63
[A]nd in 1919, when upheaval and revolution ended the war, Béla Balázs immediately
joined the Communists, without ever having belonged to a party – say, the Social Demo-
crats – before. It was not his knowledge of Marxism – which he lacked – that helped him
do so, but a certain idealistic ethic that rejected every form of opportunism, hated insin-
cerity, and only believed in radical methods that carried things to their conclusion. In
short, he was an emotional communist.64
István Eörsi, who later became a pupil of Lukács and edited the Lukács auto-
biography Record of a Life, called this phenomenon a ‘religious need’.65 In Ba-
lázs’ case this clearly rings true. His writings – especially his diaries, but also
his novels – reveal a constant search for community, for a universal belief,
which he hoped would dispel his permanent sense of loneliness, as an intellec-
tual and as a Jew.
At this point Balázs could view himself as an established writer. He was
now an émigré who, because of his activities during the Hungarian Republic of
63 Memoirs of Anna Lesznai, 1965. Cited in: Karádi and Vezér, A Vasárnapi kör, 55.
64 Balázs, Einige biographische Fakten, 6–7.
65 Lukács, Gelebtes Denken, 79.
The New Type of Internationalist 103
Councils between March and August 1919, had to flee after its collapse. Yet the
contacts to the German-speaking world – Vienna and Berlin – he had built up
during his time in Budapest helped him set up a new life in emigration:
There was something exhilarating and liberating about entering the world of German cul-
ture, and Balázs was more fortunate than some of his fellow exiles because he could write
in German without difficulty. He was therefore eager to establish contacts with German-
language publishers and journal editors … Lukács wrote to Martin Buber, asking that he
help introduce Balázs around German literary circles.66
66 Ibid., 101.
67 Balázs, Napló, vol. 2, 481.
68 Ibid., 471–82.
104 Eszter Gantner
His exile in Vienna and Berlin was linked to, and informed by, various con-
tinuities with his period in Budapest before and during the First World War and
was therefore by no means a break in his life. While it is true that he was forced
to flee his old life along with his friends and colleagues, the communist move-
ment and the milieu of the German Communist Party offered him and his com-
rades-in-arms a political and intellectual climate comparable to that of the pro-
gressive movement in Budapest some years earlier. It offered a structured envi-
ronment at the intellectual, existential, and human level, one with universal
ethical claims that rendered their ‘peripheral status’ as intellectuals, Jews, or
émigrés obsolete.
In 1926, he travelled even farther, from Vienna to Berlin. He explained this
move later on as follows: ‘In 1927 [sic] Balázs had to leave Vienna. His commu-
nist tendencies, which he never denied, had become intolerable to the newspa-
per he worked for, and no other paper picked him up.’69
This step was of course not only influenced by an invitation from the Com-
munist Party of Germany (KPD), but also by his conviction that Berlin offered
him more opportunities for personal development. When Balázs arrived in Ber-
lin in 1926, he was already a well-known film theorist and writer. His plan, dat-
ing back to Vienna, to become a German-language writer had succeeded. In
1926, he was invited to Berlin to give a talk on the essence of cinema. Once
there, he decided to stay, and henceforth collaborated with Alexander (Sándor)
Korda, who had his own film company. Edith Gyömrői, whom Balázs knew from
the Sunday Circle, worked as a costume designer on the movie Madame Wants
No Children. Balázs could boast of having made a career for himself in Berlin.
He earned a name as a screenwriter, a film critic and aesthete, as a collaborator
and organizer of the Workers’ Theatre League, serving as its artistic director
from 1927 to 1929, and also wrote theatre critiques at Die Weltbühne for a period
of five years.70 In a letter to Herbert Ihering, Balázs described his activities in
Berlin in hindsight:
It was not only the largest theatre organization in Berlin and all of Germany … in 1930 it
had almost ten thousand members. It was a mass movement … the Workers’ Theatre
League of Germany. I had the good fortune and the great honour to serve as artistic direc-
tor of the national organization for a number of years, and during my entire time in Berlin
was the producer of a company called ‘The Heretics’.71
His activities – and this is a testimony to the importance of his work in the left-
ist theatre organization and the KPD – were closely watched by both the Hun-
garian and the Berlin police.
To the Vice-Ispán of all counties and the Regional Chief of the Hungarian Royal Police.
It has come to my knowledge that Dr Béla Balázs, who during the so-called Republic of
Councils was director of a Bolshevist theatre group and after the fall of the Republic of
Councils was engaged in subversive activities in Germany, is now planning to shoot a film
with a Hungarian Bolshevist theme. The film is to have the title ‘Barricades’ or ‘When the
Tisza Burns’ and is supposed to contain passages relevant to Hungary and allegedly
filmed on Hungarian territory.
The directors purportedly want to contract a neutral German company to shoot these se-
quences. I hereby notify the addressees to instruct the subordinate police authorities to
unconditionally deny permission to shoot this film, in accordance with Directive No.
91.095/1920 B.M.
130/3/1932
72 Documents of the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior. VIIth Department. Manuscript in the
Hungarian State Archives (MOL); Call no.: M. kir. Belügyminisztérium VII. osztály MOL K- 149-
651/2-1932-3-5635
73 Documents of the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior; VIIth Department. Manuscript in the
Hungarian State Archives (MOL); Call no.: MOL: K 149-651/2-1932-3-5635, p. 7.
106 Eszter Gantner
On April 30, the following news item appeared in the Münchener [sic] Zeitung under the
heading ‘Film Bolshevism’: ‘The Berlin-based Hungarian writer Béla Balázs, author of a
number of film scripts and most recently a collaborator on the Riefenstahl movie The Blue
Light, once again found a spot in his heart for the Bolshevists and has now turned up in
Moscow, where he’s planning to make a film called Barricades with the Russian director
Leiter. The film takes its theme from the Hungarian revolutionary novel by Béla Illés. Is it
not time for the Germans to remember that Balázs has lost his currency here by placing
himself at the service of Russian revolutionary filmmaking?’
Based on information from well-informed quarters, I would like to make the following
comment about this rather noteworthy piece of news:
Béla Balázs is a known Communist who directed a Bolshevist theatre company during the
Republic of Councils, emigrated after the fall of the Republic of Councils, and has been
very successful in recent years in Germany with his book Peculiar People. This novel por-
trays social relations in Hungary in a consistently negative light. According to my infor-
mation from local film circles, the aforementioned news item is mistaken in that the
planned film with a Hungarian Bolshevist theme will not be called ‘Barricades’ but ‘When
the Tisza Burns’. The film is meant to portray Bolshevist rule in Hungary and truly shows
the hand of Moscow. The directors and/or producers purportedly want to contract a neu-
tral German company to shoot the scenes in Hungary.74
Balázs, as this report correctly mentions, was in fact very successful, especially
in cinema. But political theatre also had much to thank him for. Although the
Workers’ Theatre League was banned in 1929, Balázs continued to work with a
variety of theatre groups underground. The Communist Party also gave him the
task of prepping Soviet silent movies for the Western European market. It was
Balázs who arranged subtitles for movies by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and others.
Balázs also did much to pave the way for Soviet literature and cinema in the
West by penning regular reviews and critiques.
Despite his manifold activities for the Party and the communist cause, Ba-
lázs was generally viewed with scepticism by other Hungarian functionaries
and Party members. He belonged to that group of intellectuals who, while hav-
ing close contacts to the Party, still retained a certain creative independence.
He supported the Republic of Councils, went into emigration, considered him-
self an early communist, was accepted in the KPD in 1931 – and yet part of his
work would always remain autonomous. He succeeded in joining leftist cultural
life and finding his way there. He was appreciated not only as a KPD member
but in broad circles for his distinctive intellectual abilities. Balázs’ networks –
from film to theatre – extended to various circles of the Berlin intellectual and
art scene, and included vastly different individuals with varied political sympa-
thies. His writings on film theory and a number of his literary works reveal a
completely different side of the writer than is seen in his novels and short sto-
ries written in the spirit of the Party. This ‘independence’ was perceived by
some as a lack of discipline, as in this rather sceptical portrayal by fellow com-
rade and graphic artist Jolán Szilágyi:
What many people didn’t see coming: there was a downright mass migration in the twen-
ties. Ordinary people travelled from Hungary to Paris via Berlin … shoemakers, tailors,
furriers … by the thousands, with their families. Sometimes they were stranded for months
in Berlin. … For years the emigration committee did not concern itself with transients at
all … [before] it assigned Béla Balázs to deal with them. But anyone who knew Béla Ba-
lázs, knew what would become of it. And nothing did.75
It was probably for this reason that Balázs even seemed ideologically ‘unreli-
able’ to his former friend György Lukács:
Balázs was on the left politically. But he underwent a transformation of worldviews – that
is to say, he incorporated his old worldviews into official communism. This resulted in a
duality I couldn’t bear, neither theoretically nor artistically. … I had always advised Ba-
lázs not to join the Party.76
75 Szilágyi is describing how the emigration committee gave Balázs the task of helping find
work for Hungarians passing through on their way to France: Jolán Szilágyi, Emlékeim, 34.
76 Lukács, Gelebtes Denken, 144.
77 Balázs, Einige biographische Fakten, 6.
78 Всесоюзный государственный институт кинематографии [the All-Union State Institute
of Cinematography].
108 Eszter Gantner
Councils was shot but subsequently forbidden and all copies destroyed. Balázs
recounted the project with bitterness in his unpublished Moscow memoirs:
The first years were fruitless for my work due to the unfortunate struggle for the film ‘Tis-
za garit.’ Surrounded by wreckers, imbeciles, technical and organizational difficulties
caused by Béla Kun’s gang, who had the say in the Hungarian party back then … with not
so much as a single friend or helper. … It was the bitterest time of my life. … I turned grey
during these three years.79
What exactly happened to him – the smear campaigns he was the subject of –
can only be surmised over without further research into his years in the Soviet
Union. At one point he complains about the hostility of Andor Gábors and Lu-
kács towards him,80 which he links to the ‘bourgeois success’ he enjoyed in Ber-
lin. This success fuelled accusations of Balázs being ‘unreliable’.
And yet despite his successes in cinema and literature, and despite his be-
longing to a community (the communists), he wrote, in retrospect, about these
years as a period of uprooted-ness, which he partly blamed on his being an émi-
gré. A few years later, in his unpublished Moscow memoirs, he referred to him-
self as a German writer who was also a Hungarian, characterizing himself in a
few brief lines as a new type of ‘internationalist’:
[T]he individual, this greatest good of human development, born in blood and agonies,
can no longer be ignored. This is the prospect, the hope of his salvation: that assimilation
will be possible, that is not the task of the individual consciousness. In this new, higher
entity the personality remains intact. Communism of the future is the dialectic repetition
of primitive communism at a higher level of synthesis.
There were first glimpses of the possible emergence of a new international, secularized
culture which would sweep aside the traditional and nationalistic barriers on which anti-
Jewish discrimination had rested.85
When is a human being uprooted? When is he rooted? Nowadays the question is dis-
cussed in a vulgar way, almost biologically, and it is claimed that the uprooted individual
is one whose life, whose work, whose whole mentality is not embedded in the bosom of
some nation … If this spiritual and moral phenomenon is taken as a starting point, the
deracinated man is the one who is nothing more than himself, whose thoughts and feel-
ings are not influenced by transpersonal ideologies. Conversely, the rooted man is tied
down and restricted. … We should therefore establish the premise that we are dealing with
the ‘roots’ of thought, of emotions, of an attitude and mind-set … The second premise:
The roots of this emotional and mental makeup are exclusively to be found in the tradi-
tions of this emotional and mental makeup. Even if this mentality has passed into the
blood, it is not determined by the blood. … When we claim that someone is rooted in a
people, a race, a nation, it can only mean the spirit of this people, this race, this nation.86
83 See, among others: Dieter Gessner, Die Weimarer Republik (Darmstadt: Wisenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 2002), 68; Viktor Karády, Gewalterfahrung und Utopie (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer, 1999), 203–26; Jacob Katz, Vom Vorurteil bis zur Vernichtung: Der Antisemitismus 1700–
1933, (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1989).
84 See, among others: János Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon [The Jewish Question in
Hungary] (Budapest: Osiris, 2001); Hans Helmuth Knütter, Die Juden und die deutsche Linke in
der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf: Droster, 1971).
85 Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard
Deveson (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 159.
86 MTA Archive, Ms. 2024/2, p. 36–7.
110 Eszter Gantner
Following this argument, an individual can choose his spiritual and moral envi-
ronment (what he calls ‘soil’):
If the emotional, mental makeup can thus only be rooted in emotional, mental soil … or
tradition, these roots must not necessarily be national or völkisch ones. Only then can
someone have strong roots in other traditions and ideologies that are more expansive
than an individual life.87
For him, communism was a way to dissolve the discrepancy between national
identity and internationality, at the same time offering an alternative to the
rootless ‘wandering’ Jew:
Balázs inverted the complaint about the ‘uprooted and homeless international-
ist’ and argued as such: ‘What is certain is that nowadays a nationalist is more
uprooted than an internationalist,’ since the communist with ‘his reason, his in-
sight, his heart and his instincts, bound up as they are in his entire constitution
like a monk in an order of old, cannot for one second feel uprooted.’89 Despite
this ‘belief’, he tormented himself time and again with the question of his ethnic
and national identity, and in this context also with the question of which cul-
ture his literature belonged to: Hungarian, German, or socialist? His attempt to
construe internationalism as a cultural and moral position and communism as
a spiritual and intellectual home can be interpreted as an answer to his inner
conflict:
‘Justification.’ I start writing down my memoirs in the winter of 1940. … I lost my father-
land and found my homeland. I’m firmly rooted, even if the ground that holds me might
not be clearly definable geographically. I am far from my fatherland and the spheres of
my mother tongue and yet I feel neither lost nor derailed, neither ambivalent nor without
a perspective. What I have to say can be understood in more than one language and by
more than one people. … My path makes a wide detour back to my fatherland, even if I
don’t get there alive myself. We international communists are not vagabonds, but some-
times we are wayfarers, who, travelling to a fixed destination, feel they are on a safe path
home.90
Epilogue
Balázs was able to return to Hungary after 27 years of emigration and died there
in 1949 at the age of 65 – embittered, disappointed and despairing over the
communist regime that was beginning to form there under the leadership of his
former fellow émigrés Mátyás Rákosi and Ernő Gerő. While some of his plans
did materialize, such as the film Somewhere in Europe and the publication of his
autobiographical novel in Hungarian, he was increasingly relegated to the side-
lines after 1947. Ultimately, he lost his job and was no longer allowed to teach
at the Academy of Film and Theatre Arts.
Conclusions
For many of his contemporaries, and for the subsequent specialist literature as
well, Balázs utterly embodied the myth of the leftist Jewish intellectual.91 The
course of his life, his writings, in which he repeatedly emphasized his up-
rooted-ness and ‘transnationality’, his conversion to Catholicism, then his
rather romantic-idealist sympathy for the Republic of Councils, later his joining
of the Communist Party, all the while searching for community92 – all of these
things are ‘qualities’ that make him a ‘typical’ Jewish, international intellec-
tual.93 His ‘self-enactment’ is hardly any different than that of his friends and
contemporaries. Their self-awareness as artists and intellectuals, as political
émigrés (revolutionaries from Hungary) who were close to the KPD or members
of it, formed the basis of a ‘new’ identity and a new ‘role’. The sources of his
day took increasing note of this political role. Jewishness, the fact of being Jew-
ish, and in this context the whole complex of other Jewish issues – anti-Semi-
tism, Zionism, East European Jewry – were completely overlooked. Balázs and
his friends made a clear decision in the new phase of their lives for the identity
model of the ‘international revolutionary’, which to a certain extent had already
begun to form in Hungary, but was closely intertwined there with an obvious
outsider role as Jews and progressive thinkers. In emigration, this outsider sta-
tus as Jews and intellectuals in general seemed to dissolve into the category of
the ‘foreigner’ and the status of political émigrés. With that, the process begun
91 See Enzo Traverso, Die Marxisten und die jüdische Frage (Mainz, 1995).
92 Balázs, Einige biographische Fakten.
93 See Lee Congdon, Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria
1919–1933 (Princeton 1991).
112 Eszter Gantner
at the turn of the century in many individual biographies was concluded, one
that Viktor Karády described as follows:
A typical, extreme form of this endeavour to assimilate was the political radicalization of
many Jewish youths, who joined the … political movements with a universalist (socialist
or communist) ideology. … The ‘international’ or ‘leftist’ political option was merely an
alternative to ‘national assimilation’, an option you embraced when the latter turned out
to be a dead end.94
Returning to the question posed by Krajewksi, we can answer that the univer-
sal, socialist movement undoubtedly seemed to offer an escape from a periph-
eral existence and inner conflict, as this case study of Balázs shows. The univer-
sality of socialism, its internationalism, the possibility, in other words, to leave
behind the ‘narrow confines’ of the ‘nation’ and its inherent Jewish-Gentile so-
cial conflict was at any rate a welcome alternative. Balázs himself tried to con-
ceptualize and justify this model through his notion of the ‘new type of interna-
tionalist’, whose emotional appeal of completely fusing and identifying with
the oppressed made religious or ethnic differences a thing of the past.
Artists and art critics contemporary to Arthur Bryks described him as a painter
whose works were underpinned by Jewish mysticism and a surprisingly good
knowledge of the history of philosophy. Käthe Kollwitz and Alexei Jawlensky
encouraged Bryks to continue his studies in fine art, as did the Antikvaryus Gal-
lery, which successfully sold his works in Zurich. However, he was unable to
fully dedicate himself to his own art as he primarily earned his living as an art
restorer, which absorbed much more of his time than he would have liked. And
yet, despite constant financial problems, Bryks was a social activist. He was the
initiator and one of the founders of the Porza Association, an international or-
ganization for art and culture. In the 1930s, together with his wife Vena Wein-
mann, he established the Tissus Bryks textile factory in Amsterdam.1
After 1913, the young Arthur lived away from home. He took up rabbinical
studies – first in Basel and then in Vienna. In 1917, he went to Switzerland,
where he was cared for by the Weinmann family, who were supposed to send
him to the USA to continue his education. However, he fell in love with one of
the Weinmann daughters; the feeling was reciprocated and he stayed in Europe.
The couple married and lived together in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam and in vari-
ous cities in Switzerland. During this period Bryks founded several companies
and organizations, worked all over Europe, and maintained close contacts with
his family, artistic circles in Poland, and Jewish intellectual associations. After
Poland regained independence in 1918, he only retained Polish citizenship.
When he wanted to emigrate to Israel, the Polish Embassy in Switzerland tried
1 Arthur Bryks, ‘Schilderijen en teekeningen’ [Arthur Bryks, paintings and drawings], Handels-
blad van Donderdag (6 July 1939).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-006
114 Małgorzata Quinkenstein
to force him to give up his Polish citizenship, which he refused to do. Finally,
an intervention by Nadia Stein and persons connected to the Israeli government
enabled Bryks to obtain an Israeli entry visa.
Biography
Arthur Bryks’ life story (his given name was Zakan) began in the village of Fał-
ków near Radom, where he was born in 1894 as the eldest son of Mojżesz and
Sara Freude Bryks. Bryks’ mother was born on 3 September 1862.2 His father’s
date of birth is unknown, but a preserved photograph3 enables us to surmise
that the age difference between them could not have been more than ten years.
They led the life of a conservative Jewish family typical of their time and region.
They participated in the religious and social life of their community, which
combined Hasidic Judaism with folk mysticism and new social currents such as
Zionism, which had been gaining in popularity among many European Jews.
For many years after their wedding, Sara and Mojżesz Bryks were unable to
conceive, which led them to undertake pilgrimages to a ‘Wunder Rabbi’ in a re-
mote village4 in the hope that his renowned miracles would help them have
children. The pilgrimages did indeed have a positive outcome in the form of
three children: Zakan (1894), Lea (1897) and Chilusz (1900). The name Zakan
was given to the eldest son in honour of a vision of the ‘miraculous rabbi’, who
prophesied that the child would reach a very old age.5 Around 1915 or 1916, Za-
kan, probably at the suggestion of his future in-laws, changed his name to one
that sounded more ‘European’. He chose the name Arthur because he thought it
was related to the German word alt, which would have made it the equivalent
of his Jewish name Zakan. At that time, different spellings of his surname
(Brüks and Briks) appeared as well. Around the beginning of 1917, his full name
was recorded as Arthur Bryks.
As a long-awaited child who was treated as a prodigy by his God-fearing
parents, the little Zakan was raised to become a rabbi. In 1911, he graduated
from a yeshiva in Lithuania, probably the so-called Reines Yeshiva in Lida.6 The
school founder’s modern views and his Zionist political leanings had a perma-
nent influence on Bryks’ attitude and worldview. Throughout his life, Bryks pro-
moted charitable activities and held profoundly Zionist beliefs.
After he graduated from the yeshiva, Bryks faced being conscripted into the
Russian army. To escape this fate, he decided to seek further educational oppor-
tunities abroad. The Weinmann family in Switzerland ultimately helped him
find the money and connections he needed. The Weinmanns were a well-to-do
Jewish family from Bielsko whose members had decided to try their luck at busi-
ness in various parts of Europe. One of the brothers, Ezechiel, founded a meat
canning factory in Basel. He and his wife Malka Manela allocated part of their
income from the factory to scholarships that were offered to outstanding rabbin-
ical students from Eastern Europe, mainly from the former Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth. They corresponded in Polish and Yiddish.7
The young Bryks was offered such a scholarship along with a proposal to
continue his studies in the United States. Unfortunately, we do not know how
candidates for the scholarships were chosen. It can be assumed that the Polish
members of the Weinmann family served as a contact for Ezechiel and Malka
and provided information about future scholars. Some of the Weinmanns were
connected with the Bryks’ home region around Radom, where they maintained
good relations with conservative Jewish families from Eastern Europe. Impor-
tant to note is that Ezechiel began to assimilate as soon as he settled in Switzer-
land. In spite of this, and probably under Malka’s influence, the Weinmanns
continued to lead the life of a moderately religious Jewish family. Malka also
insisted that all children be born in Bielsko or in Przedbórz, surrounded by their
family. This was because she was expecting to bear a son (which did not hap-
pen) and wanted the circumcision ritual to be performed in the presence of the
family.8 Recipients of the Weinmanns’ scholarship first came to Switzerland so
that the family could meet them. They would then begin preparatory studies
there. In 1913, Bryks came to Basel, where he graduated two years later as a can-
tor with the highest honours. The Weinmanns’ daughter Vena studied violin at
the same school.9 While at the conservatory, Bryks also started studying paint-
ing at the Kunstgewerbeschule Basel, from which he graduated in 1916.
6 Icchak Jakob ben Salomon Neftali Reines proposed a secular curriculum so that young men
could study the Talmud and the Torah while gaining secular knowledge at the same time. He
held Zionist views and was one of the founders of the Mizrachi movement.
7 Correspondence in PAL and CZAJ.
8 Information obtained during an interview in IL.
9 Her full name was Vena Miryam Charlotte Weinmann (later Bryks).
116 Małgorzata Quinkenstein
It soon became apparent that the relationship between Arthur and Vena
was more than just a friendship, and her parents consented to Bryks receiving
the scholarship in Switzerland without the need for him to study in the USA.
The financial support that Arthur received from the Weinmanns was also re-
flected in the assistance he gave to his family in Poland, which at that time was
engulfed by the First World War and the October Revolution. Indeed, thanks to
the support from her eldest brother, Lea learned a profession and set up a tai-
lor’s shop (first in Radom and Przedbórz, and later in Łódź), and Chilusz left for
Brussels, where he worked as an economist.10
Much of Ezechiel Weinmann’s stock market investments collapsed during
and immediately after the First World War. This affected the family’s finances
and the scholarship system was discontinued. At the beginning of 1918, Arthur
Bryks found work as a cantor in a Zurich synagogue; in October of the same
year, he married Vena.11
At the time, Zurich was evolving into an important destination for European
intellectuals, scholars and artists. With his open mind and artistic interests,
Bryks moved in the company of the Dadaists associated with the Cabaret Vol-
taire.12 He struck up a friendship with Richard Huelsenbeck,13 who wrote the in-
troduction to the catalogue for Bryks’ exhibition14 and subsequently supported
the artist’s plan to establish the Porza Association. Raoul Hausmann also wrote
a letter15 to Arthur Bryks16 in November 1923 in the form of a Dada manifesto.
In the summer of 1919, Arthur and Vena Bryks travelled to Ascona for vaca-
tion, where they spent time with the Monte Verità artists’ colony.17 Inspired by
lively conversations on a variety of subjects and numerous meetings, they de-
10 He probably graduated from a Brussels business school, which enabled him to find work as
an economist before he later changed direction and became a diamond cutter.
11 Wedding invitation and commemorative book in PAL.
12 Preserved is an invitation to the 8th Dada-Soirée held in Zurich on 9 April 1919 with Arthur
Bryks’ handwritten notes.
13 Founder and chronicler of the Dada movement. See Manfred Engel, ‘Wildes Zürich: Dadais-
tischer Primitivismus und Richard Huelsenbecks Gedicht “Ebene”’, in Poetik des Wilden, ed.
Jörg Robert and Friederike Felicitas Günther (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012),
393–419.
14 The exhibition was organized in Zurich by the PORZA Foundation at the Antikvaryus Gal-
lery, Bahnhofstr. 16.
15 An artist associated with the Dada movement. See Kurt Bartsch, Ralf Burmeister, Adelheid
Koch-Didier, and Stefan Schwar, Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971): Werkverzeichnis – Biografie –
Bibliografie (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2011).
16 In PAL.
17 Robert Landmann, Ascona-Monte Verità: Auf der Suche nach dem Paradies (Frauenfeld:
Huber, 2000).
‘Europe’ – It’s such a strange word for me! 117
cided to stay in Ascona until 1921, where Arthur devoted all his time there to his
artistic work. Bryks’ views on art evolved during that period. He also became
firmly convinced that the artistic vocation demanded social and political en-
gagement. The artists who worked or stayed at Monte Verità made a strong and
positive impression on Bryks. He maintained close contacts with the Romanian
painter Marcel Janco18 and the Moldavian artist Arthur Segal,19 and became a
particularly close friend of Alexey Jawlensky20 and Marianne Werefkin,21 who
both supported him in his artistic endeavours. The surviving photographs and
correspondence demonstrate that Jawlensky and Segal were the spiritus movens
in Bryks and his wife’s search for new avenues in their work.
An important part of life in the Monte Verità artists’ colony were the modern
dance activities pioneered by Isadora Duncan. The time that Bryks spent in As-
cona (1919–1921) was reflected in the themes of his work22 and in his studies on
how to portray motion on canvas.23 In 1919, Segal painted Samson. Dedicated to
Bryks,24 the painting was the outcome of their joint reflections on artistic struc-
ture and composition. The Brykses were often visited at their home by Andreas
Jawlensky (Alexey’s son), who was closely collaborating with his father at the
time. The younger Jawlensky left some drawings dedicated to Vena that were
inspired by their lively discussions, and a photograph from 191925 taken at the
Bryks home in Ascona depicts three young men who were on intimate terms:
Andreas Jawlensky, Arthur Bryks and Ernst Meyer.26
18 A writer, painter and architect who was among the founders of the Dada movement. During
the Second World War he emigrated permanently to Israel. See Harry Seiwert, Marcel Janco:
Dadaist, Zeitgenosse, wohltemperierter morgenländischer Konstruktivist (Frankfurt am Main: Pe-
ter Lang, 1993).
19 Born as Aron Sigalu in Romania. See Wulf Herzogenrath and Pavel Liska, eds, Arthur Segal
1875–1944 (Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1987).
20 An expressionist painter, co-founder of Der Blaue Reiter group. See Ingrid Mössinger and
Thomas Bauer-Friedrich, eds, Jawlensky: Neu gesehen, exhibition catalogue (Dresden: Sand-
stein Verlag, 2013).
21 An expressionist painter who died in forced exile in Ascona in 1938. See Brigitte Roßbeck,
‘Marianne Werefkin, Ihr Leben – im Russischen Reich – in Deutschland – in der Schweiz’, in
Marianne Werefkin, Vom Blauen Reiter zum Großen Bären, exhibition catalogue (Bietigheim-
Bissingen: Städtische Galerie Bietigheim-Bissingen, 2014).
22 Portraits of Mary Wigman dancing, private collection – Bryks Art Collection (BAC).
23 Letters to Nadia Stein, file 242, CZAJ.
24 BAC.
25 In PAL.
26 German painter and graphic artist born in 1897 who lived in Switzerland – information
obtained from PAL. No studies exist on him.
118 Małgorzata Quinkenstein
Another major influence on Bryks’ artistic work was César Domela,27 with
whom he maintained contact until the end of his life. Under his influence, Bryks
began experimenting with cubism and constructivism, which then became the
main formal themes of most of his work. The works inspired by those move-
ments include Testa Astratta [Abstract Head] (1920),28 which was among the
first paintings accepted by the Museum of Modern Art in Ascona.29 The museum
was established in 1921 with donations by artists from Monte Verità. The muse-
um’s goals were informed by the artists’ thoughts on the social role of art as
well as by a need that Winfried Gebhard expressed as follows:
The reformist Bohemians of Monte Verità were, if not the prototype, then at least the root
out of which all of today’s attempts [to reorganize society] grew and continue to grow.
Their idea of a new form of community was the ‘mad’ attempt to make a consistent form
of life out of all the modern ideas of reason brought together by liberalism, socialism,
idealism, anarchism [and, importantly, vegetarianism].30
During this period, Bryks also became acquainted with the poet, writer and
translator Bruno Goetz.31 In February 1921, the poet gave Bryks a 25-page manu-
script of his poems as a gift: Neue Gedichte. Abgeschrieben für A. Bryks zur Erin-
nerung an Ascona, Ascona, Februar 1921.32
Their experiences in Ascona encouraged the Brykses to press on with their
artistic careers, and in 1921 they moved to Berlin. There they obtained consider-
able assistance from Arthur Segal and from Vena’s sister Esther and her future
husband, the graphic artist Hans Looser, who helped them find domicile and
work, and introduced them to the artistic milieu of the Weimar Republic. The
year-long stay in Berlin turned out to be a breakthrough for the Brykses. Vena
27 César Domela Nieuwenhuis, a painter, graphic artist and photographer who first created
works in the spirit of constructivism, and then geometric abstraction and neo-plasticism. See
Marcel Brion, César Domela (Paris: Le Musée de Poche, 1961).
28 A reproduction of the painting and a description of it are included in the catalogue: Mara
Folini and Veronica Provenyale, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna Ascona 1922: Le origini della
Collezione (Ascona: Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna Ascona, 2010).
29 The Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna Ascona was established in 1922.
30 Winfried Gebhardt, Charisma als Lebensform: Zur Soziologie des alternativen Leben (Berlin:
Reimer, 1994, 170).
31 Born in Riga in 1885, he died in 1954. See Manfred Bosch, ‘Bruno Goetz als Mittelpunkt: Der
Künstlerkreis auf der Überlinger Rehmenhalde’, in Bohème am Bodensee: Literarisches Leben
am See von 1900 bis 1950 (Lengwil: Libelle Verlag, 1997), 138–47.
32 PAL.
‘Europe’ – It’s such a strange word for me! 119
graduated from the famous Reimann-Schule,33 and her diploma and profession
subsequently affected most of the decisions taken by the couple, and later by
Arthur himself after Vena’s death in December 1943.34 The school’s founder Al-
bert Reimann wanted to connect the practice of crafts and industrial design to
contemporary socialist ideas. He also translated the ‘free art’ slogans promoted
by European academies of fine arts into the area of design in order to establish
design as a unique form of artistic practice in its own right. It was during his
stay in this thriving multicultural city that Arthur developed his first plans to
establish an international association. He also became more closely connected
with the Polish community, which played an active role in shaping Berlin’s ar-
tistic scene.
Porza
In 1923, the Brykses settled in Switzerland again. This time they chose Porza, a
village near Lugano. Their education and previous experiences had turned both
Arthur and Vena into socially engaged artists with strong socialist views and
associations with the Zionist movement. They were assisted in their activities by
Arthur’s old friend Nadia Stein,35 a journalist and art critic who helped Bryks
put on exhibitions of his works. The years 1923–1939 saw the painter intensify
his contacts with the Polish artistic milieu, and primarily with Mieczysław
Szczuka36 and Teresa Żarnowerówna37 – artists associated first with the Blok
33 Swantje Wickenheiser, Die Reimann-Schule in Berlin und London (1902–1943): Ein jüdisches
Unternehmen zur Kunst- und Designausbildung internationaler Prägung bis zur Vernichtung
durch das Hitlerregime (Aachen: Shaker Media, 2009).
34 Ibid.
35 Małgorzata Maksymiak, ‘Wohnungsbaureform und Klub des Goldenen Alters: Nadja Steins
Engagement gegen soziale Ungleichheiten im jungen Staat Israel’, in Deutsche und zentraleur-
opäische Juden in Palästina und Israel: Kulturtransfers, Lebenswelten, Identitäten. Beispiele aus
Haifa, ed. Anja Siegemund (Berlin: Neofelis, 2016), 278–91. Małgorzata A. Maksymiak, ‘Nadja
Steins Präsentation ihrer pädagogischen Initiative für eine jüdisch-arabische Annäherung auf
der Levante-Messe in Tel Aviv 1932’, in Promised Lands, Transformed Neighbourhoods and Other
Spaces: Migration and the Art of Display 1920–1950 / Länder der Verheißung, Verpflanzte Nach-
barschaften und Andere Räume: Migration und die Kunst ihrer Darstellung, 1920–1950, ed. Sus-
anne Marten-Finnis, Malgorzata A. Maksymiak and Michael Nagel (Bremen: edition lumière,
2016), 125–42.
36 A painter and graphic artist and an exponent of constructivism and productivism. Szczuka
was a mountaineer and died while climbing in the mountains. See Irena Kossowska, ‘Mieczy-
sław Szczuka’, Culture.pl, http://culture.pl/pl/tworca/mieczyslaw-szczuka, accessed 9 January
2017.
120 Małgorzata Quinkenstein
[Block] magazine and later with the overtly communist Dźwignia [Lever] maga-
zine, which was published until Szczuka’s tragic death in 1927. Bryks probably
met Szczuka and Żarnowerówna in 1922 during an exhibition of their films and
sculpture at the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin. The Bryks family archive includes a
selection of magazine issues collected by Arthur Bryks along with handwritten
notes and comments that indicate that the artist personally knew the authors of
the articles and the works printed. The notes mainly address his ideas for meet-
ings, discussions and joint exhibitions. Bryks’ brief notes from the 1920s and
early 1930s on the latest Polish publications he had read have also been pre-
served.
Bryks’ local activity led to the establishment of one of the most important
artistic organizations – the Porza Association, which he founded together with
the Italian sculptor Mario Bernasconi38 and the German writer and poet Werner
Alvo von Alvensleben. The organization had the goal of creating an internation-
al platform for the exchange of ideas about art and society. In the first issue of
the Porza magazine, Nadia Stein wrote:
The Porza Society aims to bring together intellectually intense, creative people of all na-
tions and interests with the aim of giving them suitable places of rest in various countries.
Leisure and atmosphere will enable them to refresh their nerves and their bodies. Just as
Porza already has German, Italian, French, and Dutch groups, we would like to see a Pal-
estinian group in our internationally conceived, internationally thinking circle.39
Just a few months after the organization was registered, Bryks held a bal paré40
in Berlin hosted by the organization’s founders, where more than 200 people
signed up to be members.41 Similar events took place in France, the Netherlands
and Italy. Within just a few years, Porza managed to open 27 artist retreats in
various countries, including the most important one in the eponymous town in
37 A Polish sculptor and graphic artist who emigrated permanently from Poland in 1937 and
probably committed suicide in New York in 1949. During the Second World War, she drew a
series of propaganda posters for the Information and Documentation Office of the Ministry of
Propaganda of the Polish Government-in-Exile, none of which have been preserved. See Andr-
zej Turowski and Milada Ślizińska, Teresa Żarnowerówna (1897–1949): Artystka końca utopii
[Teresa Żarnowerówna (1897–1949): an artist of the end of utopia] (Łódź: Łódź Museum of Art,
2014).
38 Mario’s catalogue.
39 Nadia Stein, Porza und das Neue Palästina, in Porza 1, no. 1 (1929): 14.
40 An invitation from Arthur Bryks has been preserved. The ball took place at the Logenhaus,
Kleiststr. 10. Apart from the founders, the Festcomité included, among others, Viktor Barsch,
Dr Bernhard Diebold, Georg Grosz, Richard Huelsenbeck and Jaro Jaretzki.
41 The original list, along with Arthur Bryks’ handwritten notes, is included in PAL.
‘Europe’ – It’s such a strange word for me! 121
Switzerland.42 Their terms of use were common to all the retreats and insisted
that guests had to pursue creative activities during their stay.
Whoever sees a comfortable artistic tourist experience in the Porza Society misses the
point. The idea of Porza is informed first and foremost by the value of the international
exchange of ideas. Porza harbours our time’s intellectual tendencies. It is a wholly timely
idea that embodies modern creative activity.43
The most active branches of the Association operated in Berlin, Paris and Am-
sterdam, and, of course, in Porza. The newsletter44 of the French branch stated
that in Germany, the organization had more than 1,300 members divided into
ten sections; in Paris itself, it had upwards of 200 members. The main disci-
plines represented were architecture, ethnology, graphic art, music, sculpture,
painting, theatre, film, dance and design. Beginning in the mid-1930s, members
of the French branch included artists, craftsmen, writers and intellectuals from
countries such as Great Britain, Greece, Finland, USA, Brazil and India. The
branches had their own publishing houses and galleries, and regularly hosted
exhibitions, scholarly lectures and meetings. The Porza magazine was pub-
lished in Berlin in several languages. According to the preserved correspond-
ence, the ‘official’ languages of the Association were German and French.
Thanks to Bryks and Stein, contacts were also established with Polish art
circles: Porza in Poland was to be organized by the writer and art historian Dr
Stefania Zahorska.45 The preserved 1932 list of Porza representatives/heads in
various countries indicates that these posts were held by persons with both
Porza was an association of international renown in which great men of art and ideas be-
lieved they could defend Enlightenment thinking in the face of totalitarian threats. Jac-
ques Viénot, founder of the French branch of Porza, always remained firmly attached to
these values.50
In 1937, despite the political situation and the closure of the Berlin branch, the
Porza founders themselves wrote in an English-language leaflet: ‘Porza is activ-
ities on the belief that men capable of realizing and achieving creative work
whether in the domain of arts or of letters, derive profound advantage from
War
Arthur Bryks spent the war years in Switzerland with his daughter (born in
1926) and his wife. From 1942 onwards, they ran a special weaving workshop
whose aim was to teach refugees from Nazi-occupied countries a new profes-
sion. After Vena’s death, Arthur continued the activities that they had jointly
initiated. When news began to arrive from Europe about the murder of his sister
Lea, his brother Chilusz and the remaining part of his family as well as his Jew-
ish friends, Bryks gradually withdrew, despite remaining active in the commun-
ity.54 ‘Most of my close friends have been murdered by the German barbarians,’
he wrote.55 One year earlier, however, his daughter Ly had written to her father:
‘but life goes on! … I have been with the following people: Cotti, Nella, Sulz-
berger, Fried Wescher, Mez (Mezt), Tante Schaindl, Inge, Eva, Brita, Frau Aes-
chlima Moll, Herr Blum.’56 Paintings by Bryks from the 1944–1949 period depict-
ing groups of people being murdered, lonely women and the frightened faces of
children are evidence of his deep despair and helplessness. ‘In my painting and
sculpture I have tried to tell about what has happened over the last five, sad
years (and what continues to happen).’57
After the war, his daughter Ly and Nadia Stein – his painter friend from
Odessa who had been living in Palestine since 1937 – became the most impor-
tant people in his life. They persuaded him to go to Israel, where he stayed for
more than 10 years and worked as an industrial design teacher, focusing his at-
tention on designing furniture and appliances that made life easier for people
with disabilities.58 Arthur Bryks returned to Europe in 1964 and resided in Swit-
zerland and Italy. He died in 1970 near Milan, where Ly was living with her chil-
dren.
Family Contacts
In the two studies on the Porza Association I am familiar with,59 Arthur Bryks is
referred to as a Russian painter. This attribution of nationality probably stems
from the fact that the place where Bryks was born was still held by Russia at the
time of his birth. However, after Poland regained independence, his home re-
gion once again came under Polish rule. In mid-1920, Bryks stayed in Poland,
probably in order to obtain a Polish passport. This was guaranteed by the law of
January 1920,60 the first article of which also stipulated that a Polish citizen
could not simultaneously be the citizen of another country. The law adopted
the principle of jus soli, which was also confirmed in the renewed and amended
Act of 1951.
When Bryks left his home village, he was 19 years old and Europe was on
the verge of the First World War. One of the reasons he went to Basel was to
escape compulsory military service. This was probably due to the young Ar-
thur’s pacifist outlook and his general dislike of the military; on the other hand,
he also had professional plans that involved art and rabbinical studies. He left
57 Letter from Arthur Bryks to Nadia Stein, Lugano, 13 November 1945, PAL.
58 Jerusalem Post, 7 June 1954.
59 Jocelyne Le Bœuf, Jacques Viénot (1893–1959); Elena Spoerl, ‘Echi da “La Porza” ottant’an-
ni dopo’ [Echoes from ‘Porza’ eighty years later], La Regione Ticino, Lugano e dintorni (2 June
2012).
60 Act on Polish Citizenship of 20 January 1920 (Journal of Laws No. 7, item 44).
‘Europe’ – It’s such a strange word for me! 125
behind his younger siblings and parents. From his correspondence, we also
know that Arthur’s paternal uncle Rachmiel looked after the family after Moj-
żesz died. Little is known about the rest of the family.
Arthur’s sister Lea Bryks became a seamstress. Probably enabled by the fi-
nancial assistance of her elder brother, she managed to set up a tailor’s shop
and employed several people. She moved from Fałków to Przedbórz, taking her
mother with her. The year 1926 marked a change in Lea’s relationship with Ar-
thur, because it was the year their mother died and the year that Arthur’s
daughter Ly61 was born.62 Lea remained unmarried and had no children. Her
mother’s death released her from the obligation to provide stationary care.
Around that time she moved her tailor’s shop to Łódź and began visiting Swit-
zerland frequently, where she helped Vena care for the child. Both Vena and
Arthur often travelled on business, so Lea’s presence was much needed. Lea,
who had extensive contacts in the Polish textile industry and a thorough profes-
sional knowledge of textiles and related goods, proved instrumental in the es-
tablishment and administration of ‘Tissus Bryks’.63 She advised her brother on
which fabrics to purchase and acted as an intermediary in his contacts with Pol-
ish designers.
Lea’s final stay in Switzerland probably ended in the first half of 1939. In
1940, Arthur asked the Red Cross to help him locate his sister, as he had not
received any news from her for some time. A few months later, he was informed
that Lea had been moved to a ghetto. The family’s private collection in Lugano
contains letters from Lea to her brother in which she describes her life in Litz-
mannstadt. She wrote that her life was in grave danger and requested financial
assistance. The letters suggest that right up until her death, Arthur’s replies and
the money he sent never reached Lea.
The preserved correspondence provides far fewer clues about the relation-
ship between Arthur and the youngest of the siblings, Chilusz. It was probably
his employment as a cantor that allowed Arthur to give his younger brother the
financial support he needed to eventually become a diamond cutter. Moreover,
Chilusz’s education was also probably secured by the compensation Rachmiel
Bryks64 received after Mojżesz’s death, since that money allowed him to study
61 The daughter’s name is associated with a quote from Pirkei Avot (Im ein ani Ly mi Ly?),
which can be translated as: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me?’
62 On 15 February 1926, Arthur Bryks received a telegram from his sister about their mother’s
poor health. In the same month, he went to Przedbórz to attend her funeral. He returned to
Switzerland immediately after the burial because Vena was expected to give birth in mid-
March. However, Ly was born a few weeks later, on 14 April 1926. Bryks wrote to his siblings
in Poland to inform them about the birth.
63 Correspondence between Lea Bryks and Arthur Bryks from the years 1933–1938, PAL.
126 Małgorzata Quinkenstein
abroad. Like Lea, Chilusz never started his own family, which was reflected in
his frequent contacts with Arthur and Vena’s family. He probably also helped
Arthur set up the ‘Tissus Bryks’ factory in Amsterdam. The exact date of Ar-
thur’s last contact with his brother is unknown. Chilusz’s name figured on the
lists of Jewish addresses compiled by the Brussels authorities and he was de-
ported in 1942.65
Arthur and Vena often travelled to Poland, mainly to visit their home re-
gion. Those visits were usually documented with photographs rather than in
writing.66 The photos show the couple accompanied by various family members
and friends during parties or religious rituals. While undated, they still allow us
to determine the places that the Brykses visited most often: They frequented the
uplands where Vena’s father was born and where they went on sleigh rides in
winter. There are also several photographs from Fałków and Radom showing
the couple on walking expeditions.
Professional Contacts
Correspondence with friends from Poland, which has not been preserved in its
entirety (sometimes only single letters survive), gives us some interesting infor-
mation. A letter from Izabela Kiełbasińska (the sister of the renowned pediatri-
cian Professor Hanna Hirszfeldowa) tells us about Arthur’s attempts to make a
name for himself as a painter in Poland.67 In 1934, Izabela received a dozen
paintings from Arthur and was asked to find a suitable gallery for them. She
herself purchased two works by Bryks, which unfortunately did not survive the
war. The rest of the paintings, which remained in Warsaw, were probably also
destroyed.
Whether there were other attempts to hold exhibitions of Bryks’ works in
Poland is not known, but professional correspondence on the reproduction of
the painter’s works in cultural and art magazines survives.68 A good example of
this is the correspondence between Nadia Stein and Arthur Bryks on the publi-
cation of articles about art movements in Europe, which focused on the move-
ments’ Zionist and social aspects. In his letters to Stein, Bryks mentions pro-
posals to collaborate with the Blok and Dźwignia magazines, of which he was a
subscriber. After the Blok group had disintegrated, Bryks became more closely
involved with the Praesens group, which operated from 1926 to 1930; its mani-
festo alluded to the activities of the Bauhaus, De Stijl and the Moscow Vkhute-
mas. Bryks’ notes suggest that the ideas of both Blok and Praesens were close
to his heart – he envisaged bringing artistic activities closer to production work
and, following Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński, perceived art as a
catalyst for human action.69
Because both Bryks and his daughter, who inherited his estate, lived in
many places throughout their lives, the painter’s library is completely dis-
persed. We only know about his literary tastes from fragments of his letters and
his book illustrations. The Polish authors whose work he knew included
Aleksander Wat, Bruno Jasieński and Stanisław Młodożeniec. In one of his hur-
ried letters from 1928, he wrote to his wife about the 1927 book Bezrobotny Lucy-
fer [ Lucifer Unemployed]: ‘Venuschka … yesterday I read half of a book by Wat.
It is brilliantly written.’70
Documents in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem and in the family
collection in Lugano confirm that Bryks was in contact with Professor Otto
Schneid.71 The distinguished scholar from Bohemia was a pioneer of studies on
Jewish art in Poland, both classical and modern. In 1930, he started to gather
material for a book about contemporary Jewish artists: Die Juden und die
Kunst.72 From 1934 to 1938, he cooperated with the Yiddish Scientific Institute
(YIVO) in an attempt to establish one of the world’s first museums of Jewish art
in Vilnius. Bryks initially corresponded with him to offer his portfolio as a con-
tribution to the planned book. After Schneid encouraged him (‘You were al-
ready well known to me earlier’),73 the two began corresponding about art. Ar-
thur Bryks’ portfolio is preserved in the archives of the University of Toronto
69 The group was founded primarily by architects, who were later joined by visual artists. The
chairman of the board was Szymon Syrkus, and after 1928 the organization functioned as the
Polish branch of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne.
70 Correspondence between Arthur Bryks and Vena Bryks, 8 April 1928, PAL.
71 An art historian, archaeologist and philosopher. He was born in Jablunkova on 30 January
1900 and died in Toronto in 1974. After the war broke out, Schneid went into hiding in occu-
pied Poland, helped by his friends, and then fled to Palestine. He moved to the United States in
1960 and to Canada in 1963.
72 The manuscript, which was being prepared for publication in Vienna in 1938, was confis-
cated by the Nazis.
73 Letter from Otto Schneid to Arthur Bryks, Bielsko, 17 January 1931, PAL.
128 Małgorzata Quinkenstein
and includes handwritten notes by Schneid and comments such as: ‘close to his
[Jewish] roots, a good ambassador [of Jewish art]’.74
Bryks’ pre-war contacts with Poland culminated in his attempts to establish
a branch of the Porza Association there. He persuaded the outstanding scholar
Dr Stefania Zahorska to set up the branch. Zahorska’s contacts with Bryks prob-
ably began in Berlin, where the future art historian was studying. Their views
on social issues and artistic matters were very similar and they also shared a
deeply pacifist outlook. Bryks’ pacifism was repeatedly expressed in his com-
munity activities and his artwork. In 1929 he met with Erich Maria Remarque,
who was visiting Switzerland at the time, and designed the cover for the forth-
coming new edition of All Quiet on the Western Front.75 When organizing assis-
tance for victims of war and the weaving workshop, Bryks followed the practical
guidelines contained in a dissertation by Zahorska’s life partner Adam Pragier,
which was written at the University of Zurich and titled Die Produktivgenossen-
schaften der schweizerischen Arbeiter.76 Bryks’ professional contacts with Zahor-
ska also involved the Porza Association organizing her lectures on contempo-
rary Polish art in Berlin.77 Stefania Zahorska and Adam Pragier left Poland in
1939, first for France and then for Britain, where they worked for the London-
based émigré weekly Wiadomości [News].78
Post-War Period
Among the first major documents that testify to Bryks’ contacts with his Polish
relatives and acquaintances is the poignant letter that his cousin Rachmil Bryks
(1912–1974)79 (not to be confused with his uncle Rachmiel Byrks) wrote to him
from a refugee camp in Sweden. Rachmil was one of the greatest Yiddish writers
and poets, and survived both the Litzmannstadt ghetto and Auschwitz.80 After
the end of the war, Rachmil’s only surviving brother was murdered in Łódź,
74 University of Toronto Archive, Otto Schneid Papers – Correspondence before 1939, files
57:16.
75 Original drawing in the Remarque family collection.
76 Based on an August 2015 interview with Arthur Bryks’ daughter Ly.
77 Advertisement for the planned lectures in Porza 3, no. 2/3 (1931): 23.
78 Stefania Zahorska, Wybór pism, reportaże, publicystyka, eseje [A selection of documents,
feature articles, essays and news reports], introduction and selection by Anna Nasiłowska
(Warsaw: The Institute of Literary Research, 2010).
79 Letter in Yiddish dated 22 August 1945 from the refugee camp in Öreryd (Hestra).
80 His most important literary testimonies include Ḥatul ba-geto and Di vos zaynen nisht gi-
bliben.
‘Europe’ – It’s such a strange word for me! 129
which played a significant role in the writer’s decision to leave for Sweden. In
his letter, Rachmil describes the Holocaust – mainly the events of 1944 – and
the atmosphere in Poland immediately after the war. He openly writes about his
fear of the Poles and his unwillingness to have any dealings with them. Rachmil
remained in Sweden until 1949 and then went to the United States and later to
Israel. He was one of the main people involved in organizing a US exhibition of
Bryks’ works that were thematically linked to the Jewish tradition.81 According
to information obtained from Rachmil’s daughter Bella Bryks-Klein, Arthur con-
tacted his cousin frequently during his stay in Israel.82
Another Polish intellectual with whom Bryks maintained a friendship after
the war was Stefania Zahorska. The friendship lasted until her death, but was
interrupted between 1944 and 1949, when Bryks hardly engaged in any corre-
spondence with his close friends. However, we know about the contact between
Bryks, Zahorska and Pragier from a 1950 letter to Nadia Stein.83 Bryks intro-
duced Nadia, who was visiting London, to the editors of the Puszka column in
Wiadomości, with whom she was to discuss the publication of an article about
Bryks’ community work on behalf of Polish refugees.84
At the end of 1949, Arthur Bryks was persuaded by Nadia Stein to move to
Israel. Of Arthur and Vena’s closest relatives, one of Vena’s sisters already lived
there with her family, as did Vena’s nephew and Arthur’s cousin Rachmil. With
his departure came the closure of the weaving school for disabled people and
Eastern European immigrants. Because of the large number of continuing and
new students, the process took until the end of 1951. Bryks continued this work
despite his personal circumstances and Vena’s death. In 1945, he wrote to Na-
dia: ‘I have work … for the next 3 months with about 25–30 young people from
… Buchenwald.’85 Bryks’ methods, commitment and empathy attracted consid-
erable interest. The Red Cross, with which the artist collaborated, was con-
stantly sending him new groups of students. After late 1949 and early 1950, they
were people with war-related disabilities.
These invalids are now under the guidance of our friend, the painter, Arturo Bryks who in
recent years has devoted himself to the rehabilitation of young victims of the war and its
horrors. Arturo Bryks offers his teachings in a very personal way, so that many people
81 The exhibition was held in New York in 1951. The author does not know the name of the
gallery. Correspondence in PAL.
82 Bella Bryks-Klein also owns a portfolio of Arthur Bryks’ drawings that he gifted Rachmil in
Israel (ITLV).
83 PAL. The precise affinity between Rachmil and Arthur is not known. In his letter, Rachmil
addresses Arthur as ‘Liber Kuzin’ [dear cousin].
84 This meeting took place, but we do not know what became of the idea for the article.
85 Letter from Arthur Bryks to Nadia Stein, Lugano, 13 November 1945, PAL.
130 Małgorzata Quinkenstein
who thought themselves forever excluded from the community and from all form of work,
gradually return to life. Bryks introduces these invalids to several branches of art, such as
weaving and printing fabrics.86
After a period of struggle with the administration and his efforts to close
the school, just before leaving for Israel, Bryks wrote:
There would have been a huge difference if I had come to Eretz a year ago. Things are
much different now … The loss of energy during the year of waiting has aged me a couple
of years. And yet, seen from a bird’s eye perspective, everything was probably right, and
it is pretty certain that I will never again desire to be in Europe … ‘Europe’ – It’s such a
strange word for me!94
In her reply, Nadia Stein assured him that Israel needed people like him. She
wrote that the construction of the new state would give him renewed strength
and courage. She also offered him the hope that in Israel he would witness the
realization of all his socialist and communitarian ideas.
Arthur Bryks was soon recognized in Israel as a designer of products for the
disabled. A chair he designed for disabled people that began production in 1958
was especially acclaimed in the press.95 He achieved recognition, was addressed
as a professor and received considerable assistance from the state administra-
tion.96
Despite his professional success, Bryks harboured a nostalgia that Nadia
Stein could not understand. She rebuked him for it in her letters, urging him to
become even more engaged in the community. Bryks was involved in Israeli cul-
tural life and appreciated the right to self-determination offered to Jews, which
he often emphasized in his correspondence: ‘The … Jews remind me of our fore-
fathers when they sit, stand and walk.’97 However, after several years in Israel
he grew ever more doubtful about his ability and desire to live outside Europe.
In 1963, he wrote to his daughter: ‘We still breathe in the beauty of the sky, land
and sea and think of the millions.’98 That same year he reported on his corre-
spondence with Ly to Nadia Stein: ‘Ly sometimes asks me why I always write in
German. My Nadia, dear Nadia, I do not know, I do not know.’99
Arthur Bryks returned to Europe in 1964 after 10 years of hard work and in-
tense commitment to the construction of the new Israeli state. At first he settled
94 Letter from Arthur Bryks to Nadia Stein, Porza, 27 December 1952, PAL. The last line in
original German reads: ‘“Europa” – och ist das Wort, ein eigentümlicher Begriff für mich’.
95 A series of articles about Bryks appeared in the Jerusalem Post after the artist arrived in
Israel. In the first mention of Bryks’ post-war years and his assistance to refugees, it was stated,
‘he gave all for his workshop and his brothers’ (quoted in a March 1954 letter from Nadia Stein
to Arthur Bryks).
96 Letters to Arthur Bryks from the Israeli authorities and private individuals, 1954–1964, PAL.
97 Letter from Arthur Bryks to Nadia Stein, Tel Aviv, 25 January 1956, PAL.
98 Letter from Arthur Bryks to Ly Bryks, Tel Aviv, 21 September 1963, PAL.
99 Letter from Arthur Bryks to Nadia Stein, 22 November 1963, file 247, CZAJ.
132 Małgorzata Quinkenstein
in a small studio in Via Pretoria in Lugano, and then moved to a small house in
Cernobbio. On the kitchen wall of his house in Lugano, he painted a monochro-
matic fresco – a horizontal composition with thick outlines of naked bodies of
women and children shown against a schematic Italian landscape, suggesting
that the figures are playing by the water. There is a stark, poignant contrast be-
tween the joy depicted by Bryks and his austere, formal approach. This clash
makes the characters in the fresco seem unreal – as if they were negatives of
themselves. The author wrote on the back of the only photograph of this
work:100 Auf zwei verschiedene Planeten, which might be treated as the title of
the work. This is a paraphrase of the title of a popular 1920s novel by Kurd
Laßwitz called Auf zwei Planeten;101 the book’s pacifist and deeply humanistic
message was often referenced by Nadia Stein and Arthur Bryks in their letters.
Arthur Bryks spent his last years in Italy, where his daughter lived with her
children. During this period he hardly wrote any letters at all. Nadia Stein was
one of the few people with whom he maintained regular contact. The notarized
copy of his death certificate is not preserved in the family archive, but the mu-
nicipal archive in Milan holds a document which confirms Bryks’ residence and
death in that region. In 1968, under point seven of that document, an entry was
made: Nazionalità: polacco/ebreo.102
100 The original fresco was discovered by the author of this article with the help of Sasha
Horowitz and Arthur Bryks’ grandson, Lugano-Porza, 13 August 2015. Photograph in PAL.
101 The first edition was published by Felber, Weimar 1897.
102 Archivo di Stato di Milano, AD (1966–1976). It reads: ‘Nationality: Polish/Jewish’.
Camelia Crăciun
‘Virtually ex nihilo’
The Emergence of Yiddish Bucharest during the Interwar Period
In his book The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars, Ezra Men-
delsohn remarked that:
In the interwar period a number of Yiddish writers came to Bucharest from the newly an-
nexed territories … and brought to the Romanian capital the new Yiddish literature and
the new Yiddish theater … The interwar period, therefore, witnessed what one observer
has termed the ‘flourishing’ of Yiddish culture in Romania and its appearance, virtually
ex nihilo, in the capital of Wallachia. It is extremely doubtful, however, that this new cul-
tural growth would have truly taken root in the Regat … Certainly the prevailing cultural
tendencies among the Jews of the Regat were not favorable to a long-term flourishing of
Yiddish culture. The war years, of course, put an end to this new era of Yiddish culture in
the Romanian heartland.1
1 Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1983), 201.
2 Within the current article, references to the Romanian territory, namely, the Old Kingdom
(Regat) and Greater Romania (România Mare), need clarification due to the distinct political
structures in Romanian history to which they refer; thus, the Old Kingdom represents the po-
litical structure established in 1859 when the unification of Moldavia and Wallachia occurred,
while Greater Romania represents the outcome of the 1918 unification when Bessarabia, Buko-
vina, Dobrudja and Transylvania joined the Old Regat.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-007
134 Camelia Crăciun
end of the First World War. During the interwar period, these intellectuals set
the tone for Yiddish culture from Bucharest, particularly concerning theatre,
while the influence of long-established regional centres of Yiddish culture (Iași,
Cernăuți and Chișinău) began to fade away, slowly becoming part of the new
periphery.
The project of establishing a new Yiddish cultural centre ‘virtually ex nihilo’
in Bucharest appears today as an intellectual utopia in the absence of a pre-ex-
istent Yiddish tradition able to provide a large public and to support such initia-
tives; nevertheless, the project succeeded especially due to Yiddish theatre
which gathered mainstream Romanian intellectuals who publicized the project
even further. The anti-Jewish legislation and the Holocaust halted these initia-
tives and represented a catastrophic finale for the project of maintaining Bu-
charest as an important Yiddish centre; and in the absence of its main activists,
the post-Second World War period did not succeed in reviving it.
This article analyses the determining factors, the subsequent process and
the eventual impact of the emergence of Bucharest as a centre for Yiddish cul-
ture during the interwar period.
Jewish Bucharest
The Romanian Jewry was highly diverse, including as many as seven different
identity types as, in each historical region of Romania, the Jewish community
developed a specific cultural and religious profile according to the greater polit-
ical structure in which it had been integrated and under whose influence it had
evolved.3 The linguistic situation, obviously connected with the general process
of acculturation, secularization and modernization, was complex indeed. In
Wallachia, the great majority spoke Romanian at the expense of Yiddish, while
in Transylvania (including Banat), the population was divided between speak-
ers of Hungarian, German and Yiddish respectively (especially in the Northern
part). In Moldavia, acculturation was the least advanced when compared to the
rest of the Old Kingdom areas: a great majority still spoke Yiddish or were bilin-
gual (with Romanian), while Bessarabia and Bukovina were the least accultu-
rated areas of Greater Romania, with a minority of Russian- and German-speak-
ing intellectuals within compact areas of Yiddish culture. To sum up, during the
interwar period, the only areas with a significant Yiddish culture were Bessara-
bia, Bukovina and Northern Moldavia.
The Wallachian Jewry, which also included the Bucharest community, was
long-established, small in number, mostly urban, resided mainly in Bucharest
and was inevitably subjected to a profound process of acculturation to Roma-
nian culture. According to Ezra Mendelsohn, the Wallachian population be-
longed rather to the Western type of Jewry as the degree of acculturation was
significant and the community was more secular and modern if compared with
a more traditional Moldavian community. In the 1930 census, the total Jewish
population of Greater Romania counted 756,930 individuals, while the Walla-
chian community rose to 97,739 persons, most of them living in the capital – a
fact which represented, for Ezra Mendelsohn, another characteristic of the
Western type of Jewish community.
Although the Jewish presence in Bucharest has been documented starting
as early as the sixteenth century4 as the local rulers invited and supported the
Jewish population through special legislation in order to develop the local econ-
omy, commerce and crafts, the impact on economic and social life became more
visible only in the nineteenth century when the community significantly in-
creased. Concentrating one of the greatest Jewish communities among the capi-
tals of the region, Bucharest gathered roughly ten per cent of the Jewish com-
munity in Romania and exerted a great influence on the rest of the Romanian
Jewry. According to the same 1930 census, the Jewish population of Bucharest
rose to 76,480 individuals, representing 11 per cent of the city’s population.
Indeed, as Mendelsohn concluded, the Jewish community of Bucharest re-
sembled more of a Western European style community as it was more accultu-
rated and modern, Romanian-speaking, and less inclined to traditional life, es-
pecially when compared to populations from the most vibrant Eastern European
Jewish centres such as Warsaw, Vilnius, Cernăuţi or Iaşi. Unlike the situation in
Bukovina and Bessarabia, where the least acculturated communities of the
country resided, in Wallachia the ‘great majority regarded Romanian as their
mother tongue’5 and only 19,842 individuals in Muntenia and 601 in Oltenia de-
clared Yiddish their mother tongue in the 1930 census. Even in Moldavia, the
only region of the Old Kingdom where Yiddish was still widely spoken, Yiddish
modern culture and education were less developed in comparison to similar
Eastern European cases (i.e. Poland) where Jewish culture was grounded in a
4 Irina Heinic, ‘Comunitatea evreilor din Bucureşti la începutul secolului al 19-lea’ [The Bu-
charest Jewish community in the beginning of the 19th century], Revista Cultului Mozaic, no.
255 (15 June 1971), Year XVI.
5 Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 182.
136 Camelia Crăciun
rich heritage of Hebrew and Yiddish local cultures.6 This is the socio-cultural
context in which the emergence of Bucharest as a new Yiddish cultural centre
came as a surprise; in order to better understand the process, important social,
political and cultural factors arising after the end of the First World War and
Jewish emancipation must be taken into account.
6 Ibid., 183.
7 Sol Liptzin, A History of Yiddish Literature (New York: Jonathan David, 1988), ix.
8 Ibid., 354.
9 Ibid., 356.
‘Virtually ex nihilo’ 137
sarabia and Transylvania eventually joined the Romanian Old Kingdom consist-
ing previously of Moldova and Wallachia, and ultimately, Greater Romania was
created. The new political structure benefited from the fall of Tsarist and Aus-
tro-Hungarian Empires – events which radically altered the Eastern European
map. Important urban cultural centres such as Cernăuţi or Chișinău, although
peripheral on the imperial scale, faced their decline to provincial cities within a
state whose capital (Bucharest) maintained and enforced its position as an ad-
ministrative and cultural centre for a political structure much larger than before
1918.
Within the area inhabited by Yiddish speakers, an enormous territory over-
lapping nearly all of Eastern Europe and representing the symbolic geography
of Ashkenazi culture, intellectual mobility and cultural communication greatly
stimulated the creativity and the transfer of ideas across empires––from the
Baltic Sea to provincial Moldavia, and from Warsaw to Odessa. The itinerant
troupe Broder Singers, followed by Avram Goldfaden’s10 companies and other
vagrant performing poets, would travel extensively and spread the seeds of Yid-
dish culture within this large territory, just as much as the maskils promoting
Haskala [Jewish Enlightenment] or the talmid chachams [Torah scholars] shar-
ing their religious knowledge; conflicting intellectual trends coexisted within
Yiddish Eastern Europe, stimulating one another and benefiting from this large
cultural territory that was unhampered by geo-political borders. In the after-
math of the First World War, this symbolic cultural territory was eventually frac-
tured and the resulting fragments were integrated in the newly formed states,
altering and slowing down the communication process and the previous ex-
change of ideas.
In this context, former vibrant Yiddish centres lost their prominence in the
region and saw their status decline from imperial cultural centres to more mod-
est peripheral cities. Yiddish cultural life in the newly created state of Romania,
previously animated by centres such as Cernăuți or Chișinău, started gravitating
toward Bucharest instead of the former imperial cultural centres (Vienna, Odes-
sa, Lviv) with whom close communication used to exist. In the context of these
geo-political changes, the prestigious imperial periphery (replaced by a more
modest one) imposed a radically new order and status in terms of relevance
within the newly formed political unit. Additionally, the fragmentation of the
10 Avram Goldfaden (1840–1908) was the founder of Yiddish theatre in terms of acting school
and original repertory, serving at the same time as a playwright, composer, manager and di-
rector. Originally coming from the Tsarist Empire where he was the editor of several Yiddish
journals, in 1876 he travelled to Iași where he created the first Yiddish-language theatre com-
pany in the world.
138 Camelia Crăciun
old structures and the decline of their respective centres radically changed the
symbolic structure and function of the former Yiddish Eastern Europe.
A second factor responsible for the migration of Yiddish-language intellec-
tuals to Bucharest was the belated legal emancipation of the Romanian Jewry
occurring as late as the end of the First World War when the 1919 Minorities’
Law was enacted. Unlike the situation in the post-1867 Austro-Hungarian Em-
pire, where the recently emancipated Jewry were more and more attracted to
the assimilationist cultural and social policies of the imperial authorities, the
post-1919 Greater Romania secured, at least theoretically, a space for the asser-
tion of Jewish identity in political, social and cultural terms. This new context
created favourable conditions for continuing the intellectual project of promot-
ing Yiddish culture (initiated prior to the First World War), starting with the Cer-
năuți Conference of 190811 and with the manifestations of such cultural journals
as Licht [Light]. This ideological trend coexisted with the emerging discourse
coming from a group of Romanian-language Jewish intellectuals who started to
create a ‘Jewish literature in Romanian’12 able to illustrate and integrate Jewish
identity within Romanian culture; this discourse flourished especially after
1919, reaching its peak in the 1930s when a series of novels on the life of Roma-
nian Jewry were published in Romanian. The journal Di Vokh [The Week] initi-
ated a cultural project that aimed to bring together Yiddish- and Romanian-lan-
guage Jewish writers for a literary evening in order to collect the funds they
needed to publish an anthology in both languages. It was not, however, such a
unique event of this type, yet it suggested the importance of the cultural asser-
tion of identity13 during that period. These two trends, which were active within
Jewish intellectual life, replicated a symptomatic ideological debate animating
11 The Cernăuți Conference of 1908 was the first international event dedicated to the role of
Yiddish language and culture in the life of the Eastern European Jewish population. The confer-
ence (30 August – 4 September 1908) was organized at the initiative of Nathan Birnbaum,
important pedagogue and cultural activist, and a number of important Yiddish authors at-
tended (I. L. Peretz, Shalom Asch, A. Reisen). It represented the starting point for a major
cultural trend among intellectuals, Yiddishism, defining Yiddish as the national language of
Eastern European Jewry.
12 See my article ‘The Emergence of a “Jewish Romanian Literature”: A Socio-cultural Ap-
proach’, Bruckenthalia, no. 1, (2011): 57–64; and ‘Apariţia unei “literaturi evreieşti de limbă
română”. O abordare socio-culturală’ [The emergence of a ‘Jewish Romanian literature’: A so-
cio-cultural approach], in Lumea evreiască reflectată în literatura română (Iași: Alexandru Ioan
Cuza, 2014), 67–85.
13 Leon Volovici, ‘Scriitor român – Scriitor Evreu’ [Romanian writer – Jewish writer]; ‘Utopie,
ideologie şi literatură: Intelectuali şi scriitori evrei în România în secolul XX’ [Utopia, ideology
and literature: Jewish intellectuals and writers in 20th-century Romania], Vatra, no. 10/11
(2000): 16–20.
‘Virtually ex nihilo’ 139
Romanian intellectual life in its search for ‘national specificity’,14 a direct reac-
tion to the crisis that the creation of Greater Romania, with its diverse cultural
and political regions, posed to the state and to the intellectuals struggling with
integration. All these new regional characteristics and the emerging diversity
were shared by the differing Jewish groups creating the highly fragmented Ro-
manian Jewry.
As a direct response, Yiddish was perceived by many Jewish intellectuals in
Romania as the element capable of connecting all regional communities with
their cultural and political characteristics. Thus, developing Yiddish culture in
areas where acculturation was already significant became a long-term political
and cultural project. According to the 1908 Cernăuți Conference, the plan of es-
tablishing a renewed Yiddish cultural scene in Romania was already in prog-
ress: for example, Yiddish-language cultural journal Licht,15 although it only
lasted for a short time, launched a solid platform to which many interwar intel-
lectual initiatives would later relate. The development of Yiddish theatre and
literature were the two major objectives listed in the first issues of the journal,
and quite a few of the interwar Yiddish cultural activists who subscribed to
these points with a sense of continuity and cultural mission came from the nu-
cleus of the Licht group.
To summarize, with the creation of Greater Romania and eventually the le-
gal emancipation of the Jewish community at the end of the First World War,
factors came into play that secured a new socio-cultural and political context
creating favourable conditions and allowing Yiddish activists to move to Bu-
charest and revive Jewish cultural life on the national level, beginning, of
course, in the capital. The prestige of the old imperial centres of Yiddish culture
declined, while the importance of the capital increased; in this context, a centri-
petal movement may be identified as intellectuals from the newly redesigned
periphery moved to Bucharest, while previously, during the imperial period, a
centrifugal cultural process, generated by settlement restrictions and by the im-
pact of acculturation and modernization, dominated Yiddish-language cultural
life, many choosing vibrant and active peripheral centres. In this case, the Pale
of Settlement situation in the Tsarist Empire was eloquent. In Romania, favour-
able conditions for developing Yiddish theatre and press existed, beginning
14 The ‘national specificity’ debate animated interwar period Romanian intellectual life in the
1920s and 1930s, with contributions from the traditionalist intellectual camp. For further con-
textualization, see Balazs Trencsenyi’s unpublished paper, ‘Autochthonous Modernity: Roma-
nian “Westernizers” and the Discourse of National Specificity in the Interwar Period’.
15 P. Almoni, Epoca ‘Licht’: Istoria unei epoci de lumină în trecutul evreilor din România [The
’Licht’ Era: The history of a glorious era in the history of the Romanian Jewry] (Bucuresti:
Biblioteca Evreească, 1943).
140 Camelia Crăciun
with the last decades of the nineteenth century in areas where the Jewish popu-
lation represented the majority, still speaking Yiddish, but more inclined to-
wards secular modern life and culture (e.g. Northern Moldavia). On the other
hand, during the interwar period, the cultural debates, the Yiddish activists and
the creation of Yiddish-language cultural products (literature and press) moved
to Bucharest where traditionally the largest acculturated population resided.
Thus, in Bucharest, Yiddish culture began to attract not only the acculturated
public, but also the non-Jewish intellectuals who were fascinated by Yiddish
theatre during the interwar period.
16 Iacob Groper (1890–1966) was a Yiddish-language poet and cultural activist. Born in North-
ern Moldavia, he spent his youth in Iași and eventually moved to Bucharest in 1918, where he
quickly established himself as the most important modern Yiddish-language poet. Unable to
adapt to the communist regime after the end of the Second World War, he made aliyah in 1964,
settling in Israel.
17 The shtetl (the Yiddish term for ‘town’) represents the common semi-urban settlement in-
habited mostly by Jewish population in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe.
‘Virtually ex nihilo’ 141
an important means for promoting Jewish identity and culture among the com-
munities of Romania.
From the beginning, the journal included substantial articles dedicated to
the importance of Yiddish theatre in Romania as being an essential and mostly
accessible means for promoting Yiddish culture within the masses. In the pro-
grammatic articles of the journal, the editors declared:
Our program is interested … in Jewish theatre. The only way to preserve Yid-
dish culture, more effective than anything else, is this theatre … the Jewish
scene should be a means of educating the public, of bringing the Jews closer
through Yiddish … The Jewish theatre is the only way to bring closer and to fa-
cilitate communication among different layers of the Jewish population.18
Indeed, Licht’s enthusiastic presentation of Yiddish theatre was based on a
whole Yiddish theatre culture and history in Romania, even before the journal’s
theoretical platform and initiatives. In 1876, Iași, a major Yiddish cultural centre
with a Jewish community reaching 40 per cent of the city’s population, became
the place where the first Yiddish professional theatre in the world was created
when Avram Goldfaden founded his company. Touring successfully across East-
ern Europe, Goldfaden promoted Romania as a popular destination for Yiddish
actors and companies who travelled extensively and performed in the country,
attracting and educating a large public on Yiddish drama. Thus, immediately
after the end of the First World War, many local companies started to perform
different types of theatrical productions, including musical, revue and drama.
In the post-war context, many famous Yiddish-language actors came to Roma-
nia from all over the world: Misha Fishzon, Paul Baratoff (‘Freie Yiddishe Folk-
sbiene’ of Vienna), Solomon Stramer (Jewish theatre ‘Habimah’ performing in
Transylvania), Sara Kanner, Maurice Siegler, Molly Picon, Yosef Bulov, Nelly
Kassman, Chaim Prizant, Jacob Rechtzeit, Ludwig Satz, Maurice Schwartz, Herz
Grossbart, Sidi Thal, Benny Adler, Seidy Gluck, the Siegler company, Herman
Yablokoff and Jacob Kalich who performed plays that had been successful in
America and in other Western European countries. Thus, Yiddish theatre played
an important role in Jewish cultural life in Romania both before and after the
First World War.
Stimulating and reflecting a dynamic cultural life in which Yiddish litera-
ture and cultural press (theatre in particular) were highly active and popular in
the first decades of the twentieth century, the Licht journal’s initiatives pro-
moted the ideals voiced during the Cernăuți Conference, not only offering a the-
18 Licht, year I, no. 2 (1914): 97, apud Israil Bercovici, O sută de ani de teatru evreiesc în Ro-
mânia [One hundred years of Jewish theatre in Romania] (București: Editura Integral, 1998), 117
[my translation].
142 Camelia Crăciun
oretical and intellectual platform, but also a space for dissemination. The Licht
group and their journal essentially paved the road for the emergence of interwar
Yiddish cultural life while setting up theoretical platforms and action pro-
grammes, transposing the ideas of the Cernăuți Conference of 1908 into a lo-
cally adapted programme.
I owe my personal development, from a literary and theatrical perspective, to the Roma-
nian environment, just as my great predecessor, the father of Yiddish theatre, Avram
Goldfaden, who reached his potential as a theatre creator only in Romania, although he
travelled through the whole world, through Jewish centres of different sizes and develop-
ment stages … I have understood that the only way to attract the great Jewish masses is to
propose a traditional-cultural theatre. Not even a literary theatre which I greatly sup-
ported during that time … This is why I created a socio-political theatre, a revue-theatre
which, I think, was at the time the first ever theatre of this type in Yiddish. This type of
theatre was born in Bucharest on the eve of the October Revolution … I presented on stage
in ironical terms the bourgeois assimilation process, I attacked the rabbinical authorities,
I have fought for progressist Jewish culture, for Jewish emancipation, for their citizenship
rights … for Yiddish-language progressist literature.19
Following his ideas and integrating the public’s needs, in 1917 Yankev Shtern-
berg created a theatre-revue in Yiddish, an avant-gardist project20 also known
as the Yiddish Theatre of Bucharest; it was the first of its type in Yiddish and it
managed to attract a significant audience. In this theatre, Shternberg staged sa-
tirical revues based on scripts written by himself and his collaborators, writers
Yankev Botoshanski and Moyshe Altman.21 Between 1917 and 1918, he wrote
and produced nine plays and satirical revues in Yiddish, adding new artistic
trends to the popular ‘Goldfadenian’ tradition while taking audience preference
into account, including theatrical innovation brought by I. L. Peretz and other
modernist Yiddish writers. During these years, Shternberg started to assert him-
self as one of the most popular directors in interwar Romania.
His two collaborators, Botoshanski and Altman, both equally fascinating
Yiddish-speaking intellectuals of the period, had moved to Bucharest from other
parts of the newly created Greater Romania. Altman, born in the same year and
in the same shtetl as Shternberg, was a prose writer and journalist who received
the same religious education as his theatre director friend, later attending the
Russian school in Kamenets Podolski. Unlike Shternberg, however, in 1919 Alt-
man moved to Cernăuți and worked as a lecturer on Jewish and world literature,
travelling within Bessarabian shtetls for different Jewish cultural institutions
and publications (e.g. Yiddish Cultural Federation of Romania). After an early
start in Yiddish poetry at age 14, he made his debut with Blendenish [Radiance],
a volume of prose published in Cernăuți in 1926. Although his decision to move
to Bucharest came late (in the early 1930s), his collaboration with Shternberg
and the Romanian Yiddish press began much earlier and had already secured
him a solid reputation in Romania.
Shternberg’s second collaborator, Botoshanski, was a writer, journalist and
playwright. A few years younger than Shternberg, Botoshanski was born in
1892 (or, according to other sources, in 1895) in the same Bessarabian province
and received a traditional religious education which was still common during
that period. For a while, Botoshanski had entertained the idea of continuing his
studies in a yeshiva, but he abandoned it after a few years and finished his edu-
cation in Russian schools, both in Odessa and in Chișinău. The intensive proc-
ess of acculturating to the Russian language, common amongst the Jewish pop-
20 Ibid., 119.
21 Moyshe Altman (1890–1981) was a Yiddish-language writer and journalist. Born in Bessar-
abia, he moved in 1919 to Cernăuți and eventually to Bucharest in the early 1930s, working
mainly for Jewish cultural institutions. He wrote about the life of Bessarabian Jews. Leaving for
Chișinău in 1940 and later to Central Asia during the Second World War, Altman was sentenced
to 10 years in Stalinist work camps. Released after five years, he returned to Cernăuți where he
continued to write in Yiddish till the end of his life.
‘Virtually ex nihilo’ 145
22 Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theatre (New York: Syracuse
University Press, 1996), 221.
146 Camelia Crăciun
within Romanian circles (ignoring any linguistic barriers), having been enthusi-
astically introduced to the larger public by well-known intellectuals and jour-
nalists such as Ion Marin Sadoveanu or Victor Eftimiu, or by popular actors
such as Tanți Cutava. Furthermore, the songs of Vilner Trupe immediately be-
came hits. Romanian-language theatres proposed various collaborative projects
to the company management, subsequently generating a general increase of in-
terest in Yiddish culture which materialized in requests to stage Yiddish plays
in Romanian and to organize Yiddish literary evenings involving Romanian ac-
tors. Vilner Trupe’s widespread popularity led to the founding of a number of
‘Friends of the Jewish Theatre’ associations in Bucharest and in provincial cities
with the purpose of financially supporting the company.
In Romania, Vilner Trupe’s activity was coordinated and managed by
Shternberg who was the artistic director of the company between 1924 and 1927.
During these years, Shternberg produced plays by I. L. Peretz, Sholem Alei-
chem, Osip Dymov, Gogol and Tolstoy which represented important events not
only for the Yiddish-speaking public, but also for cultural life in Bucharest in
general. With Shternberg managing the artistic direction of the company, Vilner
Trupe achieved great success; this was largely due to Shternberg’s interest in
modernism and avant-gardism which transformed the company into an avant-
garde theatre and further offered innovative perspectives on directing and stag-
ing. Between 1924 and 1927, the company resided in Romania; however, despite
their popularity, Vilner Trupe dissolved due to financial difficulties and to the
fact that some of the actors were offered professional contracts in the US and
Eastern Europe.
Shternberg’s next theatrical project was Bucharest Yiddish Theatre Studio
(BITS) in 1930 which brought together talented artists such as M. H. Maxy, Ar-
thur Kolnik, Moise Rubingher, Max Halm, M. Poleanski, Haim Schwartzmann,
as well as actors from the Kovno Trupe, e.g. Levitas, David Licht, Glezer, Kaplan,
Olshanetzkaya, Ruth Taro, Scheinbaum. From the beginning, BITS was very
successful, although Shternberg’s innovative modernist approach earned him
some critics. His staging of Peretz’s Bay nakht afn altn mark [At night at the Old
Market] was highly acclaimed and well-received in the local reviews; the re-
puted cultural journal Adam dedicated a whole issue23 to the impact of the pre-
miere, bringing together reactions from Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals
23 The Romanian-language Jewish cultural journal Adam dedicated its sixteenth issue of the
first year of the publication, appearing on 1 February 1930, to Yankev Shternberg’s version of I.
L. Peretz’s ‘Bay nakht afn altn mark’; A. Toma, ‘Însuflețitorul’ [The animator]; Dr. L. Ghelerter,
‘Se face ziuă…’ [The dawn has come…]; Ury Benador, ‘Sternberg’; Tudor Arghezi, ‘Studio Tea-
trului Idiș, din București. ‘Noaptea în Târgul Vechi’ [Bucharest Yiddish theatre studio: ‘a night
in the old marketplace’]; H. St. Streitman, ‘Un creator’ [A creator].
‘Virtually ex nihilo’ 147
24 Tudor Arghezi, ‘Studio Teatrului Idiș, din București. “Noaptea în Târgul Vechi”’, Adam, no.
16 (1 February 1930).
148 Camelia Crăciun
travelling from midnight on, sleeping during the day and performing every eve-
ning in another city. Everywhere we went, the halls were full.25
Indeed, the cultural importance of the Yiddish theatre was of the utmost in
Bucharest. To honour the creation of Yiddish theatre on Romania, the Jewish
Cultural Federation held a jubilee on 9 May 1926 at ‘Jignița’ Garden in Buchar-
est. Among the guests were representatives from major Bucharest theatres:
well-known actors such as Constantin Nottara and N. Soreanu were there on be-
half of the National Theatre; V. Maximilian, one of the most important Bulandra
company stars; Constantin Tănase, the manager of Cărăbuș company, partici-
pating on behalf of the artists’ trade union along with representatives of the ar-
tistic association Scena. When they began collecting funds for the creation of a
permanent Jewish theatre named after Avram Goldfaden, the first who joined
and made donations out of professional solidarity were actors Tănase and Not-
tara.26
In parallel with theatre and artistic performances (particularly in the
1930s), Yiddish literature and cultural press flourished in Bucharest when the
theatrical boom was at its peak. After a decade spent in Bucharest, young poet
and playwright Itsik Manger27 left Romania for Poland, aiming for a larger and
more stimulating environment for his art. Still, before his departure, he pub-
lished his debut volume of verse Shtern afn dakh: Lid un balade [Stars on the
Roof: Songs and Ballads] with Șalom Alehem Publishing House in Bucharest,
confirming the general intellectual trend already discussed, but also suggesting
an alternative motivation for migration towards traditional major Yiddish cul-
tural centres. Leaving his native Cernăuți for Iași and eventually Bucharest, It-
sik Manger made the same career choices as many other Yiddish-speaking intel-
lectuals; nevertheless, belonging to a younger generation than the intellectuals
presented in the current article, Manger returned to the symbolic Eastern Euro-
pean routes of Yiddish culture, abandoning the newly established Yiddish
centre of Bucharest for a more vibrant Warsaw which obviously offered more
opportunities for the young poet. The following year, Manger was one of the
25 Chayele Grober, Mayn veg aleyn [My path alone] (Tel Aviv: Peretz Publishing, 1968), 60–65
apud Israil Bercovici, O sută de ani, 164 [my translation].
26 Bercovici, O sută de ani, 140.
27 Itsik Manger (1901–1969) was a well-reputed Yiddish poet and playwright. Born in Cernăuți,
he moved to Iași during the First World War and eventually to Bucharest in the early 1920s.
After his editorial debut in 1929, he moved to Warsaw and was quickly recognized as one of the
most important Yiddish poets of his time. Forced to leave Poland in 1938 due to the anti-Jewish
legislation, he moved to Paris and subsequently to London in 1942. Surviving the Holocaust,
Manger moved to New York in 1951 and settled eventually in Israel in 1966. His poems were
included in the UNESCO Anthology of poetry (1961) representing Yiddish-language creations.
‘Virtually ex nihilo’ 149
four writers accepted in the Yiddish PEN Club (with Yisroel Rabon, Iosef Papier-
nikov and I. B. Singer) – a clear sign that his career choice to move towards the
old Yiddish centres eventually paid off.
Although he moved to Bucharest in 1918 and bore the reputation of being
the most accomplished modern Yiddish Romanian poet (even before the inter-
war period), Iacob Groper made his editorial debut in print as late as 1934 with
the volume In shotn fun a shtayn [In the Shadow of a Tombstone]. It was the
only volume he published during his lifetime, and it was later also translated
into Romanian. Born in 1890 in Mihăileni, Northern Moldavia, Iacob Groper at-
tended the Israelite-Romanian school in his home town, continuing his studies
at the University of Iași and eventually moving to Bucharest after the end of the
First World War. Obviously, his secular education and training led him towards
a more acculturated and modern approach to Yiddish and Romanian culture
which, naturally, singled him among the other Yiddish-language intellectuals
presented in the current article. Nevertheless, Groper had an important role in
the promotion and development of the Yiddish language and Yiddish culture in
Romania – due more so to his ideological creed than to his education and for-
mation. At the start, he wrote poetry in Romanian, German and Yiddish, but
after his participation in the Cernăuți Conference of 1908 which refined his cul-
tural affiliation, he eventually chose to write in Yiddish for the rest of his liter-
ary career. After receiving positive feedback for his poems from the poet H. N.
Bialik who encouraged him to publish his work, Groper made his debut in the
literary press in 1914 in the Vilnius literary journal Di yudishe velt [The Jewish
World] and continued to publish in other literary periodicals in Lviv, București,
Cernăuți, Brăila, Chișinău and London. His ideological opinions, as well as his
cultural activism had already manifested in Iași in 1914 when he founded the
literary association and journal Licht (to which a separate section of the current
article was dedicated). Groper’s creations became so popular that they perme-
ated folklore and were even passed on orally to the non-Jewish population; they
were translated into Romanian and widely praised by critics. Highly appreci-
ated for his lectures, Groper was one of the most visible Yiddish-language intel-
lectuals and activists in interwar Romania.
After a period of initiatives and moderate development which covered the
second half of the nineteenth century, the Yiddish press in Bucharest began to
severely decline after 1900. According to historian Bianca Bretan,28 between
1900 and 1939 (the moment when anti-Jewish legislation was implemented),
28 Bianca Doris Bretan, Istoria presei sioniste de limbă română în perioada 1897–1938 [The
history of Romanian-language Zionist press between 1897–1938] (Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universi-
tară Clujeană, 2010), 86.
150 Camelia Crăciun
Yiddish was not widely used in the press anymore, except for some publications
appearing in limited geographical areas where Yiddish tradition already existed
(Bessarabia, Bucovina and Moldavia). Nevertheless, a new Yiddish weekly pub-
lication, Di Vokh, appeared in Bucharest in 1934. Behind this initiative was an
editorial team consisting of the prolific Shternberg (who had already edited
modernist and socialist periodicals in Cernăuți and București) and his creative
collaborator Moyshe Altman, along with the esteemed critic, Shlomo Bickel,29
who had recently joined their team.
Born in 1896 in Ustechko, a shtetl in Austrian Galicia, Shlomo Bickel had
access to a religious education, continuing with his high school studies in Kolo-
myia. Between 1915 and 1918, Bickel served as an officer in the Austrian army,
while between 1919 and 1922, he studied law at the University of Cernăuți. At
age 26, after receiving his law degree, Bickel moved to Bucharest to practice law
and to become more involved in Yiddish cultural life. His religious education
combined with his liberal professional training offered a double career for him;
on one hand, Bickel worked as a lawyer, and on the other hand, he cultivated
Yiddish culture and literature, became one of the most important cultural acti-
vists in the interwar period. He enjoyed the reputation of being the best analyst
of Yiddish cultural phenomenon in Romania. For two decades, Bickel was at
the centre of the Yiddish cultural revival in Cernăuți and Bucharest. Despite his
cultural interests, however, Bickel’s official debut in print occurred rather late:
in Cernăuți in Di frayhayt [Freedom], the Bukovinian Zionists’ weekly which he
edited between 1920 and 1922. Later, his career as a literary critic and journalist
developed in Bucharest where he and Yankev Shternberg edited a number of
literary publications together. He also contributed numerous texts on Yiddish
culture in Romania to many other Yiddish journals abroad, among them, the
Literarishe Bleter [Literary pages] of Warsaw. Apart from his career as a literary
critic and journalist, Bickel was involved in promoting Yiddish culture through
the Kultur-Lige30 [Cultural league] of Bucharest for whom he served as presi-
29 Shlomo Bickel (1896–1969) was a literary critic, journalist and cultural activist for the Yid-
dish language. Born in Austrian Galicia, he studied law at Cernăuți University and eventually
moved to Bucharest in 1922. After almost two decades in Bucharest, he moved to New York in
1939 and continued his activity as a Yiddish literary historian and critic, working for various
Yiddish-language publications and as the head of research at YIVO. As president of Yiddish
PEN Club (1956–1959), Bickel published studies on Yiddish culture and wrote a memoir on his
cultural activity in interwar Romania.
30 Kultur-Lige was the name of a cultural organization founded in Eastern Europe with the
purpose of supporting the development of Yiddish culture and language. While in Bukovina
and Bessarabia branches of the organization were founded in 1919, it only became active in
Bucharest in 1931.
‘Virtually ex nihilo’ 151
dent. Before leaving for the United States in 1939, where he continued his career
as a cultural activist and critic by becoming head of research at YIVO, literary
critic for daily Der Tog [The day] and co-editor for the monthly Die Zukunft [The
future] in New York, Bickel managed to publish a collection of his best essays,
Inzikh un arumzikh [Inside and around Oneself, 1936], the volume having been
very well-received within the Yiddish community.
In 1935, two very important volumes of Yiddish literature were published by
both Shternberg and Altman. Although Altman published his first volume (Blen-
denish, a collection of short stories) in 1926 in Cernăuți, his first novel, Di viner
karete [The Viennese Coach], didn’t appear until 1935 in Bucharest and won
him the reputation of being the most important Yiddish-language novelist in
Romania. That same year, Shternberg published his first book of poetry:
although he was very present in the Yiddish press and well-known for more
than a decade for his theatrical success, Shtot in profil: Lid un grotesk [City in
Profile: Songs and Grotesque] turned him into a celebrated poet overnight. The
following year, two other volumes strengthened the position of Bucharest as a
new Yiddish literary centre: Bickel’s aforementioned volume of essays (Inzikh
un arumzikh) was presented in the Yiddish press as a cultural turning-point;
while Altman’s novel, Medrash Pinkhes [Midrash according to Pinkhes], was de-
scribed by critics as the most interesting Yiddish-language novel published after
the First World War. Altman’s next novel Shmeterlingen [Butterflies] was pub-
lished in 1939 before the anti-Jewish legislation halted Yiddish cultural creativ-
ity in Romania. During the mid-1930s, Bucharest had certainly started to build
its reputation as a dynamic centre for Yiddish literary creativity in competition
with Cernăuți, for example, where the pre-First World War’s intense activity be-
gan to severely decline.
Conclusions
The emergence of Bucharest as a centre of Yiddish culture during the interwar
period occurred in the context generated by the end of the First World War and
by the emancipation of the Jewish community of Romania. Indeed, the condi-
tions created by the new geo-political reorganization of Eastern Europe, and
subsequently by the newly created Romanian state with its new provinces, as
well as by the long-awaited legal emancipation that granted full rights and cit-
izenship to its Romanian Jewish population, stimulated a series of initiatives for
the development, promotion and preservation of Yiddish cultural life.
152 Camelia Crăciun
After being rescued by the Kasztner train along with 1,683 other Jews, 50-year-
old Hungarian writer Béla Zsolt (1895–1949) chose to come back from Switzer-
land to Budapest in the summer of 1945.1 Amidst the ruins of the capital of the
new ‘democratic’ Hungary occupied by the Soviets, he started a weekly by the
name of Haladás [The Progress] on behalf of the Hungarian Radical Party, the
MRP [Magyar Radikális Párt]. The MRP represented the Hungarian left-minded
bourgeois liberals, but was also closely associated to socialist intellectuals.
With a bunch of other survivor writers, Zsolt reshaped a utopian liberal Hun-
gary that had very little chance to meet the actual historical trends on the eve of
the Cold War. Being a radical meant being excluded from power; a power that
until the 1947 election, was shared by the four main parties of the time: the
Communist Party (MKP), the Social Democratic Party (SzDP), the National Peas-
ant Party (NPP) and the Independent Small-Holder Party (FKgP), each of which
stood within the Hungarian National Independent Front [Magyar Nemzeti Füg-
getlen Front]. In 1947, the MRP managed to send six MPs to the Assembly, in-
cluding Zsolt himself. Notwithstanding the disillusions that post-war justice
and political life poured on Zsolt and his fellow intellectuals, it seems they kept
a pre-war faith in a better Hungary that would recognize Christian and Jewish
Hungarians alike as its sons. Should such a commitment be considered as a viv-
id example of cognitive dissonance?
1 Rezső Kasztner (1906–1957), a Zionist activist from Cluj, co-founded the Relief and Rescue
Committee in Budapest in 1942, a clandestine group that smuggled Jews from Slovakia and
Poland to Hungary. During the deportations of Hungarian Jews in 1944, he negotiated the res-
cue of Jews with the SS, notably with H. Himmler’s envoy, Colonel Kurt Becher. On 30 June
1944, the ‘Kasztner train’ left Budapest with 1,684 Jews. They first arrived at a camp in Bergen-
Belsen, and eventually reached Switzerland in two groups, on 21 August and 7 December 1944.
After the war, in Israel, Kasztner was tried for collaborating with the Nazis but he was assassi-
nated before the trial was over. See: Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági, Self-Financing Genocide: The
Gold Train, the Becher Case and the Wealth of Jews, English trans. Enikő Koncz, Jim Tucker and
András Kádár (Budapest/New York: CEU Press, 2004); and Anna Porter, Kastner’s Train: the
True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust (New York: Walker & Co, 2008).
Annotation: This research was supported by two grants, from the Rothschild Foundation (Lon-
don) and from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (Paris).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-008
156 Clara Royer
tellectuals and petit bourgeois voters.5 Yet, Zsolt created a trend within the
party that diverged both from Csécsy’s group and from the pragmatic politicians
gathered around Zsigmond Kende (1888–1971), the leader of the party at that
time.
Zsolt actually very quickly booted Csécsy out of The Progress and gathered
together old friends and like-minded journalists such as social democrats Miksa
Fenyő (1877–1972), László Faragó (1896–1967) and András Mihály Rónai (1913–
1992), but also traditionally less committed writers such as Aladár Komlós
(1892–1982) and Ernő Szép (1884–1953) – most of whom were Jewish survivors.
Yet, dissent within the party did not really manifest as both Csécsy and Zsolt
claimed a common political and ethical stance in two parallel editorials in first
issue of The Progress.6 The party was to be independent and unaligned with the
coalition government, which was created under Zoltán Tildy on 15 November,
and therefore in the opposition. In its programme, the MRP rejected any class
distinctions and commited itself to defend private property, land reform and
private business.7
Quickly enough, The Progress came to be seen as a pro-assimilationist,
democratic and bourgeois platform; although, its editors tried to get rid of the
‘Jewish’ label and protested that their contributors were both Christians and ‘Is-
raelites’ (a word clearly inherited from nineteenth century Hungarian liberal
ideology).8 Even after the catastrophe of the deportations and the extermina-
tion, these Jewish Hungarian writers did not want to ‘dissimilate’ themselves,
and like their contemporaries, most of them decided to stay in the country (in
direct contrast to what was going on in Czechoslovakia or Poland at the time).9
But in the paper Politika, Jenő Katona (1905–1978), the Independent Small-
5 See the list presented for the town council elections (budapesti törvényhatósági választások)
which gathers Zsolt, writer and actress Ilona Harmos (Dezső Kosztolányi’s widow) and other
artists and journalists: Haladás, no. 1 (1 October 1945).
6 Imre Csécsy, ‘A pártatlanok pártja’ [The party of the non-partisans] and Béla Zsolt, ‘Miért
járunk külön utakon?’ [Why do we walk separate roads?], Haladás, no. 1 (1 October 1945): 1.
7 See Lajos Izsák, ‘A polgári ellenzéki pártok Magyarország nemzetközi helyzetéről, külpoliti-
kai lehetőségéről, 1944–1947’ [The bourgeois opposition parties on Hungary’s international
situation and foreign policy options, 1944–1947], Századok, no. 5/6 (1990): 757–8. The pro-
gramme of the party is reproduced pp. 297–304 in Lajos Izsák, Polgári ellezéki pártok Magyar-
országon 1944–1949 [The bourgeois opposition parties in Hungary 1944–1949] (Budapest: Kos-
suth Könyvkiadó, 1983), 35–43.
8 István Bródy, ‘Temessük el!’ [Let’s bury it!], Haladás, (8 February 1946): 2.
9 See András Kovács’s analysis on such peculiarity in his ‘Jewish Groups and Identity Strat-
egies in Post-Communist Hungary’, in New Jewish Identities: Contemporary Europe and Beyond,
eds, Zvi Gitelman, Barry Kosmin and András Kovács (Budapest/New York: CEU Press, 2002),
211–42.
158 Clara Royer
Holder Party’s chief of press and MP, claimed The Progress carried a ‘moral yel-
low stain’ on Hungarian intellectual life.10 And when distressed by an outburst
of anti-Semitism in the daily they read, even communist readers would turn to
The Progress to complain about it.11 Indeed, survivor writers published in The
Progress more than in any other platform, which tends to show they could find
in its columns a broader space for expression. To this, Hungarian Jewish poet
György Faludi (1910–2006) testified as well when, as he broke away from The
Progress in 1947, he declared the paper only pledged to defend the Jews in Hun-
gary and lacked any other political vision.12
The Progress was indeed the weekly that published the most on Jewish
topics, with at least one such article per issue, while the other parties’ period-
icals barely published on Jewish topics at all.13 Such a discrepancy doesn’t nec-
essarily imply that the other parties had little concern for the Holocaust, but
rather shows how much our perception of the Holocaust today differs from that
of the post-war period. In the field of Hungarian culture, one has to wait for Já-
nos Pilinszky’s poems, and even more for Imre Kertész’s work to fully grasp the
major turning point the Holocaust represented in European culture. Contempo-
raries were more obsessed with post-war reconstruction, the new world order
and the domestic reforms in a so-called free Hungary. Furthermore, and this is
more specific to Hungarian history, even after the Holocaust, men and women
who were perceived as Jews, although this identity hardly mattered to them
(such as Mátyás Rákosi, Ernő Gerő, György Lukács and so forth), were at the top
of political and cultural life in Budapest. Still, it made it easier to forget that al-
most half a million Jews had been exterminated.14
10 ‘Lelki sárgafolttal vagy sárgafolt nélkül?’ [With or without the moral yellow stain?]; Rónai
Mihály András, ‘Miért hadonászunk?’ [Why do we scramble?], Haladás, no. 22 (29 May 1947): 3.
11 For instance: Károly Posta, ‘“Judeodemokrata”: Levél a Haladás-hoz’ [‘Judeodemocrat’: let-
ter to The Progress], Haladás, no. 20 (15 May 1947): 3. Posta wrote to The Progress to complain
about anti-Semitic discourses in the periodical Tovább (regarding Andor Miklós, converted in
1919, described as ‘a Jew according to the Nurnberg laws’).
12 György Faludi, ‘Ave atque vale’ [Hail and farewell], Búcsú a Haladástól (26 August 1947): 5.
Farewell to Haladás was a one-issue mock-paper gathering all the Socialist writers who split
with The Progress because of the MRP’s electoral tactics for the 1947 parliament elections. See
note 83.
13 See Viktor Karády, ‘Traumatisme, refoulement, oubli volontaire, tabou. La mémoire de la
Shoah dans la Hongrie Soviétisée’, in Histoire de l’oubli en contexte post-socialiste et post-col-
onial, eds, Patrick Vauday and Paula Zupanc (Koper: Publishing House Annales, 2009), 173–
88.
14 See Paul Gradvohl, ‘Juifs et communisme en Hongrie’, in Cultures juives, Europe centrale et
orientale, Amérique du Nord, eds, Cylvie Claveau, Didier Francfort and Stanislaw Fiszer (Paris:
Le Manuscrit, 2012), 99–115.
A Liberal Utopia Againt All Odds 159
The Progress relentlessly covered three major topics: the politics and conse-
quences of Jewish extermination, the trials of war criminals, and the post-war
manifestations of anti-Semitism in Hungary and Europe (especially in Poland
and Slovakia). But the idea behind it was that the struggle against anti-Semi-
tism was a test for democracy. The Progress’ authors called for a clear break
from pre-war politics that had corrupted the younger generations at school with
its revisionist and anti-Semitic ideology.15 They insisted on the need to re-edu-
cate Hungarian society, and this became a main topic within the many polemics
they launched against their fellow non-Jewish intellectuals – especially after an
Institute for Popular Education [Népi Művelődési Intézet] was assigned to the
care of poet Gyula Illyés (1902–1983) by the minister of Education (Dezső Ker-
esztury 1904–1996), with the aim to improve education in the countryside.16 Ac-
cording to young poet Gábor Antal (1922–1995), this new institution could only
be a new venue for political and cultural anti-Semitism since it welcomed in its
midst such men who had propagated anti-Semitic ideas at school during the
war.17
As in the rest of post-war Europe, anti-Semitism in Hungary did not vanish
with the liberation of the camps. In 1946, The Progress published around forty-
four articles signed by ten different contributors on what Zsolt (quite incor-
rectly) called ‘new anti-Semitism’: a type of daily anti-Semitism which not only
found its way into private conversation, but also had the power to ignite
crowds. As he attended former Prime minister Béla Imrédy’s trial, social demo-
crat journalist Dezső Király (1896–1966) who was of Jewish origin and the editor
in chief of the satirical Szabad Száj [Free Mouth] at the time, mentioned with
dismay a brief chat he overheard between two men in the hall: ‘This Imrédy guy
sold our country to the Nazis … – Well, what could you expect from a Jew like
15 This is quite a relevant interpretation as Hungarian sociologist Ildikó Szabó shows in: Nem-
zet és szocializáció. A politika szerepe az identitások formálódásában Magyarországon 1867–
2006 [Nation and socialization: the role of politics in the formation of identities in Hungary
1867–2006] (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2009).
16 Keresztury was the target of attacks by The Progress for his anti-Semitic remarks against
government members of Jewish origin after the war. See: Gáspár Remete [Miksa Fenyő], ‘Lev-
elék a Thelemei apátságból – Melyben Hilarios testvér Zsolt Bélával polémizál és az “átnevelés”
problémájáról mond figyelemreméltó dolgokat’ [Letters from the Abbey of Thélème – In which
Brother Hilarios disputes with Bela Zsolt and says things worthy of attention on the problem of
‘reeducation’], Haladás, no. 42 (31 October 1946): 4. Keresztury was also accused of hailing his
pupils with the Hitler salute when he was a Hungarian lector at the Berlin University before the
war: ‘Heil Keresztúry!’, no. 43 (7 November 1946): 5. Keresztury sued Zsolt for slander in 1947,
but Zsolt was not tried for he then enjoyed parliamentary immunity.
17 a. g. [Gábor Antal], ‘Kultúrbotrány!’ [Culture scandal!], Haladás, (8 August 1946): 5.
160 Clara Royer
this?’18 Imrédy, who had enacted the first anti-Jewish law (law XV of 1938) that
restricted the economic activities allowed to the Jews, had been compelled to
resign in May 1939 after a Jewish forefather was discovered among his ances-
tors.
The Progress largely commented upon the pogroms that took place in East-
Central Europe after the war. Hungarian post-war anti-Semitic violence is best
illustrated by the Kunmadaras pogrom which took place on 21 May 1946 (two
dead).19 But as the 1946 Polish pogrom of Kielce was part of a series of violent
anti-Semitic outbursts in Poland (beginning in the summer of 1945), the Kunma-
daras pogrom belongs to a complex cycle in which the return of the deported
Jews, inflation and the black market, the myth of blood libel, the political tac-
tics of the communist party and also the guilt of non-Jews each played a part.20
Kunmadaras had been preceded by anti-Jewish violence in Ózd and Sajószent-
péter (in February), Szegvár (in March), Budapest (4 May 1946)21 and was fol-
lowed by others such as Makó, where the synagogue was burnt down in June,
or Miskolc (from 29 July to 1 August 1946, two dead).22 When commenting on
the Kunmadaras pogrom, Béla Zsolt perceived the hatred that met the Jews who
returned home as a sign of the bleak future awaiting Hungary should the soci-
ety fail to sever its ties with fascism. Behind such a plea for maintaining the
Hungarian Jewish community, Zsolt viewed its security as proof of democracy.23
18 Király Dezső, ‘Pillanatképek a nagy perről’ [Snapshots of the big trial], Haladás, no. 8 (17
November 1945): 2.
19 For a relevant analysis on the Kunmadaras pogrom, see Péter Apor, ‘The Lost Deportations
and the Lost People of Kunmadaras: A Pogrom in Hungary, 1946’, Hungarian Historical Review
2, no. 3 (2013): 566–604.
20 On the importance of the blood libel myth, see the works of Joanna Tokarska-Bakir. In
French: Légendes du sang: pour une anthropologie de l’antisémitisme chrétien, French trans.
Malgorzata Maliszewska (Paris: Albin Michel, 2015).
21 On this pogrom, which started because of a rumor about a four year-old girl who was sup-
posedly missing and was spread by a man renowned for his anti-Semitic acts during the war,
see Andrea Pető, ‘About the Narratives of a Blood Libel Case in post-Shoah Hungary’, in Com-
parative Central European Holocaust Studies, eds, Louise Vasvari and Steven Tötösy de Zepet-
nek (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2011), 240–53. As she relevantly shows, the guilt
and fear felt by non-Jews were crucial triggers in this outburst of violence.
22 See Éva Standeisky, ‘Antiszemita megmozdulások Magyarországon a koalíciós időszakban’
[Anti-Semitic movements in Hungary during the coalition period], Századok, no. 2 (1992): 284–
308. Other blood libels resumed in the following years, such as in Szegvár in May 1948, Hajdú-
nánás in September 1948, and according to János Pelle, again in 1954 in Törökszentmiklós.
János Pelle, ‘Az utolsó hazai vérvádak’ [The last Hungarian blood libels], História, no. 7
(1995): 25–7.
23 Béla Zsolt, ‘Kunmadaras’, art. cit.
A Liberal Utopia Againt All Odds 161
24 Some of whom The Progress branded as moral authorities, for instance the journalist Géza
K. Havas: Haladás, no. 15 (25 April 1946); László Faragó, ‘K. Havas Géza’, no. 23 (19 June 1946).
25 Ignác Romsics, Magyarország története a XX. század [The history of Hungary in the 20th
century] (Budapest: Osiris, 2002), 329.
162 Clara Royer
Indeed, from January 1946 to the end of 1947, that is 102 issues, The Prog-
ress attacked the contributors of Answer in no less than 81 articles. Among
these, 26 targeted writer Péter Veres (1897–1970), the leader of the National
Peasant Party at the time; 12 railed against László Németh (1901–1975), a major
writer and thinker whose anti-Semitism could hardly be questioned; and at
least 7 articles were against Gyula Illyés, who had shown some ambivalence, to
say the least, when the time came to voice protest against the first anti-Jewish
law in 1938, and who, in the course of a literary polemic in 1935, had claimed
the impossibility for a person to be part of two communities (i.e. Jewish and
Hungarian).26 Németh and Illyés were the two spiritual leaders of the pre-war
Answer. These intellectuals who claimed to be népi (or, ‘of the people’) had for
the most part joined the NPP. Before the war, they had shared a common aim
beyond their various political affiliations: the improvement of the peasant con-
dition. This was to be achieved through a land reform in a country still plagued
with a semi-feudal system of big latifundia (a third of the cultivable land be-
longed to one thousand large landowners) that were out of reach for the land-
less and small peasants who were then labelled as the ‘three million beggars’.27
In these intellectuals’ view, land reform was a priority to be achieved notwith-
standing the nature of the regime, and in 1935, Németh, Illyés and other népi
writers attempted to influence Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös, who for his part,
was striving to apply Italian fascist ideas to Hungary.28 What was called the
‘New Spiritual Front’ proved quite vain and was heavily criticized by their for-
mer friends, the urbánus writers. To the latter, such a reform was unthinkable
without a democratic regime, and they disparaged their colleagues’ view of
peasantry as the sole reposit of ‘Hungarianness’ – often at the expense of a sym-
bolical Budapest and its intellectuals of assimilated background whose part
had been critical to the development of Hungarian culture.29 Indeed, since 1934,
the gap within this one literary generation had deepened, specifically due to
26 On Illyés, see Clara Royer, Le Royaume littéraire (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011), 407–9,
and Pál Ács, ‘Fattyazás’, Beszélő, no. 11 (2009). http://beszelo.c3.hu/cikkek/fattyazas.
27 The phrase ‘three million beggars’ was used by economist György Oláh in a 1928 book de-
nouncing rural impoverishment. It became a catchphrase for népi writers in the 1930s.
28 On this episode, the reference study remains that of Miklós Lackó, Válságok-választások
[Crises and choices] (Budapest: Gondolat, 1975), 52–170. On the career and ideology of Gyula
Gömbös, see: József Vonyó, Gömbös Gyula és a jobboldali radikalizmus. Tanulmányok [Gyula
Gömbös and right-wing radicalism: studies] (Pécs: Pannónia, 2001).
29 It may not be irrelevant to remind here of the fact that Jewish writers in Hungary had for the
most part adopted Hungarian as their writing language from the second half of the nineteenth
century on. Between the wars, only one poet still wrote in Yiddish, József Holder (1893–1945),
born in a Hassidic family near Sighetu Marmației (Hgr. Máramarossziget).
A Liberal Utopia Againt All Odds 163
László Németh’s public attack against Jewish writers whose part in Hungarian
culture he judged to be too important.30
But this post-war polemics actually gives out the illusion of continuity in
Hungarian literary life. For one, the literary milieu was now deprived of 72 of its
writers.31 They had been murdered in camps, in forced marches or in ‘labour
service’32 within the Hungarian army, which from the summer of 1940 only in-
volved Jewish men – many of whom were placed in so-called Jewish companies
and sent to the Ukraine after Hungarian troops entered the USSR territories.
Such was the fate of Béla Zsolt who spent 19 months in the Ukraine between
1941 and 1943. For those who remained, the years between 1938 and 1945 had
deeply changed them. Survivors’ traumas could not be ‘fixed’ by the act of writ-
ing anymore (some, such as Komlós, actually gave up on poetry and fiction al-
together), as could have been the case before the extermination when literature
seemed to offer a shelter and an ideal escape when confronted with anti-Semi-
tism. To them it was necessary to break away from the past of the Horthy era
and the war.
Still, the polemic which unfolded on the pages of The Progress was not in-
terpreted as a break: at best, it was seen as the resumption of old pre-war quar-
rels;33 at worst, as the proof of a desire for revenge on the part of survivor writ-
ers, especially of the review’s mastermind, Béla Zsolt.34 Yet, the analysis of such
30 On the népi-urbánus quarrel and the literary polemics around the ‘Jewish question’, see
Clara Royer, ‘Un engagement paradoxal? Écrivains juifs et népi dans la Hongrie de l’entre-
deux-guerres’, in Cultures juives. Europe centrale et orientale, Amérique du Nord, eds, Cylvie
Claveau, Stanisław Fiszer and Didier Francfort (Paris: Le Manuscrit, 2012), 367–415.
31 According to Romsics, Magyarország története, 320.
32 This labour service (munkaszolgálat, or musz) was initiated on 1 July 1939 by the decree
5070/1939. At first it involved both Jewish and non-Jewish men. The recruits, whose uniform
carried a distinctive letter ‘M’, carried out tasks of general interest whether military or not. On
23 August 1940, the Defense Department regulated the musz so that only Jewish men would be
recruited. Those who were older or ill and could not be sent to military troops, would carry out
works of general interest (draining of marshes, land clearings and so forth).
33 As exposed by an anthology gathering pre-war and post-war articles, aiming at presenting
the major texts published during the quarrel between urbánus and népi writers: Péter Sz. Nagy,
ed., A népi-urbánus vita dokumentumai 1932–1947 [The documents of the debates between népi
and urbánus writers, 1932–1947] (Budapest: Rakéta, 1990).
34 See: Zoltán Szőcs, ‘Szennyez az emléke is’ [His souvenir too contaminates], Havi Magyar
Fórum, juin 2009. http://www.miep.hu/fuggetlenseg/2009/junius/12/22.htm (last accessed 12
June 2013). Mr Szőcs, a journalist affiliated to the MIÉP (Life and Justice Party), merely lists
The Progress’s so-called ‘attacks’ as evidence of Béla Zsolt’s hatred and contemptible nature,
although the polemic was carried on by a dozen writers who were not all Jewish – such as
László Bóka, who was from a reformed background and signed eleven articles, that is, as many
as Zsolt himself.
164 Clara Royer
an intellectual divide after the war and the Holocaust demands taking into ac-
count elements that are too often overlooked: on the one hand, the commitment
of these survivors to the idea of a democratic Hungary; on the other hand, the
ambiguity of such népi writers, who far from being publicly scrutinized, were
actually sought after as political partners by the left-wing parties.
In the opinion of most of The Progress’ contributors, the népi writers kept
on betraying anti-Semitic feelings under their claim to work for the greater good
of the ‘people’ they claimed to represent. Such a suspicion was not entirely
groundless. In an investigation on the ‘Jewish question’ after the war and pub-
lished by the boulevard magazine The Illustrated Observator, Imre Kovács
(1913–1980), vice-president of the NPP, drew a distinction between good and
bad Jews (a dichotomy already used by Németh) and advocated a reconciliation
based on the ‘mutual confession’ of the ‘errors’ of the past. As for Illyés, he de-
nied the existence of a ‘Jewish question’ in post-war Hungary and saw in it
sheer political agitation.35 Népi writers usually showed solidarity with their
more compromised fellow writers: Veres defended László Németh, ‘who lived
through and suffered all the evils of the Hungarian people in his sensitive soul.
He made mistakes. But only those who do nothing can never make any mis-
takes.’36 The népi camp was not devoid of Jewish friendships: when Németh
came under the fire of The Progress, survivor Zoltán Zelk (1906–1981), a poet
and a communist, broke off with András Mihály Rónay in a violent article pub-
lished in the socialist daily.37
‘Is everything for sale?’ asked Béla Zsolt in an editorial commenting on Józ-
sef Erdélyi’s (1896–1978) defence at his trial in 1947 in Budapest. The poet had
indeed blamed his anti-Semitic writings in far-right papers, and his commit-
ment to the Arrow Cross Party during the war, on petty money issues.38 This né-
pi poet, who had been awarded several times, was renowned for demanding
justice for the Tiszaeszlár case in his poem ‘Eszter Solymosi’s Blood’ published
in 1937 in the far-right newspaper Virradat [Dawn].39 As Hungarian historian
35 ‘Az új antiszemitizmus’ [The new anti-Semitism], Képes Figyelő, no. 4 (22 September 1945).
36 After the account of a literary conference held by népi writers in the communist daily: ‘Irók
az idők sodrában. Népi írók vitadélutánja’ [Writers in the twist of time: the afternoon debate of
the népi writers], Nép Szabad (12 May 1946): 7.
37 Zelk Zoltán, ‘Hozzászólás’ [Comment], Szabadság (29 March 1946): 2.
38 Béla Zsolt, ‘Minden eladó?’ [Is everything for sale?], Haladás (29 May 1947): 1.
39 The Tiszaeszlár case refers to the blood libel which divided Hungarian public opinion after
the disappearence of a 15-year-old Christian maid, Eszter Solymosi, in April 1882 even after the
13 Jewish accused were acquitted in August 1883. See Andrew Handler, Blood Libel at Tiszaes-
zlár (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); and György Kövér’s more recent social his-
tory, A tiszaeszlári dráma [The Tiszaeszlár drama] (Budapest: Osiris, 2011).
A Liberal Utopia Againt All Odds 165
Éva Standeisky has compellingly shown, Erdélyi’s trial was botched40 and The
Progress’ contributors were not fooled. In an article titled ‘The Invisible Judge-
ment’, writer Miklós Gyárfás (1915–1992), later to become a prolific author of
comedies, described the trial as a ‘literary morning session’ in the course of
which both prosecution and defence competed with quotes from the accused’s
work: ‘In this academic atmosphere one was gradually led to believe that the
hearing had no other goal but to show us who knew best József Erdélyi’s poems.’41
Erdélyi was sentenced to three years in prison and granted presidential pardon
as quickly as 1948; and in 1955, he was exculpated.
Erdélyi is the emblematic case of post-war literary purge in Hungary. Very
few writers were summoned to appear in court. In September 1945, far-right
writers Lajos Kádár (1898–1982) and Lajos Nagy Dövényi (1906–1964) were
tried. The latter, who had rewritten the Tiszaeszlár myth in his play Ártatlanok
[The Innocents] that was performed at the Mádach Theatre in the summer of
1944 (and again after the Arrow Cross putsch in October), was sentenced to
death before he was saved by presidential pardon in January 1946. Ferenc Kiss,
the stage director of the play, was also condemned on 27 November 1945 to
eight years of hard labour for his ‘anti-Semitic and his anti-communist cultural
policy’.42 However, with the exception of some of the leaders of the far-right
press (e.g. Ferenc Rajniss [1893–1946] who was executed as the Arrow Cross
minister of Education and Religious Affairs), in Hungary, there really was noth-
ing like the French case of collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach. A writer like
Géza Féja (1900–1978), also a member of the népi group who had published
more than one anti-Semitic article during the war, sat in jail for only one day (15
March 1945) but was freed thanks to Péter Veres’ and the NPP’s pleading.43
Censorship did not weigh much on such compromised writers. At the begin-
ning of 1947, László Bóka (1910–1964) criticized what he called a ‘two-tier’ cen-
sorship that did not prevent László Németh or poet Lőrinc Szabó (1900–1957)
from publishing their literary works in the népi press.44 ‘Let’s not haste with re-
40 In Gúzsba kötve. A kulturális elit és a hatalom [Hands and feets tied: cultural elite and the
power] (Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, Állambiztosági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, 2005), 335–
50.
41 Miklós Gyárfás, ‘A láthatatlan ítélet’ [The invisible sentencing], Haladás, no. 21 (22 May
1947): 3 (Gyárfás’s emphasis).
42 See the articles devoted to his trial by the communist daily The Free People: ‘Kiss Ferenc a
bíróság előtt’ [Ferenc Kiss in court], Szabad Nép (27 November 1945): 2, and Dezső Vozári’s
article on the next day.
43 See ‘Féja Géza mentes az igazolás alól!’ [Géza Féja exempt from verification!], Haladás,
no. 22 (13 June 1946): 7.
44 László Bóka, ‘Kétféle cenzura’ [Two-faced censorship], Haladás, (2 January 1947): 3.
166 Clara Royer
habilitation!’, he had already requested a year before.45 At the end of 1947, Bó-
ka, Zsolt and writer Aurél Kárpáti (1884–1963) resigned from the Society of Writ-
ers to protest against Szabó’s admission. According to Bóka in his public letter,
Szabó had ‘not only betrayed progressive thought and writer’s ethics, but has
not even made a gesture or a step toward democracy since the liberation.’46 As
Éva Standeisky puts it, Szabó, who was indifferent to politics, ‘never identified
himself to Fascist Germany where he had taken part in official cultural events,
but the part he played in Germany could justifiably look like a demonstration of
sympathy to the persecuted and the outcast.’47
The Progress was one of the few newspapers that rejected the malfunctions
of the post-war judicial system. The hearings behind the closed doors of the
people’s courts, which were created by decree on 22 January 1945 to deal with
war crimes, seemed to young journalist Zsuzsa Szegő (circa 1926–1963, married
György Faludy in 1953) a hurdle to Hungarian collective awareness of its re-
sponsibility.48 Justice was overlooking ordinary people only to focus on famous
criminals who became the scapegoats of the time.49 The system of people’s
courts was heavily criticized at the time of the trials that took place in the wake
of the 1946 Kunmadaras and Miskolc pogroms. After what Zsolt called 30 years
of a counter-revolutionary regime, what was needed was not mob justice but
the re-education of Hungarian society. The court members, who were headed
by a professional judge and were comprised of representatives from each gov-
ernment party, were more concerned with their own political agendas than they
were with the moral elevation of the people.50 The Progress published regular
reports on the war criminals’ trials which took place at the Music Academy on
Liszt Square in Budapest. Many contributors expressed their dismay and disap-
pointment as they failed to bring any collective catharsis.51 Executions eventu-
45 Bóka László, ‘Lassabban a rehabilitációval!’ [Slow down with rehabilitation!], Haladás (11
July 1946): 3.
46 In Haladás, no. 52 (25 December 1947): 10.
47 Éva Standeisky, ‘Erkölcsök 1945-ben’ [Morals in 1945], Mozgó Világ, no. 2 (2006): 15–31.
48 On the functionning and malfunctionning of the people’s courts, see: Ildikó Barna and
Andrea Pető, A politikai igazságszolgáltatás a II. világháború utáni Budapesten [Political justice
in Budapest after the Second World War ] (Budapest: Gondolat, 2012).
49 Zsuzsanna Szegő, ‘Zárt tárgyalás’ [Closed trial], Haladás, no. 7 (10 November 1945): 3.
50 Béla Zsolt, ‘Kunmadaras’, Haladás, no. 20 (30 May 1946): 1–2, and ‘Miskolc, vagy a vesztett
illúziók’ [Miskolc, or the lost illusions], Haladás, no. 30 (8 September 1946): 1–2. These critics
were addressed by the communist daily: Gyula Kállay, ‘Antiszemitizmus, vérvád, népmozga-
lom’ [Anti-Semitism, blood libel, popular movement], Szabad Nép, (9 June 1946): 3.
51 See survivor István Bródy’s article, ‘Naplóm arról a napról, amelyiken Bárdossyt kivégezték’
[An entry from my diary about the day Bárdossy was executed], Haladás, no. 2 (12 January
1946): 3. As he attended Bárdossy’s execution, he was struck by the lack of redemption he felt
A Liberal Utopia Againt All Odds 167
ally did fit into the routine of Budapest between inflation and the peace negotia-
tions that were led in Paris – that is, if they were not objected to, as was the
case with László Bárdossy whose death sentence caused a great stir among the
public.52
Aware of post-war anti-Semitism and faced with a biased justice system that
spared writers who had betrayed the democratic ideal, the intellectuals of The
Progress turned their paper in a symbolical court of justice, into their own ‘J’Ac-
cuse!’.53 Indeed, these writers did not conceal their approval of the French liter-
ary purges.54 For instance, Zsolt believed that the death penalty was the only
way to restrain anti-democratic behaviours.55 Attacks against other writers came
along with ‘evidence’, interviews akin to interrogations, and a strong judicial
eloquence. When she heard that Géza Féja was considering heading a peasant
college in Békéscsaba, writer Ágnes Fedor (1909–1990), whose publicist career
had been broken by the anti-Jewish laws and who survived the war with forged
documents (as narrated in her 1947 novel, A Peculiar Carnival), paid a visit to
the népi writer. In the article, she wrote about their encounter and she recreated
their dialogue; that is, her accusations and his poor defence: ‘did he really be-
lieve he was in the best position to teach the new peasant generations in a dem-
ocratic Hungary?’ And further: was he aware that military inspectors toured the
cafés on the Danube strand to find new Jewish recruits for the musz [labour
service] in the summer of 1942 after he asked for Jews to be banished from the
Danube corsos in an article titled, ‘Negresco’, ‘because he, Géza Féja, had not
found a free table there’?56
and by the ‘part’ the condemned kept on playing for the public until the end. See also the
disappointed ‘Szálasiék az akasztófán’ [Szálasi and his people on the scaffold], Haladás, no.
9 (14 March 1946): 1.
52 Béla Zsolt, ‘Bárdossy halálára’ [To Bárdossy’s death], Haladás, no. 2 (12 January 1946): 1–2.
53 The French model was very present in Haladás. On this, see my ‘Justice et vengeance? Un
appel à la responsabilité intellectuelle des écrivains survivants du Progrès (1945–1947)’, Revue
d’Histoire de la Shoah 1, no. 204 (2016): 359 –81.
54 See Béla Zsolt, ‘Levél Macartney professzorhoz, aki Hóman szabadonbocsátását kérte’ [Let-
ter to Professor Macartney, who asked for the release of Hóman], Haladás (21 February 1946): 1,
in which Zsolt uses the execution of Brasillach as a case in point; Sándor Szombati, ‘Nyugaton
legnagyobb bűn az intellektuális árulás’ [In the West, the greatest sin is the treason of the
intellectuals], no. 19 (8 May 1947): 1; Marianne Gách, ‘Hölgyfutár’ [Female courier], Haladás,
no. 33 (14 August 1947): 11 (on Céline). Compare with ‘Halállal vagy börtönnel lakolnak a ha-
zaáruló francia írók, akik barátkoztak a hitlerizmussal’ [Deaths or imprisonment of the treach-
erous French writers who have been friending Hitlerism], Szabad Nép, no. 209 (06 December
1945): 3.
55 Zsolt, ‘Bárdossy halálára’, 2.
56 Ágnes Fedor, ‘A bosszúalló Haladás: Újabb népi írót ítél két hasáb betűre’ [The Vengeful
Progress sentences another népi writer to two columns], Haladás, no. 12 (3 April 1946): 3.
168 Clara Royer
Fedor’s article was published in a new column titled, ‘The Vengeful Prog-
ress’ [A bosszúálló ‘Haladás’] that disappeared after the first occurrence. Such a
withdrawal is meaningful: Hungarian survivors were fully aware that ‘Jewish re-
venge’ [zsidó bosszú] had a certain tradition in pre-war anti-Semitic discourse.
László Németh, who in 1934 had broached the so-called ‘Jewish sensitivity’ of
some writers who he believed ‘gritted their teeth’ as they thought about the
times when they ruled Hungarian literature (one wonders when that time might
have been), had made a speech in 1943 in Szárszó at a népi gathering (prior to
the deportations) to express his fear that the anti-Jewish laws would be used by
Jews ‘hungry for revenge’ and devoid of any self-criticism, all at the expense of
‘men of modest manners’.57
It is nevertheless obvious that personal enmity between the writers of The
Progress and the népi writers was an incentive in their post-war conflict. ‘A bril-
liant polemicist’, Ferenc Fejtő would say of his late friend Zsolt in 2004, ‘but he
knew no limits, and saw racists everywhere … He even attacked Illyés!’58 This
mutual dislike was quite well known in the post-war literary milieu. Even before
the polemic started, Márton Horváth (1906–1987), who was to become the intel-
lectual figurehead of the MKP, brought up the topic in the communist daily. He
mentioned how a year and a half before, he had witnessed Zsolt’s personal ha-
tred for some népi writers (whose names Márton did not reveal) when they were
both held in the prison of Margit Boulevard.59 But such hostility cannot be
understood without the feeling of betrayal that inhabited most of these surviv-
ing writers, or without the trauma that haunted them.60 Focussing on Zsolt’s
case (his editorials and his testimony in Nine Suitcases with its throbbing flash-
backs) gives us a hint at the depths of the writer’s wreckage after the deporta-
tion of his 72-year-old mother – his experiences in the Oradea [Nagyvárad] ghet-
to, his ambivalent feelings toward his wife as her health may have threatened
57 Németh’s Szarszó speech has lately been on its way to rehabilitation. See: Imre Monostori,
‘Szárszóról – hatvan év után. Egy fejezet a Németh László “problémák” történetéből: a szárszói
beszéd’ [About the Szárszó meeting—sixty years later. A chapter on the history of László Ném-
eth’s ‘problems’: the Szárszó speech], Kortárs, no. 12 (2002): 1–17, in which the author finds
only ‘natural’ that Németh should state such a ‘hunger for revenge’. See also how Németh can
even be turned into a persecuted martyr: Péter László, ‘Hajsza Németh László ellen’ [The man-
hunt against László Németh], Kortárs, no. 2 (2003): 102–3.
58 Clara Royer, ‘Beszélgetések Fejtő Ferenccel’ [Conversations with Ferenc Fejtő], Múlt és Jövő,
no. 2/3 (2008): 162.
59 Horváth Márton, ‘Irodalmi vita’ [Literary debate], Szabad Nép, no. 217 (16 December 1945):
2.
60 See for instance, in Hungarian, Márton Liska, ‘A holokauszt mint társadalmi traumatizácio,
Túlélők, elkövetők és leszármazottaik’ [The Holocaust as a social trauma: survivors, perpetra-
tors and descendants], Múltunk 51, no. 3 (2006): 163–82.
A Liberal Utopia Againt All Odds 169
61 See: Nine Suitcases, English trans. Ladislas Löb (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004). On his
mother, see: ‘Az anyám keze’ [My mother’s hand], Képes Figyelő, no. 5 (29 September 1945).
62 Zsolt, weakened by the typhus fever he contracted in Ukraine, spent most of 1947 in a
sanatorium in Budapest before going to one in Davos, Switzerland in 1948. See the letter he
received from Mihály Károlyi on 21 January 1948, who kindly advised him to smoke less (Zsolt
was a chain-smoker): Károlyi Mihály levelezése, 1945–1949 [The correspondence of Mihály Kár-
olyi, 1945–1949], ed. Tibor Hajdu, vol. 5 (Budapest: Napvilág, 2003), 457.
63 Béla Zsolt, Halál Budapesten [Death in Budapest], Haladás, nos. 16–34 (from 15 April to 19
August 1948).
64 On Kovács’s involvement, see: Julianna Horváth, Éva Szabó, László Szűcs and Katalin Za-
lai, Pártközi értekezletek: Politikai érdekegyeztetés, politikai konfrontáció 1944–1948 [Inter-party
conferences: political interest conciliation, political confrontation 1944–1948] (Budapest: Nap-
világ Kiadó, 2003), 56.
65 See: Jean-Léon Muller, L’Expulsion des Allemands de Hongrie 1944–1948: Politique interna-
tionale et destin méconnu d’une minorité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 137–40.
170 Clara Royer
66 Béla Zsolt, ‘Boldogtalan új esztendő’ [Unhappy New Year], Haladás, (29 December 1945): 1–
2.
67 In ‘Antiszemitizmus és németellenesség – A kétfrontos harc’ [Anti-Semitism and anti-Ger-
man sentiment: a two-front battle], in Küzdelem az igazságért. Tanulmányok Randolph L. Bra-
ham 80. születésnapjára [The struggle for justice: studies for the 80th birthday of Randolph L.
Braham], eds, László Karsai and Judit Molnár (Budapest: Mazsihisz, 2002), 747–8.
68 Béla Zsolt, ‘A svabok?’ [The Schwabs?], Haladás, no. 1 (5 January 1946): 1–2.
69 Házassággal végződik [It all ends in a wedding], (Budapest: Genius kiadás, no date), 311–2:
‘You see, we from the left-wing we should spread anti-Semitism. The wealthy Jews got imme-
diately in bed with the counter-revolution.’
70 Béla Zsolt, ‘Rejtély nélkül’ [Without mystery], Haladás, (17 November 1945): 1.
A Liberal Utopia Againt All Odds 171
75 See Lukács’s attack against Molnár: ‘Egy rossz regény margójára’ [A margin note to a bad
novel], Fórum (1947): 461–5. See Zsolt’s answer: ‘Molnár Ferenc és akiknek nem kell’ [Ferenc
Molnár and those who aren’t needed], Haladás, (26 June 1947): 1–2.
76 See, for instance: Béla Zsolt, ‘Levél dr. Sulyok Dezsőhöz’ [Letter to Dezső Sulyok], Haladás
(25 July 1946): 1–2.
77 Varga, ‘A Radikális Párt’.
78 Cf. János F. Varga, ‘A Magyar Radikális Párt és az 1947-es választások’ [The Hungarian
Radical Party and the 1947 elections], Történelmi szemle, no. 2 (1981): 227–44.
79 Széchenyi Hungarian national library archives, fonds 163, Csécsy’s diary, cit. in ibid., 233.
80 See, for example, the minister of Justice, István Ries’s vibrant disavowal of Peyer: Magyar
Országos Tudósító [Hungarian National Correspondant], (5 August 1947, 9:45 pm, Ries István
beszéde egy szocialdemokráta pártnapon [István Ries’s speech on a Social Democratic Party
Day]).
A Liberal Utopia Againt All Odds 173
In his memoirs, József Litván would hold Béla Zsolt responsible for gleich-
schatol-ing their party: according to him, Zsolt was not the same man after the
war, and there was only one way he could sustain his way of life and his pro-
longed stays in the sanatorium—that is, with the help of communist money.81
True, Litván, a close friend of Csécsy, blamed Zsolt and Kende for estranging
Csécsy from The Progress. The question of Zsolt’s personal connections with the
communist party is left unclear since no hint can be found in the Hungarian Na-
tional Archives. The communist press certainly did not refrain from deriding
Zsolt during the campaign.82 But what may be more relevant is the fact that the
MKP didn’t seem to mind the contradictory picture given of its relationship with
Zsolt and the MRP. the MKP didn’t seem to mind painting a contradictory pic-
ture of their relationship with Zsolt and the MRP?
At the time, another interpretation was given by Zsolt’s very own friends –
the collaborators of The Progress, most of whom were socialists. Mihály András
Rónay, Ferenc Fejtő, László Faragó, György Faludy and Lajos Hatvany broke off
with him after his political alliance with Peyer.83 Peyer was isolated in his
party – his detention in Mauthausen did not clear his name from the stain of his
1921 ‘pact’ with Prime Minister István Bethlen that had forced the Social Demo-
cratic Party to partly support the Horthy regime in exchange for the party’s le-
galization. Zsolt’s alliance with such an infamous ‘betrayer’, with whom he had
barely worked in the past, was a shock to his old friends. According to Rónai,
for a few months Zsolt had shown a tendency toward making concessions and
also many editorial mistakes. These men judged The Progress to be the best
weekly in Hungary – they had been able to write in it without the pressure of
censorship; they had been happy to join the fight against ‘clerical reaction’ and
‘post-fascism’, and they respected its appeal to democratic re-education.
The year 1948 was the end of the utopia: the Radical Party fell more and
more in line with the soon-to-be unique Marxist Party. Indeed, according to The
Progress, England was certainly a neo-fascist country and Yougoslavia was the
new enemy.84 The only noticeable difference was the interest kept by The Prog-
81 József Litván, Itélétidő [The Time of judgement] (Budapest: Tekintek könyvek, 1991), 106–7.
82 Béla Zsolt, ‘Tömegeim’ [My crowds], Haladás (31 July 1947), and ‘A Radikális Párt – a de-
mokrácia ellensége?’ [The Radical Party – the enemy of democracy?] (23 August 1947): 1 (an
answer to József Révai).
83 See Bucsú a Haladástól [Farewell to The Progress], (26 August 1947). Nevertheless, most of
these friends will come back in the course of 1948. See for instance Lajos Hatvany, ‘A magyar
Börne (Perem a ‘Haladás’-sal)’ [The Hungarian Börne: my trial with The Progress], Haladás, (28
October 1948): 2.
84 See also Magyar Távirati Iroda – Belpolitikai szolgálat [Hungarian Telegraphic Office –
Service of Internal Policies], 5 July 1948, 8 pm.
174 Clara Royer
ress on what was going on in Palestine. The year 1948 also meant the end of the
literary and intellectual quality of the weekly, but it further saw the beginnings
of two unfinished reconciliations: with some old friends such as Hatvany and
Fejtő; and with the népi group, in the aftermath of István Bibó’s remarkable es-
say on the ‘Jewish question after 1944 in Hungary’ to which the contributors of
The Progress paid tribute – but such reconciliation was quite untimely.85
At the core of these survivors’ liberal utopia were three main hopes: the
hope for assimilation after the war and the extermination; the hope for a cathar-
sis by way of getting rid of the népiek; and finally, the hope for a social democ-
racy. The cognitive dissonance showed here pinpoints the dead end of such a
stance – and, for a few decades at least, the death of liberal thought among
Jews in Hungary. Under the pressure of the communist society and their own
self-censorship, Hungarian Jews came to deny their own Jewishness and liberal
thought that had been the historical incentive for their assimilation.
85 István Bibó, ‘Zsidókérdés Magyarországon 1944 után’ [The Jewish question in Hungary after
1944], Valász, no. 10/11 (October-November 1948): 778–877; Dezső Kiss, ‘Antiszemitizmus 1948-
ban’ [Anti-Semitism in 1948], Haladás (9 December 1948): 3.
Ferenc Laczó
From European Fascism to the Fate of the
Jews
Early Hungarian Jewish Monographs on the Holocaust
The Holocaust in Hungary was the final major chapter of the continent-wide Na-
zi genocide and arguably also amounted to ‘the peak of its evolution’.1 Between
mid-May and early July 1944, its main phase – the deportation of over 437,000
persons, nearly all to Auschwitz-Birkenau where their large majority, approxi-
mately 300,000 persons, were immediately murdered – was implemented with
the utmost brutality and efficiency. One of the results of this massive campaign
was that Jews from Hungary ended up constituting the single largest victim
group of this most infamous Nazi camp complex.2
At the same time, Hungary had a substantial number of Holocaust survi-
vors – altogether over two hundred thousand – who, in the early post-war
years, were at the forefront of documenting the unparalleled human destruction
that had just befallen European Jewry with a clear focus on the ‘fate’ of their
own community.3 The major wave of documentation in Hungary right after the
war was partly due to the fact that the most intense period of Hungarian Jewish
persecution practically coincided with the last year of the Second World War in
Europe, thus resulting in a shorter period of persecution for the large majority
Hungarian Jewish survivors than for surviving Jews from other countries. On
average, Jewish survivors of Nazi camps from Hungary – their extremely poor
physical condition and profound traumatization notwithstanding – may thus
have been physically and psychologically somewhat better equipped to articu-
late and record their camp experiences upon their liberation, which they did in
1 Zoltán Vági, László Csősz and Gábor Kádár, The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Geno-
cide (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2013), xxx.
2 It was arguably this campaign that turned this camp complex into the symbol of the exter-
mination of European Jewry. On the reorganization of the Nazi camp system in the very same
phase, see: Stefan Hördler, Ordnung und Inferno: Das KZ-System im letzten Kriegsjahr (Göttin-
gen: Wallstein, 2015); on the last year of Nazi Germany, see Ian Kershaw, The End: Hitler’s
Germany, 1944–1945 (New York: Penguin, 2012).
3 Hungary thus offers a key example of a much wider trend recently analyzed by Laura Jock-
usch; however, without reference to the case of Hungary. See: Laura Jockusch, Collect and
Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-009
176 Ferenc Laczó
impressive numbers. Next to those who were liberated from one of the Nazi
camps and those who had survived the death marches, there was also another
large group of survivors from Hungary, most of whom were liberated by the ad-
vancing Red Army in one of the two Budapest ghettos.4 Members of Budapest
Jewry, who prior to the Holocaust constituted the second largest Jewish com-
munity on the European continent right after Warsaw, may have suffered terri-
ble losses under the rule of the Arrow Cross, but were often spared the experi-
ence of the Nazi camps. Thus, upon the end of the war, Jews from Budapest
would still constitute a significant urban community, now the third largest on
the continent behind Paris and Bucharest.
In the early months of the post-war period, members of the Hungarian Jew-
ish community were not only receiving camp survivors upon their return and
providing them with badly needed aid,5 but partly in direct response to encoun-
tering such survivors and hearing their exceptional stories, they also started to
engage in various projects of Holocaust documentation (avant la lettre). In the
years that immediately followed the end of the Second World War, Holocaust
documentation in Hungary produced a huge quantity and an impressively
broad range of sources, including thousands of interview protocols recording
witness accounts of the Nazi camps, dozens of personal recollections, several
edited volumes, and the first contemporary historical monographs. The docu-
mentation project of the National Committee of Hungarian Jews for Attending
Deportees alone recorded interview protocols with over 5,000 camp survivors in
Hungary in the years 1945–46, amounting to the largest early collection on sur-
vivor experiences worldwide.6 The years immediately after the end of the war
saw the publication of numerous volumes of personal recollection by – to em-
ploy a key distinction of the period – both the politically and the racially perse-
4 On the death marches, see: Daniel Blatman, The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi
Genocide (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). On the battle for Budapest,
see: Krisztián Ungváry, Battle for Budapest: Hundred Days in WWII (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).
5 On the liberation of the camps, now see: Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: The End of
the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Haven: Yale UP, 2015).
6 See www.degob.hu. On the history of DEGOB, see: Rita Horváth, ‘“A Jewish Historical Com-
mission in Budapest”: The Place of the National Relief Committee for Deportees in Hungary
[DEGOB] Among the Other Large-Scale Historical-Memorial Projects of She’erit Hapletah After
the Holocaust (1945–1948)’ in Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Po-
lemics and Achievements, eds, David Bankier and Dan Michman (London: Berghahn, 2009). On
the articulation of the unprecedented features of the Holocaust in this collection, see: Ferenc
Laczó, ‘Tanúságtételek a példátlanról. Magyar zsidó szemtanúk beszámolói a holokauszt alap-
vető jellemzőiről 1945–46-ból’ [Witnessing the unprecedented: Hungarian Jewish eyewitness
accounts on the elementary characteristics of the Holocaust from 1945–46] in Századvég, no.
74, (2014): 57–82.
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews 177
7 Some of the most important volumes – not necessarily written by Jewish survivors – are:
Manó Buchinger, Gestapo banditák bűnhalmaza. Tizennégy hónap a hitleri koncentrációs tábor-
ban [The Concursus Delictorum of the Gestapo bandits: fourteen months in Hitler’s concentra-
tion camp] (Budapest: Szerzői kiadás, 1945); János Fóthy, Horthyliget, a magyar Ördögsziget
[Horthyliget, the Hungarian Devil’s Island] (Budapest: Müller Károly, 1945); Teri Gács, A mé-
lységből kiáltunk Hozzád! [From the depths, I have cried out to you, O Lord] (Budapest: Tábor,
1946); Béla Katona, Várad a viharban [Várad in the storm] (Nagyvárad: Tealah Kórháztámogató
Egyesület, 1946); Sándor Millok, A kínok útja. Budapesttől Mauthausenig [The tortured road:
from Budapest to Mauthausen] (Budapest: Müller Károly, 1945); László Palásti, A bori halálút
regénye [Novel of the death road of Bor] (Budapest: Gábor Áron, 1945); György Parragi, Mau-
thausen (Budapest: Keresztes, 1945); Károly Rátkai, A két torony. Magyar politikusok Mauthau-
senben [The two towers: Hungarian politicians in Mauthausen] (Budapest: Génius, 1945); Teréz
Rudnóy, Szabaduló asszonyok [Women in the course of liberation] (Budapest: Dante, 1947);
József Spronz, Fogoly voltam Auschwitzban. [I have been a captive of Auschwitz] (Budapest:
Gergely, 1946). Note that the majority of these works were released as early as 1945 (I am not
referring here to any of the volumes on the experiences of labour servicemen, which constitute
another vast and largely separate corpus). On Hungarian-language recollections of the experi-
ence of persecution from 1945–46, see my: Ferenc Laczó, ‘Alvilági társasutazások keresztúti
állomásai. A háborús évekbeli üldöztetettség korai elbeszéléseiről’ [The crossroad stations of
all-inclusive travels in the underworld: on the early narratives of wartime persecution] in Be-
tekintő 8, no. 3 (2014): 1–26. http://www.betekinto.hu/sites/default/files/2014_3_laczo.pdf.
8 On the Hungarian institution of labour service, now see: Robert Rozett, Conscripted Slaves:
Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front during World War II (Jerusalem: Yad
Vashem Publications, 2014). See also: Randolph L. Braham, The Hungarian Labor Service Sys-
tem, 1939–1945 (Boulder, Col.: East European Monographs, 1977).
9 István Szirmai, Fasiszta lelkek. Pszichoanalitikus beszélgetések a háborús főbűnösökkel a bör-
tönben [Fascist souls: psychoanalytical conversations with major war criminals in prison] (Bu-
dapest: Fauszt, 1946); István Kelemen, Interjú a rács mögött. Beszélgetés a háborús főbűnösök-
kel [Interview behind the prison bar: conversations with major war criminals] (Budapest: Mül-
ler Károly, 1946).
10 Vilma Sz. Palkó, A német halálgyárak [The German death factories] (Budapest: Gábor Áron,
1945); Miklós Nyiszli, Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitzi krematóriumban [I was
doctor Mengele’s assistant: the memoirs of an Auschwitz physician] (Nagyvárad: Szerzői kia-
178 Ferenc Laczó
dás, 1946); István Somos, Auschwitz! Hazatért deportáltak megrázó elbeszélései [Auschwitz!
Shattering stories of the homecoming deported] (Kolozsvár: Szerzői kiadás, 1945).
11 See the following important collections: Sándor Mester, ed., A toll mártírjai [The martyrs of
the pen] (Budapest: A Magyar Újságírók emigrált, deportált, internált csoportja kiadó, 1947);
Dezső Pór and Oszkár Zsadányi, eds, Te vagy a tanú! Ukrajnától Auschwitzig [You are the wit-
ness! From Ukraine to Auschwitz] (Budapest: Kossuth, 1947); Imre Benoschofsky, Maradék
zsidóság. A budai aggok és árvák menházegyesületének évkönyve [The surviving remnant: the
yearbook of the Association for the Asylum House of the Elderly and Orphans of Buda] (Buda-
pest: Officina, 1946).
12 On the Sovietization of Hungary, see: Peter Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets:
The Establishment of the Communist Regime in Hungary (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006); Mária Palasik, Chess Game for Democracy: Hungary Between East and West,
1944–1947 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011); On foreign policy, see: László
Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War, 1945–1956: Between the United States and the Soviet Union
(Budapest: CEU Press, 2004). For Hungary in a comparative context, now see: Anne Apple-
baum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (London: Allen Lane, 2012).
13 Relevant works were released in earlier years as well, such as Lévai’s various publications I
shall discuss below. See, above all: Jenő Lévai, Fekete könyv a magyar zsidóság szenvedéseiről
[Black book on the suffering of Hungarian Jewry] (Budapest: Officina, 1946). See also the even
earlier work of Béla Vihar, Sárga könyv. Adalékok a magyar zsidóság háborús szenvedéseiből
[Yellow book: data on the wartime suffering of Hungarian Jewry] (Budapest: Hechaluc, 1945),
which is essentially a collection of documents. On the intellectual origins of Nazism by a lead-
ing scholar of Judaism from the same years, see: Sámuel Lőwinger, Germánia ‘prófétája.’ A
nácizmus száz esztendeje [The ‘prophet’ of Germania: the hundred years of Nazism] (Budapest:
Neuwald, 1947).
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews 179
bles us to highlight both their individual features and their common elements,
and thereby, map the spectrum of early Hungarian Jewish intellectual responses
to the unprecedented catastrophe.
14 A single day after the German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944, Eichmann’s Son-
dereinsatzkommando ordered the Jews of Hungary to establish a Central Jewish Council. They
aimed to create a body to which they could convey their orders and that would be of help to
them in their implementation. See Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági, ‘Compulsion of Bad Choices –
Questions, Dilemmas, Decisions: The Activity of the Hungarian Central Jewish Council in 1944’
in Jewish Studies at the Central European University. Vol. 5, eds, András Kovács and Michael
Miller (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009).
15 Son of the famed linguist and ethnographer Bernát Munkácsi and a lawyer by profession,
Ernő Munkácsi served as chief secretary of the Jewish Community of Pest as well as director of
the newly established Jewish Museum between 1934 and 1942. In 1943, when the Holocaust was
already being implemented just outside the borders of Hungary but the Hungarian Jewish com-
munity could still hope for the survival of its large majority, Munkácsi released a collection of
his studies and articles, which offers key insights into his stance during the years of persecu-
tion. See: Ernő Munkácsi, Küzdelmes évek… Cikkek és tanulmányok a magyar zsidóság elmúlt
évtizedéből [The years of struggle… articles and studies from the past decade of Hungarian
Jewry] (Budapest: Libanon, 1943). Having survived the last stages of the war just outside Buda-
pest, Munkácsi was subsequently appointed executive director of the National Office of Hun-
garian Israelites.
180 Ferenc Laczó
until the Arrow Cross takeover in mid-October 1944. Although Munkácsi was ar-
guably not among the Council’s most important members – the strategy of the
Council being shaped, above all, by Chairman Samu Stern and his two deputies,
Ernő Pető and Károly Wilhelm – he also had to face the aforementioned heavy
charges.
In early 1946, Munkácsi decided to publish his own detailed version of the
main events of 1944 in the Jewish weekly Új Élet, which he released in book for-
mat the following year.16 Hogyan történt? Adatok és okmányok a magyar zsidó-
ság tragédiájához was a seminal, though profoundly ambivalent, contribution
to the raging debate by a key witness. Hogyan történt? did not ambition to offer
a final assessment, not even a full and systematic history, but was rather in-
tended as an original documentary account of the Holocaust in Hungary (avant
la lettre) from the perspective of the persecuted.17 Accordingly, the book was
based on documents of Jewish provenance, mostly from the archives of the Na-
tional Office of Hungarian Israelites, including the Council’s reports.18 Besides
drawing on these sources, Munkácsi added insights from his personal experi-
ence, though without addressing his own role in an elaborate manner.19 Even
so, the book was clearly meant as a rather apologetic depiction of the Hungar-
ian Jewish leadership and as a definite vindication of the author’s stance and
behaviour during the war years.20
16 Ernő Munkácsi, Hogyan történt? Adatok és okmányok a magyar zsidóság tragédiájához (Bu-
dapest: Renaissance, 1947). As Munkácsi was writing so shortly after the war, the expressions
Holocaust or Shoah were not yet available to him. Hogyan történt? used a host of concepts
practically interchangeably, such as extermination, destruction, catastrophe, tragedy, but also
martyr’s death.
17 The book focuses solely on the events between 19 March and 16 October 1944. Somewhat
curiously, Munkácsi thus closes his narrative with the beginning of Arrow Cross rule when ‘the
streets of the capital city opened to the pogrom groups’ and ‘the Jewish people of Budapest
have never been closer to their death.’ Ibid., 244.
18 Munkácsi clarifies that he could draw neither on the already lost minutes of the Jewish
Council meetings, nor on the documents related to their interactions with Hungarian and Ger-
man authorities. Ibid., 8.
19 It is telling that Munkácsi preferred to write of himself in the third person and only very
occasionally switched to the first. The point where he clearly emphasizes his own role was
related to the preparation of a pamphlet, which – in his interpretation – if released, would
have meant the beginning of the resistance. Ibid., 120. Even though the head of the Jewish
Council decided against issuing it and submitted a polite request to Prime Minister Döme Sztó-
jay instead, the call to Hungarian Christian society was nevertheless circulated, with Munkácsi
explaining that he was among those who were investigated for this after the fact. Ibid., 124.
20 In fact, Munkácsi explicitly maintains that he foresaw and foretold the events and that they
‘justified’ him.
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews 181
The explicit aim of Hogyan történt? was to document ‘key scenes of the
darkest crimes in human history’ ever committed during what Munkácsi labels
as the time of ‘the German occupation’ of Hungary.21 The author chooses to be-
gin his narrative by pointing to the internal causes of Hungarian Jewry’s de-
struction: its nineteenth-century religious schism, the naïve optimism of its elite
(preserved even in the early 1940s), its detachment from the masses, and the
resulting severe impotence in the face of the genocidal onslaught.22 Besides the
cunning methods employed by the Germans in Hungary, Munkácsi thus as-
cribes the Jewish Council’s fateful choices in 1944 to their ignorance, naivety,
and lack of foresight. A key point in the book’s narrative is the reception of the
Auschwitz Protocols, which Munkácsi not only extensively quotes, but regard-
ing which, he explicitly asserts that it had brought about decisive change: sup-
posedly, the Protocols belatedly dissolved the ‘sinful optimism’ of ‘the great ma-
jority’ of Hungarian Jews.23 Munkácsi thereby suggests to his readers that until
its reception – and the deportations from Hungary were already being imple-
mented at the time – even members of the Central Council had been largely un-
aware of the ongoing genocide.24 In this manner, Hogyan történt? paints a
21 Ibid., 7. In accordance with the focus of the book, Munkácsi states that ‘the true protagonist
of the tragedy of 1944’ was the Jewish people. Ibid., 145. Munkácsi makes a number of explic-
itly Jewish references in his text,, including several historical analogies. Whereas Hungarian
perpetrator László Ferenczy is presented as the successor of Khmelnytsky, the story of Kasztner
reminds Munkácsi of a Haggadah illustration and his character of David Reubeni, Sabbatai
Zevi, and Jacob Frank. Ibid., 56. What is more, to his mind, the Holocaust in Hungary echoed
‘the destruction of Jerusalem’, whereas in Budapest ‘the wonder of Jericho was repeated the
other way round’ when ‘all bastions have fallen, but Jews survived behind the walls of the
capital city.’ Ibid., 20, 179.
22 Munkácsi depicts Jewish society as unorganized and lacking solidarity, and as a society
that includes some notable spoilsmen. In the same self-critical vein, he complains that too
few committed themselves to ‘positive Judaism’ in Hungary and that many Jews even con-
verted. Ibid.,136. He also uses the comparison with Polish Jewry or, more precisely, with the
Warsaw ghetto uprising, to argue that the Hungarian Jewish people possess ‘less natural life
instinct’. Ibid., 119. At the very same time, Munkácsi praises the Zionists for their Realpolitik,
emphasizing that they alone made ‘illegal’ rescue attempts.
23 Munkácsi maintains that this document caused deep horror among the Jews and meant a
deep shock for Christians too, but claims that the power to act did not materialize on any of the
two sides. He nevertheless interprets the Protocol’s reception in Hungary as a decisive change,
curiously arguing that ‘it became clear all at once that the fate of Hungarian Jewry, its exter-
mination, is also the tragedy of Hungariandom – since defeat in the war appeared certain to all
sober minds.’ Ibid., 111.
24 Munkácsi explicitly claims – ‘no matter how incredible this may sound’ – that the horror of
extermination camps and the details of deportations were not known until the second half of
May. Ibid., 76. He reminds his readers that not even the name of Auschwitz was known and
even states that ‘nobody suspected’ that the ongoing ‘reorganization’ of the countryside would
182 Ferenc Laczó
highly critical portrait of Hungarian Jewry while aiming to exonerate its 1944
leadership from the heaviest accusations.25
On the pages of his book, Ernő Munkácsi depicts how the Jewish Council
aimed to rescue the Jewish people through a defensive strategy mixing compli-
ance and petitioning.26 He interprets the former as a choice in favour of lesser
evil and the latter as revealing the fully agreeable attitudes and intentions of
the Council.27 More specifically, Munkácsi’s overview from 1947 explains that
the Jews of Hungary developed altogether seven policy directions in the face of
the Nazi genocidal onslaught. Their mainstream choice may have been to stay
in contact with the Germans and aim to decrease ‘friction’ that way,28 but there
was also the path of the Zionists who ‘had the most realistic assessment of the
situation as well as the best contacts abroad while they also dared to do the
most.’29 Further Jewish choices consisted of investing hope in the Christian
lead to ‘the ghettoization, deportation and extermination of Jews.’ Ibid., 62. All of this is
strangely akin to a recurrent mode of argumentation pursued by Miklós Horthy’s defenders
concerning the Regent’s role in 1944. However, inconsistently and revealingly, Munkácsi adds
that in early 1944 Hungarian Jews still believed that ‘all of European Jewry may perish but we
shall not be harmed.’ Ibid., 78.
25 Munkácsi is eager to explain that even if the Council had acted differently, the results
would not have been better, thereby essentially asserting that the role of the Council was ir-
relevant and merely illusory. Ibid., 52. On the other hand, Munkácsi maintains that the scarcity
of resistance revealed how sick the Hungarian Jewish community had been. The book even
closes with the words that a community that does not redistribute wealth and get organized
‘has to fall’. Ibid., 245.
26 In Munkácsi’s own words, they were ‘groping in every direction to save what could be
saved.’ Ibid., 53. Interestingly, he also tries to explain that the submissive tone of petitions
constituted a conscious – strategic, even if self-denying – attempt to appeal to the taste and
sentiments of Christian intellectuals. Ibid, 119.
27 Munkácsi explicitly suggests that the activities of the Council needed to be documented
since the masses could not gain proper information about them. Ibid., 117.
28 He asserts that this was the mainstream line. According to his strangely balanced assess-
ment, this choice had both its advantages and disadvantages: it worked against the spread of
knowledge and the development of resistance, but it supposedly proved effective in gaining
time and thereby rescuing Budapest Jewry.
29 Ibid., 134. In his interpretation, the Holocaust provided justification for Zionism and also
made Hungarian Jews receptive to it: ‘The torture of the Gestapo and the gendarmerie, ghetto-
ization, the bitter experiences of deportation made Hungarian Jewry aware of the historical aim
of uniting Jews in one country and into one people, where it will neither be humiliated, nor
tortured in ghetto prisons. The dialectics of Zionists reached the Marxian turning point of the
“Zusammenbruch”.’ Ibid., 182.
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews 183
most brutal’ part of the Europe-wide campaign.36 As its central causes, Munkác-
si names the plans of ‘Germanic cultural superiority’, ‘the Hungarian counter-
revolution’ and the ambitions of ‘the right-wing Arrow Cross middle class.’37 In
fact, Hogyan történt? explicitly argues that ‘the liquidation of Hungarian Jewry’
was the result of an agreement between Eichmann’s Kommando and László En-
dre,38 and that ‘four key persons’ were chiefly responsible for its implementa-
tion: ‘Eichmann, Endre, Baky and Ferenczy, the immediate chief executioner.’39
What is more, Munkácsi directly raises the question whether the Germans could
have carried out the deportations without Hungarian help, in response to which
he unequivocally states, ‘incontestable facts prove that the deportation of Hun-
garian Jewry – the way it happened – could only have happened with the fullest
cooperation of the Hungarian gendarmerie.’40
However, Hogyan történt? offers a rather different interpretation as well.
Munkácsi asserts that, unlike other countries occupied by Germany, the state
administration may have theoretically remained an internal matter,41 but the
Hungarian government had de facto ‘removed its protection’ of Hungarian Jews
and ‘extradited’ them to the Germans.42 However, even in retrospect, Munkácsi
looks certain that their notification, according to which the Jews of Hungary
had to submit to the Germans, was ‘not the final one, it was not honest, and not
the stance of all Hungarian authorities or public figures.’43 The author, thereby,
underlines his position (already cited above): ‘those who fought for the rescue
36 Ibid., 162.
37 Ibid., 88.
38 ‘We now know that Eichmann and Endre decided about the deportation of Hungarian Jewry
at a meeting of the Ministry of the Interior during the first week of April.’ Ibid., 79.
39 Ibid., 156. Munkácsi claims that Ferenczy provided Eichmann with the armed forces re-
quired ‘to round-up, to ghettoize and to deport.’ Ibid., 157.
40 Ibid., 215. Elsewhere, Munkácsi states that, ‘hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews, the
very best of them were chased into death trains by Hungarian gendarme.’ Ibid., 236. Hogyan
történt? poses the question of continuities in the following terms: ‘Is it imaginable at all that
Horthy did not realize … where “the ideas of Szeged” had led after the drunken “Christian and
national” slogans, that he did not realize that they had led to the world of the numerus clausus
and the Jewish laws that denied divine and human rights?’ Ibid., 236. Munkácsi is also eager to
explain that the decision to halt the deportations was taken ‘not in the interest of Jews but to
save themselves, their own power positions, and in the interest of the country they led,’ spec-
ifying that the decision was triggered by the allied landing in Normandy, the approach of the
Russians and the attempted ‘Baky putsch’. Ibid., 111, 175.
41 Ibid., 34.
42 Ibid., 15.
43 Ibid., 71. Tellingly, Munkácsi interprets Miklós Horthy’s decision of 6 July to finally halt the
deportations as ‘the reawakening of Hungarian sovereignty’, of which, according to his inter-
pretation, there have been ‘no previous instances’ since 19 March. Ibid., 177.
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews 185
44 Ibid., 72. Hogyan történt? repeatedly asserts that there was only one way for Hungarian
Jews to escape; namely, to ‘awaken’ the Hungarian authorities and resist. Ibid., 215.
45 Munkácsi could assert within one and the same paragraph that the connection to the Hun-
garian resistance would have been decisive in saving Hungarian Jewry and that the Hungarian
gendarme ought to be qualified as key perpetrators. See, especially, the full paragraph on page
112.
46 Ibid., 18.
47 As Munkácsi puts it, ‘The stone started rolling and it swept away Hungarian Jewry but also
brought the entire country onto the brink of final destruction.’ Ibid., 53.
48 Ibid., 146.
49 Ibid., 245.
186 Ferenc Laczó
50 Jenő Lévai, Endre László. A háborús bűnösök magyar listavezetője [László Endre: the top
Hungarian war criminal] (Budapest: Müller, 1945).
51 Jenő Lévai, A hősök hőse…! Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Endre, a demokrácia vértanúja [The hero of
heroes…! Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, the martyr of democracy] (Budapest: Müller, 1945).
52 Jenő Lévai, Fekete könyv a magyar zsidóság szenvedéseiről [Black book on the suffering of
Hungarian Jewry] (Budapest: Officina, 1946); Jenő Lévai, Fehér könyv. Külföldi akciók magyar
zsidók megmentésére [White book: foreign operations to rescue Hungarian Jews] (Budapest:
Officina, 1946); Jenő Lévai, Szürke könyv magyar zsidók megmentéséről [Grey book on the res-
cue of Hungarian Jews] (Budapest: Officina, 1946).
53 Jenő Lévai, A pesti gettó csodálatos megmenekülésének hiteles története [The authentic story
of the miraculous escape of the Pest Ghetto] (Budapest: Officina, 1946).
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews 187
who owed their lives to his rescue mission, Lévai published a book on Wallen-
berg that shortly thereafter also appeared in Swedish translation.54
If this was not plentiful enough, in 1948, the year when the communist dic-
tatorship was more brutally established in his country, Lévai completed a sub-
stantially more elaborate monograph on the Holocaust in Hungary, speaking of
Jewish fate (zsidósors) in its title.55 In the same year, Lévai also released a vol-
ume under the title Zsidósors Európában [Jewish Fate in Europe] in which he
nominally broadened his horizon to the whole continent, though admitted to
offering no more than a ‘representative mosaic’ of documents which, in fact,
mostly related to the international rescue of Hungarian Jews.56 Last but not
least, and aside from the eleven Hungarian-language books he authored be-
tween 1945 and 1948, the year 1948 also saw Lévai emerge as an international
author with the publication of his English-language Black Book on the Martyr-
dom of Hungarian Jewry in Zürich, Switzerland.57
54 Jenő Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg regényes élete, hősi kűzdelmei, rejtélyes eltűnésének titka [The
secret of the eventful life, heroic struggle and mysterious disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg]
(Budapest: Magyar Téka, 1948). In Swedish: Jenő Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg, hjälten i Budapest
(Stockholm: Saxon-Lindström, 1948).
55 Jenő Lévai, Zsidósors Magyarországon [Jewish fate in Hungary] (Budapest: Magyar Téka,
1948).
56 Jenő Lévai, Zsidósors Európában [Jewish fate in Europe] (Budapest: Magyar Téka, 1948),
Ibid., 5. The explicit focus of this work was Central Europe and, more particularly, the Mantello
Rescue Mission El Salvador conducted in Switzerland which was led by a Hungarian Jewish
émigré named George Mandel-Mantello.
57 Eugene Lévai, Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry (Zürich: Central European
Times Publishing, 1948). While his most productive years were indubitably those between 1945
and 1948, Lévai made several other important contributions during his lifetime. A student at
the Budapest University of Technology and a journalist, Lévai was captured during the First
World War and was forced to spend years in Russian captivity. During the 1930s, he published
several popular volumes on these experiences. See: Jenő Lévai, Éhség, árulás, Przemyśl [Hun-
ger, treason, Przemyśl] (Budapest: Magyar Hétfő, 1933); Jenő Lévai, Éhség, forradalom, Szibéria
[Hunger, revolution, Siberia] (Budapest: Magyar Hétfő, 1934); Jenő Lévai, Éhség, panama, Hin-
terland [Hunger, Panama, hinterland] (Budapest: Magyar Hétfő, 1935). He managed to establish
himself as a leading journalist of his country, working first for Az Újság and later for the Est
papers, the most popular dailies of the Horthy era, which stood in opposition to the govern-
ments. During the 1930s, Lévai became the owner and chief editor of several papers such as
Magyar Hétfő and Kis Újság and also devoted himself to exploring the history of Hungarian
journalism. See: Jenő Lévai, Kossuth Lajos néplapjai. A magyar újságírás hőskora 1877–1937
[The popular papers of Lajos Kossuth: the beginnings of Hungarian journalism, 1877–1937]
(Budapest: Kis Újság, 1938). As part of his attempt to expose the dealings of the increasingly
powerful radical right-wing forces in Hungary, Lévai released a book shortly before the out-
break of the war that aimed to show how intimate their connections to the German Nazis were.
See: Jenő Lévai, Gömbös Gyula és a magyar fajvédők a hitlerizmus bölcsőjénél [Gyula Gömbös
188 Ferenc Laczó
Its broad scope, thematic diversity and rich source base all make Zsidósors
Magyarországon into the single most impressive result of Lévai’s three excep-
tionally prolific years. Ambitioning no less than to ‘contain a summary of the
whole question while being objective in tone,’58 Lévai indeed manages to touch
on a whole row of themes on the pages of this work that have preoccupied his-
torians since,59 while combining a narrative account with the reproduction of
relevant primary sources – without, however, specifying where their originals
and Hungarian race protectors at the cradle of Hitlerism] (Budapest: Szerzői Kiadás, 1938).
During the early years of the Second World War, Lévai served as editor of the Hungarian Jewish
Képes Családi Lap where he devoted significant attention to the mistreatment of labour service-
men. He also edited several volumes in defence of the legally discriminated and socioeconomi-
cally excluded Hungarian Jewish community. See: Jenő Lévai, …Védelmünkben! Vezércikkek,
tanulmányok, vitacikkek […In our defence! Lead articles, studies, polemics] (Budapest: Képes
Családi Lapok, 1942); Jenő Lévai, Írók, írások …: vígasztalás van az irodalomban [Writers, writ-
ings…: there is solace in literature] (Budapest: Faragó, 1943); Jenő Lévai, Írók, színészek, éne-
kesek és zenészek regényes életútja a Goldmark-teremig: Az OMIKE színháza és művészei [The
life paths of writers, actors, singers and musicians to the Goldmark Hall: the theatre of OMIKE
and its artists] (Budapest: Szerzői kiadás, 1943). His impressive early post-war works were then
followed by abrupt silence before he would return with several more volumes in the 1960s.
These volumes included the documentation released on the occasion of the Eichmann trial:
Jenő Lévai, Eichmann in Hungary: Documents (Budapest: Pannonia Press, 1961); a volume on
Kurt Becher, Chief of the Economic Department of the SS Command in Hungary, Jenő Lévai, A
fekete SS ‘fehér báránya’ [The ‘white sheep’ of the black SS] (Budapest: Kossuth, 1966); and
another on the interventions of Pius XII and the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, Jenő
Lévai, Hungarian Jewry and the Papacy: Pope Pius XII did not remain silent (London: Sands,
1968).
58 Lévai, Zsidósors Magyarországon, 5.
59 For instance, Lévai devotes some of his attention to the impact that foreign policy consid-
erations had on internal policy, as well as to the connection between Hungarian revisionist
successes and anti-Semitic legislation. Ibid., 22, 29. He briefly describes the fraught relations
between international Jewish organizations and Hungarian Jewry, the socioeconomic conse-
quences of anti-Jewish laws, the military labour service system, and Jewish cultural life during
the war years. Ibid., 51–3, 60. Zsidósors Magyarországon also refers to the infamous Nazi-in-
spired Hungarian Institute for Research on the Jewish Question, the destruction of Jewish
books orchestrated in 1944, and the massive looting of art works. Ibid., 135, 173, 251. Moreover,
Lévai mentions several specifics of the Holocaust in Hungary such as the humiliating searches
Jews were forced to undergo before being deported, or the creation of the so-called yellow-star
houses of Budapest. Ibid., 139, 166. Furthermore, his book recalls famed individual stories,
such as the resistance martyr Hannah Szenes, László Ocskay and his thousands of protected
workers, and also the German major general Gerhard Schmidthuber who provided assistance to
Hungarian Jews struggling to survive in the Budapest ghetto. Ibid., 379, 376, 396. Anticipating
further thematic priorities of later decades, Lévai refers to the international press campaign to
save the lives of the threatened Jews of Hungary when the war had practically been decided,
and poses the question (repeatedly raised since): why have the train tracks to Auschwitz-Bir-
kenau not been bombed, even though this could have been done. Ibid., 357.
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews 189
60 The sources quoted or reproduced also include sources from perpetrators such as a letter
Hungarian Ambassador Döme Sztójay sent in 1943 from Berlin recommending the implemen-
tation of the Holocaust in Hungary (Ibid., 48–51); the detailed reports of László Ferenczy, ‘the
leading expert of the deportations’ (Ibid., 144) from 1944 that evidently belong among the key
sources (Ibid., 151–4); the presentation of László Endre on the ‘Jewish Question’ at the govern-
mental meeting of 20 June 1944 (Ibid., 214–8); Endre’s contemporaneous interview in the Ber-
liner Lokalanzeiger (Ibid., 163); and, parts of the post-war account of Edmund Veesenmayer,
Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary during the Holocaust (Ibid., 101). Lévai also uses various
sources of Jewish provenance such as the diary of Central Jewish Council leader Samu Stern
(Ibid., 168); letters sent by the Council to the Minister of the Interior, Andor Jaross (Ibid., 112–
6); telegraph messages of Zionist activists Miklós Krausz and Ottó Komoly that were meant to
further their cause of rescue (Ibid., 157–8); and, Jewish leaflets addressing Hungarian Christian
society that were distributed without legal permission in 1944 (Ibid., 164–6). In the course of
his attempt to reconstruct the ways Jews were being physically attacked, Lévai even employs
less conventional historical sources such as ambulance diaries (Ibid., 380). Last but not least,
Lévai makes use of the account of the single witness who survived the horrendous Buda hos-
pital massacres committed under Arrow Cross rule (Ibid., 398). Lévai’s work also features some
social historical data. See his data on Jewish demography, conversion rates and migration:
Ibid., 26–7. The appendixes feature documents from the Jewish Council on the ghettos and
concentration camps in the countryside; calculations on the cost of the Nazi occupation; pro-
tocols (including Hungarian-related information in Russian protocols) and witness accounts
(including DEGOB ones) concerning Auschwitz-Birkenau and various other Nazi camps; doc-
umentation of Arrow Cross crimes based on Court proceedings, including female perpetrators,
and of the punishments meted out; documents of rescue attempts both by the neutral states
with representation in Budapest, the Red Cross and international Jewish organizations; hu-
manitarian help of the latter after the end of the war; statistics on the losses of Hungarian
Jewry as well as the legal documents condemning the persecution of Jews from 1946. Lévai
names many of his sources in the text and also includes 179 footnotes. However, this proves
far from sufficient to identify – let alone to be able to locate – the sources he used.
61 In the course of this, Lévai – somewhat curiously – declares, ‘Unfortunately, due to the
limited space available, the authentic story of the concentration and deportation of Hungarian
Jewry from the countryside has to be presented relatively briefly.’ Lévai, Zsidósors, 97. At the
same time, he assigns genocidal intentions to Hungarian ghettoization, claiming that it already
‘aimed at killing as many people as possible.’ Ibid., 96.
190 Ferenc Laczó
turn, presents the developments that took place during the last months of the
war and the Holocaust, reporting on the life and death of Budapest Jews under
Arrow Cross rule, in particular.
On its pages, Lévai articulates his stance on a host of contested questions
related to the Holocaust in Hungary that as such, enables us to study how he
revised some of his previous assessments by 1948.62 A major organizational nov-
elty of Zsidósors Magyarországon is that, whereas in his first overview, Fekete
könyv from 1946, Lévai divides the story of the Holocaust into three separate
volumes (the black, gray and white books), by 1948, he attempts to integrate all
major aspects into one single book. There were also four significant interpreta-
tive changes compared to Fekete könyv: in Zsidósors Magyarországon, Lévai
takes a much more critical stance toward the Jewish Council; he devotes added
attention to the Zionist role in self-rescue operations, including a discussion of
Rezső Kasztner’s acts; he covers the rescue missions by the neutral states who
still operated their embassies in Budapest in 1944–45; and, last but not least, he
offers detailed documentation of, and repeated praise for, the efforts of the
Christian Churches.
Concerning the Jewish Council and potentially drawing directly on Ernő
Munkácsi, Lévai first remarks on the unfathomable ignorance they displayed in
1944 and their apparent inability to interpret even some of the clearest signs.
However, Lévai’s assessment is rather different from that of Munkácsi: he ar-
gues that the shocking naïveté of the Jewish leadership had resulted in ‘servile
behaviour’, ‘exaggerated benevolence aimed at fulfilling all demands and wish-
es’, even ‘enthusiastic expert cooperation’.63 Zsidósors Magyarországon goes be-
yond repeating Lévai’s previous conclusion to the extent that it has proven fatal
that the Council had not even aimed at organizing Jewish self-defence and re-
sistance,64 and would assign partial responsibility to its members.65 Thus, even
as Lévai still praises the activities of Lajos Stöckler and Miksa Domonkos – both
members of the Jewish Council during the rule of the Arrow Cross whom he de-
picted as heroic leaders in his book on the Pest ghetto released the previous
year – he now declares that ‘our fathers’ have proven ‘too weak in the storm’.66
Zsidósors Magyarországon declares the failure of the Jewish endeavour to assim-
ilate in more general terms as well, and further propagates a new form of Jewish
unity that would have included close cooperation with the Zionists.67 In accord-
ance with this stance, Lévai intends to help improve the reputation of the Zion-
ists and would now assess their wartime role in markedly positive terms.68 For
instance, while briefly noting that ‘no ultimate judgment’ could be passed over
Rezső Kasztner yet,69 Lévai argues that his efforts ‘at least’ resulted in the rescue
of 1,700 people from the clutches of the Nazis,70 and he therefore deserves rec-
ognition for his ‘self-rescue attempts’.71
Zsidósors Magyarországon documents the activities of the Christian
Churches on more than 30 pages, which amounts to the longest section of docu-
ments in the entire book.72 Lévai concludes these pages with the generous as-
sessment that ‘the vast movement of the Christian Churches doubtlessly im-
pacted members of the government as well as Regent Horthy and made them
revise their helpless and indifferent ways.’73 At the same time, Lévai credits the
efforts of the embassies of neutral countries in a novel way as well. As opposed
ian Jewry and the poverty of the large majority, complaining about the lack of solidarity and
contributions from great capitalists. Ibid., 57–8. He does note, however, that there was a new –
though still rather modest – level of democratization after 1938 as well as increased coopera-
tion between different Jewish fractions.
66 Ibid., 403.
67 Ibid., 403. Such a statement at the end of the book is all the more intriguing since Lévai
opens his narrative with several Hungarian national topoi, see: Ibid., 7.
68 Zsidósors Magyarországon concludes its discussion of Zionist wartime activities with the
statement: ‘the work of the Zionists under the label of the Swiss Embassy was the only truly
democratic mass movement of self-defence. It merits fair treatment, which it has not yet re-
ceived.’ Ibid., 337.
69 Ibid., 357.
70 Ibid., 357.
71 Ibid., 160. However, Lévai does critique Kasztner because of his ‘severe and fatal waste of
time’ and extensively quotes Miklós Krausz, secretary of the Palestine Office, who accused him
of having committed several mistakes and having made many empty promises. Ibid., 163, 275.
For his part, Lévai merely explains that Krausz and Kasztner followed different strategies –
whereas the former sought ways to strike deals with the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, the latter
‘negotiated with the SS’ – without taking a stance on their relative merits. Ibid., 241.
72 See: Ibid., 145–9, 179–206.
73 Ibid., 206. Earlier, Lévai remarks on how the Christian Church contributed to anti-Semitism
and how their leaders supported the anti-Semitic laws of the late 1930s.
192 Ferenc Laczó
to the almost exclusive praise reserved for the Red Army in Fekete könyv, Lévai
now argues that the survival of the remaining Budapest Jews was due to ‘the
victory of the Red Army and the persistent efforts of the neutral embassies.’74
Lévai’s discussion of Arrow Cross rule does not significantly change in com-
parison with his previous works, it is merely that some of his statements were
formulated in a more nuanced manner. Zsidósors Magyarországon still depicts
Ferenc Szálasi’s reign as a period characterized by brutality, atrocities, theft,
and corruption, but also as a time when there was no supreme authority to con-
trol violent local struggles.75 Furthermore, Lévai argues that the system of la-
bour service was transformed under Arrow Cross rule when around 60,000 Jews
from Budapest were forced on ‘death roads’, and whoever survived until the
Western border of the country was handed over to the Nazis to be extermi-
nated.76 In accordance with his ideological preferences, Lévai thus asserts that,
along with the more than 6,200 Arrow Cross murders in Budapest that the Peo-
ple’s Tribunals had investigated,77 the deportation of Jews to their certain death
was also reinstated after mid-October 1944. In an exaggerated manner, he even
claims that Szálasi had re-launched the war against the Jews ‘in a more drastic
manner than ever.’78
On the pages of his post-war synthesis, Lévai continues to be preoccupied
with the complex and no less controversial question of German-Hungarian rela-
tions. He argues that the meeting where the agenda of ‘cleansing’ the whole
country of Jews was agreed upon took place at the Hungarian Ministry of the
Interior on 4 April 1944 and that it was a joint Hungarian-German agreement.79
He explains that the Gestapo and the Nazi Sonderkommando had arrived in
Hungary with the intention of implementing the deportations, but that subse-
quently, Adolf Eichmann and László Endre decided together ‘how to apply their
ideas to the Hungarian circumstances and how to develop a detailed plan of de-
74 Ibid., 400.
75 Ibid., 334.
76 Ibid., 350. The number 60,000 appears on p. 358; 59,000 is found on p. 467.
77 Ibid., 386.
78 Ibid., 319. This is one of the points where more recent scholarship, especially publications
by László Karsai, has clearly contradicted Lévai: Szálasi’s rule was characterized by wide-
spread mass murder against Hungarian Jews but – unlike during the premiership of Döme
Sztójay – no systematic program of annihilation was being implemented during its months.
See László Karsai, ‘The “Jewish Policy” of the Szálasi Regime’ in Yad Vashem Studies 40, no. 1
(2010).
79 Ibid., 97.
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews 193
portations.’80 Lévai also informs his readers of the revealing detail that Endre in
fact pleaded for a speedier policy of genocide than the German Nazis: Endre rec-
ommended operating six trains per day between Hungary and Auschwitz-Birke-
nau containing as many Hungarian Jews as possible, whereas the Germans
were ‘only’ ready to agree to four.81
In Zsidósors Magyarországon, Lévai thus assigns heavy responsibility to the
Hungarian side, arguing that ‘Eichmann and Endre, the German and the Hun-
garian “dejudaizer”, having the approval of Baky, started to implement their
common program. Sztójay and Jaross are chiefly responsible that they could do
so: without their approval this could not have happened … it is certain that Re-
gent Horthy was not against the expulsion [kitelepítés in the original – FL] of
the Jews either.’82 Such an emphasis on Hungarian responsibility in Zsidósors
Magyarországon appears all the more striking since, similar to Lévai’s earlier
works, his major synthesis also pursues starkly anti-German discourses and
clearly blames the rise of Hungarian anti-Semitism during the 1930s on the in-
fluence of Nazi Germany.83
As part of his discussion of shared responsibility, Lévai relates again to the
struggle that emerged between Germans and Hungarians concerning who
would eventually acquire the wealth of Hungarian Jews.84 Lévai sketches sev-
eral alternative ways that the pursuit of genocide and the programme of robbery
could be connected. Calling the Holocaust ‘the greatest and dirtiest campaign of
robbery in history’,85 he argues that Adolf Eichmann prioritized ‘the physical
80 Ibid., 107. At the same time, Lévai repeatedly asserts that the deportations and their con-
sequences could not have remained unknown to the Hungarian government, claiming that
they both knew about them and fully approved them. See: Ibid., 140, 161, 172.
81 Ibid., 143.
82 Ibid., 99. At one point, Jenő Lévai’s major synthesis even maintains that documents from
the People’s Tribunals have conclusively proven that the deportations had been the exclusive
responsibility of Horthy and the Sztójay government. Lévai also explicitly states that the Hun-
garian gendarmerie and its leaders were responsible for the terribly brutal implementation of
the deportation decrees. Ibid., 97.
83 He not only – exaggeratedly – claims that Hungarian anti-Semitism was essentially due to
German influence, but also – falsely – maintains that the Nazi leaders heavily pressured Hun-
garian leaders to adopt anti-Semitic measures from the late 1930s onwards, and viewed their
willingness to do so as a decisive criterion of their reliability. He also writes of a ‘German
invasion’ of the 1930s through which Hungary became part of the German sphere of influence.
Ibid., 22–3. By asserting that the ‘real interests of the masses’ were anti-German, Lévai could
maintain that Hungarian anti-Semites essentially constituted a fifth column of Nazi Germany.
Ibid., 44, 33. At one point, he even contrasts the betrayal of the Germans of Hungary and the
loyalty Jews displayed towards the country. Ibid., 61.
84 Ibid., 169.
85 Ibid., 249.
194 Ferenc Laczó
annihilation of Jewry even over the military interests’ and also wanted to ac-
quire ‘Jewish wealth’ for himself and his organization.86 He maintains that
László Endre and László Baky were fully committed to the programme of geno-
cide too, but that other members of the Döme Sztójay government seemed
‘barely interested in the fate of the Jews but all the more so in their wealth.’87
This distinction is coupled with the assertion that regarding ‘the Jewish ques-
tion’, all ministers of the Sztójay government, with the sole exception of De-
fence Minister Lajos Csatay, stood closer to the Germans than to the stance of
Regent Horthy.88
It is apparent that in Zsidósors Magyarországon, Jenő Lévai could already
draw on years of intense research, enabling him to complete a multifaceted
overview of the Holocaust in Hungary as early as 1948. This impressive early
synthesis of a major chapter of the Europe-wide genocide not only covers a
wider scope of themes and employs a greater number and variety of sources
than Lévai’s previous works, but it also reveals how Lévai grew less interested
in putting exclusive blame on the Germans. As I aimed to show above, by 1948,
his interpretation of Hungarian, and also of Hungarian Jewish, behaviour dur-
ing the Holocaust in Hungary turned highly critical: the major early historian of
the Holocaust in Hungary not only articulated a more accusatory assessment of
the activities of the Jewish Council but, much more importantly, assigned a cru-
cial part of the responsibility for the deportations from Hungary to the local au-
thorities.
86 Ibid., 240.
87 Ibid., 240.
88 Ibid., 266. Horthy may have been presented as some kind of counterpole here, but through-
out the book he is depicted rather as a weak and helpless leader who was ultimately respon-
sible for the deportations.
89 On Endre Sós’ assimilationist stance and collaborationist practices as leader of Hungarian
Jewry between 1957 and 1965, see: Róbert Győri Szabó, A kommunizmus és a zsidóság az 1945
utáni Magyarországon [Communism and Jewry in post-war Hungary] (Budapest: Gondolat,
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews 195
2009); Kata Bohus, Jews, Israelites, Zionists: the Hungarian State’s policies on Jewish Issues in a
Comparative Perspective (1956–1968) (Budapest: Central European University, 2014, unpub-
lished dissertation).
90 Endre Sós, Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus [European fascism and anti-Semitism] (Bu-
dapest: Magyar Téka, 1948). Accordingly, Sós highlights that there were not only German, Jap-
anese and Spanish but also Italian, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian and Croatian perpetrators
(his mention of Spain underlines that his subject was indeed fascism rather than the Second
World War). Sós, Európai, 204. However, in line with his ideological agenda, Sós asserts that
the people of the Soviet Union did not participate in anti-Jewish actions and that the Yugoslav
partisans helped all the Jews they could. Ibid., 204, 207. In other words, here we see the begin-
nings of an ideologically motivated version of history that has become deeply influential and
that Timothy Synder, among others, has done so much to debunk in recent years. See: Timothy
Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
91 Endre Sós wrote for Esti Kurír, Az Újság, Magyar Hírlap, Reggeli Újság and A Toll, among
others. His major books on political issues from the 1930s are Endre Sós, Mi lesz Európával?
[What will become of Europe?] (Budapest: Magyar Cobden-Szövetség, 1931); Endre Sós, Diktá-
torok és diktatúrák [Dictators and dictatorships] (Budapest: Magyar Cobden-Szövetség, 1933);
Endre Sós, Európa drámája [The drama of Europe] (Budapest: Viktória, 1936).
92 Endre Sós, Becsapott ajtók előtt: a magyar zsidóság sorskérdései [In front of doors slammed
shut: the existential questions of Hungarian Jewry] (Budapest: Periszkóp, 1938); Endre Sós,
Emberdömping: az eviani konferencia és a zsidó kivándorlók világproblémája [Human dumping:
the Evian conference and the world problem of Jewish emigration] (Budapest: Periszkóp, 1939);
Endre Sós, Fejek és elvek [Heads and principles] (Budapest: Viktória, 1940); Endre Sós, Zsidók a
magyar városokban [Jews in Hungarian cities] (Budapest: Libanon, 1941); Endre Sós, A nagy-
váradi zsidók útja [The path of Nagyvárad Jews] (Budapest: Libanon, 1943); Endre Sós, A zsidók
útja a kálvinista Rómában (Debrecenben) [The path of Jews in Calvinist Rome (Debrecen)] (Bu-
dapest: 1943).
93 Endre Sós was killed in a car accident.
196 Ferenc Laczó
Similar to Lévai, the early post-war years were among Sós’ most prolific and
saw him complete a host of further political and contemporary historical works.
In 1945, he published works on anti-fascist heroes and human rights.94 In 1947,
one year before the release of his major work (to be analyzed below) that inevi-
tably focused much attention on Nazi Germany, he covered the ‘fateful path’
taken by Weimar Germany under the title The Suicide of Democracy.95 In the lat-
er years of his life, which partly coincided with his top-level collaboration with
the repressive Kádár regime,96 Sós authored several popular biographies and al-
so published autobiographical reflections.97 After 1956, he would occasionally
work as a translator too, being responsible for, among other things, the Hungar-
ian edition of Polish diaries related to the Warsaw ghetto and its uprising.98
His Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus from 1948 nonetheless remained
his major statement on the Jewish catastrophe in its European dimension – and
the major Hungarian-language statement of its kind until the end of the com-
munist regime. Drawing on publications in a great number of languages (Ger-
man, French, English, Hungarian and Yiddish, above all) and addressing a host
of key themes, Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus was, similar to the works
discussed above, a remarkable accomplishment a mere three years after libera-
tion. However, contrary to Jenő Lévai or Ernő Munkácsi, Európai fasizmus és
antiszemitizmus offers a broad international coverage, not only of Holocaust-re-
lated topics, but also of secondary sources and it does so without a marked em-
phasis on Hungary. The events in the Soviet Union are covered primarily
through German and Yiddish sources. Sources in Slavic languages – and thus
94 Endre Sós, Három mártír [Three martyrs] (Budapest: Officina, 1945); Endre Sós, Az emberi
jogok [Human rights] (Budapest: Dante, 1945).
95 Endre Sós, A demokrácia öngyilkossága. A weimari Németország végzetes útja [The suicide
of democracy: the fateful path of Weimar Germany] (Budapest: Téka, 1947).
96 Sós also regularly reported to the Hungarian State Security, often denouncing other mem-
bers of the Jewish community.
97 For the former, see: Endre Sós, Zola (Budapest: Művelt Nép, 1952); Endre Sós, Cervantes
(Budapest: Művelt Nép, 1955); Endre Sós and Magda Vámos, Thomas and Heinrich Mann: a két
írótestvér szenvedése, küzdelme és nagysága [Thomas and Heinrich Mann: the suffering, strug-
gle and magnitude of the two brothers] (Budapest: Gondolat, 1960); Endre Sós and Magda
Vámos, Lincoln (Budapest: Magvető, 1964); Endre Sós and Magda Vámos, Franklin vagyok Phil-
adelphiából: Benjamin Franklin élete [I am Franklin from Philadelphia: the life of Benjamin
Franklin] (Budapest: Móra, 1970). For the latter, see: Endre Sós, Tanúvallomás. Cikkek, emlé-
kezések [Witness testimony: articles, reminiscences] (Budapest: Magyar Izraeliták Országos
Képviselete, 1962); Endre Sós, Felvillanó arcok. Arcképek, emlékezések [Flashing faces: profiles,
reminiscences] (Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1965).
98 Dorka Goldkorn, Leon Weiczker and Noemi Szac-Wajnkranc, Fellázad a gettó [The ghetto
revolts] (Budapest: Kossuth, 1959). However, Sós translated the work not from the Polish orig-
inal, but from its German version titled Im Feuer vergangen: Tagebücher aus dem Ghetto.
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews 197
also much of Central and Eastern Europe – may be recurrently evoked on the
pages of the book, but still remain somewhat underrepresented. Sós’ chapter on
anti-Semitism constitutes a partial exemption as it presents strong links be-
tween the story of Nazi Germany and Hungary, particularly in relation to anti-
Semitism, and also devotes significantly more attention to Slovakia, Romania,
Croatia and Serbia than many of the other chapters. The chapter begins with a
section titled ‘From Szeged to Auschwitz’ which claims that Hungary was the
pioneer in developing fascism, even if its variant of fascism did not possess in-
ternational appeal.99 At the same time, Sós describes the platform of Szeged as
‘the unity of conservative and fascist nationalists’ and asserts that ‘a straight
line connected the White Terror to the mass murder on the banks of the Danube
under Arrow Cross rule and even to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.’100 What is
more, in some respects, Sós may be the most professional of early Hungarian
Jewish survivor historians dealing with the origins and implementation of the
Holocaust,101 even if he may also be faulted for his occasional, rather uncritical
use of sources.102
ical commitments. He even argues that the operation of the crematorium of Majdanek ‘was to
some extent necessitated by the Katyn case. The German feared that their crimes would be
discovered one day.’ Sós, Európai, 125. A perhaps more obvious case of the uncritical use of
sources, which actually consciously aimed to falsify history, is when Sós presents ‘proofs’ of
Jewish based on SS reports that were meant to justify the massacres. See Ibid., 179.
103 For instance, Sós maintains that the Communist Party in Hungary pursued a ‘continuous
struggle despite being outlawed.’ Ibid., 78.
104 On the one hand, Sós repeatedly links the very recent catastrophe to what he calls ‘the
necessity of socialism’. He makes statements such as ‘What happened to the Jews in Europe
could happen because the historical destiny of the capitalist social order is finished: it is eco-
nomically and morally bankrupt! Practical Christianity that aims to legitimate capitalism is
bankrupt too!’ Ibid., 29. Referring to ‘the solution of the Jewish question', in the vein of Karl
Marx, as inseparable from ‘humanity becoming freed from the shackles of capitalism’, he even
asserts, ‘The memory of six million murdered Jews obliges all Jews to become pioneers of the
socialist world. There is no other salvation for the Jews of the world than Socialism!’ Ibid., 229,
235. On the other hand, certain parts of his book reveal the marked impact of the emerging
Zionist interpretation. For instance, the photos included at the end of the book begin with a
portrait of Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (whom Sós denounces as somebody
who played ‘a serious role in the establishment of death camps’ and was ‘one of the chief war
criminals,’ see Ibid., 44, 47), then include images of Majdanek, Treblinka, Buchenwald and
Nordhausen, followed by pictures of resistance – the Warsaw ghetto uprising, above all – with
depictions of the Zionist struggle. The visuals of the book thus clearly cohere into a Jewish
national narrative.
105 Sós asserts that in ‘the century of the realization of socialism’, Palestine will have to be-
come socialist too. Ibid., 176. He argues that ‘the Jewish spirit’ has ‘profound social content’
and Jews are in fact highly similar to proletarians. Ibid., 231. More generally, he maintains that,
‘as the example of the Soviet Union showed’, socialism ‘does not demand denying one’s reli-
gion, nationality or ethnicity from anybody’ and does not raise the question of assimilation.
Ibid., 233–4. He presents Ilya Ehrenburg as a role model since he was at once a Soviet citizen, a
communist, and a Jew. Ibid., 230.
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews 199
ate than tragedy since Jews were generally ‘misfortunate victims’ who could
neither ethically, nor aesthetically be qualified as heroes.106
Such a clear conceptual preference notwithstanding, Sós’ overall evaluation
of Jewish behaviour during the Second World War proves rather ambivalent. On
the one hand, he claims, ‘From the very beginning of the Second World War,
Jews were allies of the nations who fought against fascism and its alliance.’107
In this interpretation, Jews not only made significant military contributions, but
were also highly active as leaders and members of resistance groups. Accord-
ingly, the book repeatedly cites examples of Jewish resistance during the Holo-
caust, highlighting the cases of Białystok, Vilna, Lemberg, and at the same
time, cites acts of resistance in Nazi annihilation camps such as Sobibór, Tre-
blinka and Auschwitz. Based on David Knout’s La Bataille du ghetto de Varsovie
that includes the report of Jürgen Stroop, Sós highlights the Warsaw Ghetto Up-
rising, above all, but also draws attention to Anna Szenes as a ‘shared martyr’
of ‘the Palestinian Jewish antifascist struggle and the Hungarian resistance
movement.’108 In spite of offering such an elaborate presentation of praisewor-
thy acts during the Second World War, Sós ultimately asserts that ‘in their over-
whelming majority’, Jewish behaviour was just like the European average.109 As
this rather ambivalent assessment of Jewish behaviour indicates, Sós’ mono-
graph offers a rich mosaic of relevant information and several intriguing inter-
pretations rather than a fully coherent conceptualization of the Jewish catastro-
phe.110
106 Ibid., 219, 223. Sós’ arguments in favour of the term catastrophe contest the use of the label
tragedy in particular. He argues that the behaviour of the large majority of Jewish victims was
‘not worthy of tragic heroes’ but was rather conformist, even servile, asserting that their mur-
der was nevertheless shocking; but this was the case, above all, because of the immensely
large number of victims. Ibid., 223. Moreover, Sós proposes that the victims ought to be called
Jews and not Jewry since ‘economically, socially and politically’ Jews in modern Europe have
not formed a unit – in fact, he explicitly maintains that Jews ‘only became’ Jewry at the time of
their brutal persecution. Ibid., 219.
107 Ibid., 171.
108 Ibid., 174. See David Knout, La Bataille du ghetto de Varsovie (Paris: Editions du Centre de
Documentation Juive Contemporaine, 1946).
109 Ibid., 223.
110 Sós’ chapter titled ‘From the Timetable of Anti-Semitism’ may illustrate how rich and in-
ternationally diverse the coverage of the book was. This chapter discusses the Nazi book burn-
ings of 1933, the Nuremberg laws of 1935, the Novemberpogrome of 1938, the race to acquire
Jewish property in the Czech lands in 1938–39, the swiftness of Slovak anti-Semitic action upon
the foundation of the Slovak state in 1939, the mass murders in Jassy, Cernauti and Odessa in
1941, the deportations from Hungary orchestrated by the Central Authority to Control Foreign-
ers and the mass murders in the reacquired Southern parts of the country in 1941–42, the Ger-
man use of gas vans (fojtókamra-gépkocsi) in the early stages of the Holocaust, the participa-
200 Ferenc Laczó
The book certainly covers a whole palette of themes, beginning with the
profiles of chief Nazi perpetrators, their major crimes,111 and the sentences they
received at Nuremberg,112 while finishing with a related chapter of reflections
on the German situation in the early post-war years titled ‘Crime and Punish-
ment.’113 In between these two closely connected chapters, Európai fasizmus és
tion of Ukrainian and French militias, the establishment of Jewish Councils in Poland, Nazi
mass murders in Soviet territories, the setting up of Dutch deportation camps as well as the
destruction of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Croatia. Moreover, Sós refers to the hunger
plan, the public declarations concerning genocide made by Goebbels, the Posen speech of
Himmler, he addresses the Polish underground’s reports on the murder of the Jews and re-
marks on how Hungarians wanted to speed up the deportations in 1944 (it goes without saying
that all these developments are mentioned rather than analyzed on the pages of this chapter).
111 It ought to be added that, like numerous contemporaries, Sós believed that propaganda
was the ultimate means to influence people and that Goebbels was in complete control of the
radio, the press, the film industry, the theatres, literature and the fine arts in Nazi Germany.
Ibid., 36–9. However, he also discusses how Himmler ‘acquired greater power during WW2
than any chief of the Nazi party or minister.’ Ibid., 40. Sós also repeatedly addresses the role
of Adolf Eichmann (whom he mistakenly calls Karl Eichmann), arguing that he was an ideo-
logical fanatic who, once he was appointed the dictator in Jewish matters, proved ‘obsessed
with a single idea: the extermination of all European Jews.’ Ibid., 43. On two occasions, the
book even labels Eichmann ‘the main manager of the Europe-wide German dejudaizing ac-
tions.’ Ibid., 77, 89.
112 The book begins with the words of Robert H. Jackson, the chief United States prosecutor at
the Nuremberg Trials on the unprecedented number of victims of the Nazis and how Nazism
was an international conspiracy held together by the plan to destroy Jews. Ibid., 9. In other
words, Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus, like a very large segment of early post-war works,
offers an intentionalist interpretation of the Holocaust (avant la lettre) and propagates the no-
tion of collectively responsible organizations. The chapter also discusses a long list of anti-
Jewish crimes that were categorized as crimes against humanity in Nuremberg and ends with
introducing the new concept of genocide to its Hungarian readers. Genocide appears as genocid
bűncselekmény in Sós’ translation, though he suggests that it could be translated as népgyil-
kosság (or peoplemurder, Völkermord) and also uses various other expressions, such as népek
tömegirtása and tömeges emberirtás (népirtás was to become the accepted Hungarian transla-
tion of the term). Sós describes this new crime as ‘the methodical destruction of groups of
people due to racial, national, linguistic, religious or political reasons.’ Ibid., 26. His mention
of ‘political reasons’ may be considered somewhat surprising since the Soviet Union – success-
fully – opposed its inclusion in the official definition.
113 In the course of his assessment of early post-war Germany, Sós argues that Germans have
shown no repentance and drawn no lessons. He even poses the question whether such brutal-
ized people might be ‘saved’ at all, but eventually maintains that if they were willing to repent,
they would have to be allowed to become part of ‘the cultured peoples of the world’ again.
Ibid., 240. He thus agrees with what he calls the Potsdam platform: Nazism and German mil-
itarism need to be destroyed, Germans need to be ‘re-educated’, but also given the occasion to
rebuild their country and reintegrate into the international system. At the same time, he ex-
plains that he is in complete agreement with Josef Gottfarstein that ‘if the Third Reich used
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews 201
anti-Semitic examples in school textbooks, democratizing Germany would have to use exam-
ples from Majdanek, Treblinka, Auschwitz and Birkenau.’ Ibid., 152. See: Josef Gottfarstein,
L’école du meurtre (Paris: La Presse française et étrangère, 1946). Sós thus expresses his belief
in the power of culture to tame ‘wild’ and ‘blind’ human instincts – but only once ‘monopoly
capitalism’ has been abolished. Regarding Hungary, he calls for the repentance of those who
were ‘terrified and misled’ but also argues that with those who actively contributed to the
deportation of the Jews of Hungary no reconciliation is possible at all – as he put it, ‘we cannot
shake hands with the torturers and murderers of our relatives.’ Ibid., 233.
114 This chapter has important lessons concerning the image of the Nazi perpetrator. Sós –
largely in accordance with recent research by the likes of Ulrich Herbert or Michael Wildt –
argues that the chief executioners were ‘mostly people with university degrees.’ Ibid., 143. See:
Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft,
1903–1989 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996); Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Lead-
ership of the Reich Security Main Office (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010).
Moreover, Sós claims that the ‘school of fascism’ may have been focused on racial theory and
may have thereby encouraged people to suppress all their human sentiments and become mur-
derers, but that the Nazis also led campaigns against the Bible. In this respect, his argumen-
tation resembles that of Alon Confino in: Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imag-
ination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
115 The chapter focuses on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. On its pages, Sós again employs
the rhetorical strategy of reversing arguments, stating that ‘the true global conspiracy was that
of the elders of Erfurt’ led by Ulrich Fielschhauer. In other words, the global threat was actually
the one posed by anti-Semites. Ibid., 164.
116 Concerning helpers (segítők), Sós argues that Jews had been primarily saved ‘due to the
selfless actions of nameless proletarians and the incredibly fast advance of the Red Army.’
Ibid., 203. He polemicizes with what he calls the Christian ‘legends’ of rescue in particular,
assessing the role of the Church and their faithful in a highly negative way. Sós even maintains
that Nazi crimes were not only tolerated but implicitly even appreciated by the Church and
many perpetrators were in fact religious. Ibid., 204.
117 Ibid., 224.
118 Ibid., 225. Sós maintains that anti-Semitism may have had primarily economic causes but
that it was not ‘an exclusively economic’ phenomenon. Ibid., 229. Whereas Sós speaks of anti-
202 Ferenc Laczó
Semitic mobilization and policies as a ‘diversion of attention’ from ‘the real issues’, he also
relates how they had temporarily proven rather popular. Ibid., 227.
119 Ibid., 226.
120 The chapter draws on a variety of sources, including trials of key perpetrators, diaries of
German soldiers, books by survivors as well as interview-based witness accounts.
121 Ibid., 101.
122 Ibid., 98–100.
123 Ibid., 123. Constantin Simonov, Maïdanek, un camp d’extermination (Paris: Éditions so-
ciales, 1945).
124 Ibid., 138–42. The latter appeared in Hungarian translation as early as 1945, see: Vaszilij
Grossman, A treblinkai pokol [The hell of Treblinka] (Budapest: Cserépfalvi, 1945).
125 Ibid., 186, 182.
126 Ibid., 131.
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews 203
Conclusions
Having analyzed the three most significant early Hungarian Jewish monographs
on the origins and implementation of the Holocaust (avant la lettre) all of which
were published between 1947–48, I wish to conclude by briefly summarizing
and comparing the types of intellectual responses they articulated. Ernő Mun-
kácsi’s Hogyan történt? was based, above all, on documents of Jewish prove-
nance and assessed the pre–1945 Hungarian Jewish community to have failed.
As a member of the Hungarian Jewish establishment and former secretary of the
Central Jewish Council during the mass deportations from Hungary in 1944,
Munkácsi appears to have critiqued the community in order to be able to exon-
erate its leadership and vindicate his own revivalist wartime stance in particu-
lar. At the same time, even as Munkácsi clearly expressed just how responsible
Hungarians were for the implementation of the Holocaust, he continued to cher-
ish notions of the shared fate of the Jews of Hungary and their country. Hogyan
történt? in fact interpreted the events of 1944 as interlinked tragedies of the two,
at one point revealingly naming the halting of the deportations as the moment
of reasserting Hungarian sovereignty.
Jenő Lévai’s Zsidósors Magyarországon from 1948 was the major early over-
view of the Holocaust in Hungary that, in spite of giving expression to its au-
thor’s anti-German sentiments, arrived at a detailed and thorough articulation
of Hungarian responsibility. However, Lévai also focused disproportionate at-
tention, potentially with apologetic intentions, on the months following the
mass deportations between mid-May and early July 1944. Thus, Ernő Munkácsi,
a member of the Jewish community elite who released his version of the events
with apologetic intentions, and Jenő Lévai, who argued from a decidedly leftist
but rather nuanced position, both articulated the significant share of Hungarian
responsibility for the Holocaust in 1944, but combined it with certain Hungarian
national arguments: they explicitly discussed and condemned Hungarian deeds
while painting a somewhat idealized picture of Hungarian intentions.
Last but not least, in Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus from 1948, Endre
Sós provided an impressive early European panorama of the Holocaust that de-
picted anti-Semitism as primarily an economically motivated phenomenon
which, partly through the self-reinforcing nature of violence, resulted in poli-
cies of extermination. Of the three key authors analyzed in this chapter, Sós
drew the most directly political conclusions from the Holocaust. According to
his interpretation, the unprecedented anti-Semitic crimes necessitated socialist
revolution. As a committed communist, Sós articulated a wholesale condemna-
tion of fascism and unconditionally qualified wartime Hungary as a case in
point. At the same time, in 1948, Sós could still combine his support for the
communist project with an explicit endorsement of a starkly leftist variant of
Jewish nationalism.
The above analysis of three key Hungarian-language monographs on the
origins and implementation of the Holocaust from the early post-war period has
revealed just how intricate and diverse early Hungarian Jewish intellectual re-
sponses were. By 1947–48, the Holocaust was narrated from the point of view of
a key representative of the Hungarian Jewish wartime establishment, and fur-
ther from of a prolific, critical yet balanced researcher, both of whom were pri-
marily interested in key events in wartime Hungary, while the Judeocide was
also already explored from the perspective of an ideologically committed com-
munist who had a broad European horizon. Ultimately, an appropriate –
though rather melancholy – way to affirm the intellectual achievements of Hun-
garian Jewish survivors in the early post-war years would be to remind our-
selves that since 1947–48, Hungary has not seen such a plurality of prominent
and sophisticated interpretations on the origins and implementation of the Hol-
ocaust.
Ilse Josepha Lazaroms
Across the Rupture
Jewish Survivor-Writers and the Landscapes of War in Post-war
East-Central Europe
Introduction
In February 1946, the literary historian Aladár Komlós published an ‘In Memori-
am’ for all the Hungarian Jewish writers who had perished in the Holocaust. For
Komlós, who had dedicated his life to writing the intellectual history of Hungar-
ian Jewish literature, this was to be his last text on so-called Jewish themes for a
long time to come.1 Most of his friends and fellow writers had vanished in the
furnaces of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, or in the icy waters of the Danube.
While, in terms of lives lost, the heart of Hungarian literature had been torn
out, some of the writers of the pre-war generation survived. Béla Zsolt was
among them; so was Ernő Szép. Together with other survivor writers and mem-
oirists scattered across the Central European landscape, they rescued their voi-
ces from amidst the rubble and sat down to write about what had happened to
them. In this essay, I concentrate on a small body of early literary texts about
the Holocaust experience. Emphasizing the comparative perspective, it offers
insights into the question of what sustained and gave content to the Jewish lit-
erary imagination in the wake of destruction by looking closely at two semi-au-
tobiographical texts: one written by a Czech Jew, the other by a Hungarian Jew.
It probes the notion as to what extent the past could be salvaged; what frag-
1 I thank Joachim von Puttkamer, Ferenc Laczó and Clara Royer for their insightful comments
on this essay.
Aladár Komlós, In Memoriam (1947), Múlt és Jövő 5, no. 4 (1994): 18–22. Komlós fled to Switzer-
land aboard the Kasztner train in 1944. For many decades, he did not return to Hungary or
touch the subject of Hungarian Jewish literature. He returned to it in the years prior to his
death in Budapest in 1980.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-010
206 Ilse Josepha Lazaroms
ments of the pre-war Jewish world still carried meaning when perused from in-
side a fresh, horrendous landscape of war.
Some of these early texts, especially those written in minority languages,
have been critically omitted from the international scholarly debate about early
Holocaust literature. In a recent anthology of Holocaust literature by David Ros-
kies and Naomi Diamant, for instance, both Ernő Szép and Béla Zsolt are miss-
ing. We read that ‘until [Elie] Wiesel, Hungarian Jewry had not yet been heard
from,’ referring to the 1956 publication of … And the world was silent, better
known as Night.2 Perhaps the eyes of the world were not yet tuned in with the
realities of Hungarian survivor writers – due to imaginary, linguistic, or actual
borders – yet this does not deny the existence, nor the importance, of a vast
body of work on the Hungarian Jewish Holocaust experience. This essay ad-
dresses this lacuna.3
The omission of Hungarian authors from the larger study of Holocaust liter-
ature, in many ways, mirrors the limited role given to literature as such in the
scholarly exploration of Jewish documentation efforts both during and after the
catastrophe.4 It is simply not the case that during the first 17 years of the post-
war era (that is, until the Eichmann trial in 1962), Jewish writers kept silent
about the atrocities that were committed against them; indeed, many literary
texts speak otherwise. In this sense, early Holocaust literature as a historical
source seems to be lingering on a border that some historians might consider
2 David G. Roskies, ‘Dividing the ruins: Communal memory in Yiddish and Hebrew’, in After
the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, ed. David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (Lon-
don and New York: Routledge, 2012), 82–101, 93. This misconception is repeated in Holocaust
Literature: A History and Guide, ed. Roskies and Naomi Diamant (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis
University Press, 2013), 107.
3 Other examples of early literary texts chronicling the Holocaust experience in Hungary are
Béla Zsolt, Nine Suitcases (1947); Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys (originally written in Hungarian
in 1945, published in French as Souvenirs de l’au-dela (1946–1947); Eugene Weinstock, Beyond
the Last Path (1947); Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account (1946) (Nyiszli
also gave a DEGOB testimony, No. 3632); Arthur Koestler, ‘On Disbelieving Atrocities (1944)’, in
The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1945), 88–92; and Rózsi
Stern, From Budapest to Bergen-Belsen: A Notebook from 1944. For the wealth of other early
sources documenting the Holocaust experience in Hungary, in particular historical works on
the origins and implementation of the Holocaust, see Ferenc Laczó’s contribution to this vol-
ume.
4 See, in order of appearance, Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American
Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University
Press, 2009); David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist, eds, After the Holocaust: Challenging the
Myth of Silence (London and New York: Routledge, 2012); and Laura Jockusch, Collect and Re-
cord! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012).
Across the Rupture 207
too close to the catastrophe itself to warrant serious discussion – a fate, I would
say, that resembles that of survivor testimonies, whose ‘trustworthiness’ as a
historical source is still being debated. Yet writing during or in close proximity
to catastrophe has a long tradition in Jewish history. Whether in the form of the
Jewish calendar (which memorializes catastrophes and persecutions from an-
cient times until the present), or the countless Yizkor books remembering van-
ished peoples and communities, or in the form of more scientific reflections
about the meaning of the Jewish past, throughout the ages, Jews have turned to
question (as well as remember) the hard times they encountered as a means of
giving meaning to what had passed.
Furthermore, as modern European history has shown, moments of decline
and fall – in other words, catastrophe – are often closely tied up with notions of
regeneration and rejuvenation. One example which greatly impacted the Jewish
historical course is the political upheaval that came in the wake of the fall of
the great empires after the First World War, when formerly silent minorities
gained a voice, and new claims were made in regards to the legitimacy of the
now predominantly national histories. While for some minorities this meant the
return to a much desired ethnic national existence, for others – especially the
Jews – the newly nationalized map of Europe meant the loss of the relative se-
curity they enjoyed during the reign of Austria-Hungary. One of the main sour-
ces that allows for an understanding of the ‘world of yesterday’, which was so
abruptly destroyed, is literature. Jewish novelists such as Joseph Roth, Franz
Werfel, Stefan Zweig and Franz Kafka all documented the catastrophe very soon
after it happened; some, like Roth and Zweig, remained preoccupied with the
subject of the pre-war world for the rest of their lives.5
Here, I would like to make two observations in regards to the use of early
Holocaust literature as a historical source. Even if, due to physical confinement,
internment or other limitations to personal freedom, individual narratives often
zoom in on the national experience, the very idea of a literary imagination as
something that surpasses, and at times transforms historical reality, is inher-
ently transnational. It begs comparisons across languages and borders so as to
illuminate the still relatively unexplored territory of early Jewish literary re-
sponses to the Holocaust. The second observation, or quandary, one that also
occupied survivor-writers and their theoreticians at the time, is the question of
how to convey the ‘truth’ about what happened to those (audiences, readers)
5 Ilse Josepha Lazaroms, The Grace of Misery: Joseph Roth and the Politics of Exile, 1919–1939
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 45–8. See also Adam Kożuchowski, The Afterlife of Austro-
Hungary: The Image of the Habsburg Monarchy in Interwar Europe (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2013).
208 Ilse Josepha Lazaroms
who were not there. ‘They will never really know’, says one of Jorge Semprun’s
fellow survivors a few days after the liberation of Buchenwald. ‘That leaves
books. Novels, preferably. Literary narratives, at least, that will go beyond sim-
ple eyewitness accounts, that will let you imagine, even if they can’t let you
see…’. The answer for Semprun lies in the art and craft of the imagined realm:
‘How do you tell such an unlikely truth, how do you foster the imagination of
the unimaginable, if not by elaborating, by reworking reality, by putting it in
perspective? With a bit of artifice, then!’6 For a mind engraved with the Holo-
caust – that is, a mind committed to remembering at all times, throughout all
time, what happened to the Jews of Europe – these early texts are invaluable.7
Since they were written before the ‘Holocaust’ came into being as a theoretical
concept, or as a discipline, they allow for the imagination to run across time
and breach spatial as well as theoretical boundaries. They offer a combined nar-
rative that concerns itself both with the ‘surviving remnant’ (הפליטה שארית,
or she’erit hapleitah in Hebrew) and with cultural approaches to Jewish history.8
6 Jorge Semprun, Literature or Life, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (New York:
Penguin Books, 1997), 127, 124. The book was originally published in France under the title
L’ecriture ou la vie by Editions Gallimard, 1994.
7 The idea of ‘a mind engraved with the Holocaust’ is from Norma Rosen, as quoted by Cynthia
Ozick, in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 281.
8 Guy Miron, ‘Bridging the Divide: Holocaust versus Jewish History Research – Problems and
Challenges,’ in Yad Vashem Studies 38, no. 2 (2010): 191.
9 The Smell of Humans: A Memoir of the Holocaust in Hungary, trans., John Bátki, with an
introductory essay by Dezső Tandori (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 1994). For the Hun-
garian, see Emberszag (Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 2011). Life With a Star, trans. from the Czech by
Rita Klímová with Roslyn Schloss (London: Daunt Books, 2012).
Across the Rupture 209
graph on this historical period is warranted. While some historians consider the
period 1945–1949 as the prolonged aftermath of fascism, others regard it as the
beginnings of the Cold War. Fascism had been defeated, but it showed some
ugly aftershocks in the perpetuation of wartime violence, crime and pogroms.
In the eyes of many, the Red Army had liberated the region, but it also brought
with it the first stirrings of the terrible bearings of the future regime.10 Yet ex-
actly where in time one dictatorial regime ends and the other begins is difficult
to say. Perhaps, instead of trying to locate the passing point between fascism
and communism, it is more convincing to argue that this short period in post-
war European history had a distinct character of its own.11 There was something
inherently unique about these years of transition besides the reality of transi-
tion itself. The historian Peter Kenez, for instance, who spent his childhood
years in Hungary, emphasized the strange optimism of the post-war years and
the prevalent sense that ‘some degree of democracy’ could be saved from the
devastation.12 Indeed, in Hungary as elsewhere, survivor intellectuals were con-
cerned with post-war reconstruction, justice, the struggle for democracy, and
the future of their countries in Soviet-occupied East-Central Europe. In this con-
text, Béla Zsolt’s notion of a radical liberal utopia, expressed in his journal The
Progress (Haladás), may in retrospect have been doomed, but it was not as out
of place at the time as it may seem to us now.13
The Jewish experience during these years was fraught with ambiguity in re-
gards to the events they had just lived through. Jews were caught between a
highly particular fate, singled out as they had been for destruction, and the vast
ruinations of a world war that had affected millions of others, non-Jews, across
10 This is not to say that the presence of the Red Army led in one straight line to the commu-
nist dictatorships of 1948. For the influence of other factors, especially the experiences of war,
occupation, and liberation, see Bradley F. Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech
Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 9–
38.
11 For a brief but excellent overview of the debate on Hungary, see Holly Case, ‘Kenez, Peter:
Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: The Establishment of the Communist Regime in Hungary,
1944–1948’, in H-Net HABSBURG Discussion Network, 24 October 2007, http://www2.h-net.msu.
edu/reviews/showrev.php?id=13689. For Czechoslovakia, see Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul
of the Nation, 1–8.
12 Peter Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: The Establishment of the Communist
Regime in Hungary, 1944–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–2. See also
his memoir Varieties of Fear: Growing up Jewish Under Nazism and Communism (Lincoln, NE:
Authors Choice Press, 1995).
13 See Clara Royer’s contribution to this volume.
210 Ilse Josepha Lazaroms
Europe and beyond.14 As a people having been thrown into a collective fate by a
murderous enemy, European Jews were both at the centre of these great histor-
ical currents, and disentangled from them. They were caught, too, between
their pre-war loyalties and friendships and the newly emerging communist re-
gimes. Here, it must be remembered that for many Jews, particularly the assimi-
lated intelligentsia, their Jewishness had never been a clear-cut or unproble-
matic identity.
It was from amid these new realities of their survival that the Jewish survi-
vor-writers Ernő Szép and Jiří Weil sat down to write. The Smell of Humans was
published in 1945, Life With a Star in 1949. Both men could look back upon a
lifetime of writing. They had survived the war in their capital cities—Szép in the
international ghetto in the XIIIth district in Budapest with a protective pass is-
sued by the Swedish consulate, Weil in hiding in Prague after faking his own
suicide. Soon to be the last of their generation, they quickly fell into disfavour
with the communists, and their works were pushed into forgetfulness. After its
initial publication in 1945, The Smell of Humans was not reissued in Hungary
until 1984; the first English translation appeared in 1994, published by Central
European University Press. Szép was looked upon unfavourably by the commu-
nists and spent his remaining years in poverty and without an audience; con-
temporaries considered him a ‘remnant from a bygone world.’15 Life With a Star
suffered a similar fate. The book did not meet the approval of the Communist
Party, and Weil himself was labelled ‘cowardly,’ ‘defeatist,’ ‘existentialist,’ and
not without anti-Semitic undertones, ‘cosmopolitan.’ He was expelled from the
Czechoslovak Writers’ Union from 1951 to 1956, and spent the rest of his life as a
literary outsider.16 As survivors, they suffered; yet, as writers, poets and critics
from the end of the First World War onward, these men had been part of a gen-
eration of Jewish intellectuals that sculpted modernity and were involved in the
shaping of its upheavals. In this sense, their biographies, as well as the litera-
ture in which they gave voice to the Holocaust experience, go ‘across the rup-
14 For the debate between Jewish-centred versus regional approaches to the Holocaust, see the
contributions by Dan Michman and Timothy Snyder in Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New
Transnational Approaches, ed. Norman J.W. Goda (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books,
2014), 17–51.
15 For a short biographical account, see the entry ‘Szép, Ernő’ by Ivan Sanders in The YIVO
Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, online: http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/
Szep_Erno.
16 For a short biographical account, see the entry ‘Weil, Jiří’ by Jonathan Bolton in The YIVO
Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, online: http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/
Weil_Jiri.
Across the Rupture 211
ture’ of war, adding to our understanding of how the Holocaust marked these
intellectuals over time.
What Szép and Weil have in common, not only with each other, but also
with many assimilated Central European Jewish intellectuals who survived the
war, is that their post-war fiction is characterized by a decidedly more vocal
turn to Jewish themes. During their interwar careers, Jewish themes did not fea-
ture prominently in Szép’s poems and plays, nor in Weil’s novels and short sto-
ries.17 They had both made deep plunges away from their humble Jewish origins
in the provinces into the urban and cosmopolitan milieus of Budapest and
Prague. Szép was born in 1884 in Huszt, a small multi-ethnic town in Austria-
Hungary (now in Ukraine), the son of a schoolteacher and one of nine children.
At the time, Huszt was home to a sizeable Orthodox Jewish community. In his
plays, which he began staging in the years following the First World War, we
mostly meet figures from the lower-middle class with aspirations for social
climbing. If Jews appear at all, they come in the guise of folkloric, and thus
slightly ‘unrealistic’ representations. As Ivan Sanders observed, the main trace
of Jewishness in Szép’s writings and his otherwise deeply Hungarianized lan-
guage, lies in the added inflections, inversions and accents that betray a Jewish
past.18 Weil was born in 1900 in the village of Praskolesy, near Prague, the son
of a frame maker of middle-to-upper class Orthodox Jewish heritage. After the
war, the family moved to Prague where Weil became interested in Russian liter-
ature and the avant-garde, and completed a PhD in Slavic philology. He moved
to Moscow in 1933 and worked as a translator of Marxist literature; but two
years later, he was expelled from the Communist Party under unclear condi-
tions and sent to Kazakhstan for six months of re-education. Upon his return to
Prague, Weil published his first novel, From Moscow to the Border, chronicling
his experiences and addressing the Stalinist purges. During the Nazi occupation
of Czechoslovakia, Weil worked at the Jewish Museum in Prague until he went
into hiding in November 1942. It wasn’t until 1949 that he turned his full literary
attention to the fate of the Jews.
Despite this common turn to Jewish themes, both writers responded to the
rupture in very different ways. Szép, who wrote his memoirs 10 months after
the events, fell silent when faced with the near impossibility of sustaining his
dual Hungarian Jewish identity in the post-war world.19 ‘It was the ninth of No-
vember [1944] when we got home,’ he wrote. ‘I will not go on to narrate what
happened starting on the tenth. That, I feel, is not to be described, not to be
believed.’ So ends Szép’s account of the weeks of forced labour he endured in
October and November 1944. He could not narrate further.20 Weil, on the other
hand, before writing his fictional memoir of survival in Prague, turned with a
deepening interest to the Jewish past, especially to the lifeworlds of Jewish chil-
dren. He resumed his work at the Jewish Museum where he helped organize an
exhibition of drawings made by Jewish children in the Theresienstadt camp. He
wrote about the victims of the Holocaust in an effort to remember them; and in
1958, one year before his death, Weil wrote the novel The Harpist, dealing with
the lives of Prague Jews in the nineteenth century.
The intellectual horizons that these writers explored in The Smell of Humans
and Life With A Star are uneven and upset. On the one hand, they documented
the atrocities, while on the other, they reflected on the meaning of the destruc-
tion. Indeed, this is not much different from the work of wartime diarists whose
writings revealed contemporaneous expectations as the events unfolded in real
time while they struggled with the fact that their experiences were always al-
ready ‘narrated,’ and thus partly fictional. However, as writers of fiction, or
documentary fiction, Szép and Weil probably did not feel as conflicted as war-
time diarists or historians about the inherently narrativized aspects of their
works.21 As such, these texts confess to a literary universe constructed from
ruins entirely their own.
What, then, did it mean to write from amidst the ruins – the ruins of private
biographies, cities and the Jewish lifeworlds of East-Central Europe? What are
the horizons against which these writers placed themselves, alive by accident
in a time outside of time, yet very much part of this world? Szép chose to speak
in his own voice about the experience of forced labour on the outskirts of Buda-
pest – he was 60 years old at the time. Weil created the former bank clerk and
anti-hero Josef Roubicek who, for months, was confined to a broken house at
the edge of the city, shovelling leaves in the Jewish cemetery. Both accounts un-
fold in real time; while we, as readers (at least most of us), frame these tales in
the absolute horror of what we now know about the Holocaust, the narrators
are stuck in the present. Their fate is unspoken and unsure. Their only means of
escape lies in the mind, into flights of the imagination. On the imaginative
of marginality and exclusion, by projecting them onto a female body. I thank Clara Royer for
our discussion about this.
20 The Smell of Humans, 173.
21 For an analysis of wartime diaries as a Jewish-centred source about the Holocaust, see Alex-
andra Barbarini, ‘Diaries, Testimony, and Jewish Histories of the Holocaust’, in Goda (ed.),
Jewish Histories of the Holocaust, 91–104.
Across the Rupture 213
plane, too, both Szép the protagonist and Josef R linger between a barred future
and a broken past.22 They struggle with a sense of drastic discontinuity between
what was and what is; yet throughout their ordeals, they maintain a fragile
hope that some remnants of the past can be saved. In this mental confinement
lies the strength of these early works: we are forced to share the ever-narrowing
mental and emotional landscapes of these two narrators as they move further
and further towards the destruction – and survive.
22 For Peter Kenez, for instance, it was clear that after 17 January 1945 [the liberation of Buda-
pest by the Red Army], there could be no return to life as it had been before the war. It was
impossible to continue to believe that what had happened had been an aberration, a momen-
tary extraordinariness. Instead, ‘there could only be a groping through the rubble toward a new
and unimagined life.’ Kenez, Varieties of Fear, 38.
23 Ferenc Szálasi was the leader of the Arrow Cross, the fascist party that ruled Hungary dur-
ing the last months of the war, from 15 October 1944 onward. During Szálasi’s reign of terror,
thousands of Jews were murdered, their bodies thrown in the Danube. After the war, Szálasi
was tried by the People’s Tribunal in Budapest and executed on 12 March 1946.
214 Ilse Josepha Lazaroms
city,’ ‘the East’ and ‘the fortress town.’ At the centre of this unnamed reality sits
the uneasy metaphor of the circus: a place where men with shaved heads are
forced to perform circus acts under the threat of violence and for the amuse-
ment of their superiors.24 The camp vocabulary is entirely absent; all we see is
the collapse of the human into the animal, the subjugation of one man to anoth-
er. This conflation of the camp experience with the grotesque, however, is not
that outrageous when we consider that Terezín was created as a ‘model ghetto’ –
a ‘Jewish resettlement district’ – with the aim of keeping Allied concerns about
the destruction of the Jews at bay. It was in Terezín that people were forced, not
unlike the sad and wretched circus props of Weil’s fiction, to partake in the
staging of theatrical performances, subsequently caught on propaganda film.25
With all these particulars left unnamed, the novel could easily be read as a uni-
versal dystopia, outside of time, even if this is unlikely, and perhaps, justly so.
In both texts, history is the catalyst behind the story. In Life With a Star,
however, the agency of the past – i.e. as an invisible narrator pushing the plot
forward – is imploded so as to emphasize the process of dehumanization on the
most abstract level. The role of the author as witness is confined to the thoughts
and observations of Josef R, who sees the world through an ever-narrowing
prism until he, and it, comes to a standstill. This claustrophobic and increas-
ingly anxious reality makes the decision that comes at the end – whether to re-
port to his call for interment at Theresienstadt, or to go into hiding – all the
more charged and, in some sense, cathartic. But it is a decision that, for novel-
istic purposes, is uncoupled from the explicitly named realities of life under Na-
zi occupation, thus exploding onto the existential rather than the historical
plane.
In The Smell of Humans, on the other hand, the author concerns himself
with his position vis-à-vis the reality he is describing. But the act of transform-
ing that which he has witnessed into language is fraught with complexities. ‘I
can’t recall so well all the things that happened that summer,’ Szép cautions.
‘My mind is still exhausted, and besides, I seem to have a considerable talent
for rapidly forgetting historical events.’26 Szép frames his recollections inside
the double warning of an exhausted mind and a bad memory.27 Here, we hear
the voice of an older man writing self-consciously from amid the devastation.
From his private horizon of loss, in which there appears to be little comfort,
24 For images of the circus, see pages 129, 131–3 (‘the devil’s lair’), 137, 144, 146.
25 For an account of Terezín and Weil’s role in collecting the drawings of children imprisoned
there, see Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 227–31.
26 The Smell of Humans, 32.
27 Ibid., 130.
Across the Rupture 215
Szép consoles himself with the thought that his book, as a testimony of atroc-
ities, might be of retrospective interest for future readers. He stresses the impor-
tance of the double act of witnessing and recording, not only in times of crisis,
but also during peacetime, and he pities those who cannot record: ‘… instead of
writing poems and novels,’ he writes, ‘they turned to suicide.’28 Besides the po-
tential posthumous value of his narrative, another reason why Szép clings to
his craft despite the obvious difficulties is the fact that to him, stories, or in-
vented narratives, are more believable than everything else that surrounds him.
‘The future,’ he writes, ‘speaks through the mouth of the imagination.’29 After
the Holocaust, this future was contained in the act of writing – a writing that by
its very nature was suffused with images that belied, transformed and mourned
reality.
As these examples of early Holocaust fiction demonstrate, the figure of the
writer/narrator and the witness collide. The problem of their position, vis-à-vis
the events described, is not one of authenticity but of proximity.30 Contrary to
what one might expect from a direct first-person narrator who shares a name
with the author, Szép’s testimonial voice does not underline so much the au-
thenticity of the events, but the fragility of a voice destined for destruction; a
Jewish voice, barely able to return to his craft and pick up his pen with the same
strength as before the war. Here, the intrinsic connection between history and
memory is mediated not through time, but through the difficulty of ‘telling.’31
Thus, because the horizon is one of immediate destruction, it is important to
ask which pieces of the vanished Jewish lifeworlds these authors chose to recall
in writing.
In Life With a Star, discussions of the Jewish past per se are rare, but the
story is interspersed with references to the Hebrew Bible. When at one point Jo-
sef R compares himself to Samson, ‘bound to a column’ in Gaza, it is not his
strength but his weakness that is underlined. The comparison emphasizes his
perceived inability to rise up against his confinement and fight. There is the
ironic observation that miracles are happening in the present, ‘when biblical
28 Ibid., 168–9.
29 Ibid., 42.
30 For the idea of the writer as eyewitness and the problem of authenticity, see James E.
Young, ‘Holocaust Documentary Fiction: The Novelist as Eyewitness,’ in Writing and the Hol-
ocaust, 200–15.
31 For a reflection on the difficulty of ‘telling’ the Holocaust and the narrative form this telling
should take, see Semprun, Literature or Life, 122–7.
216 Ilse Josepha Lazaroms
predators [come] out of hiding and millstones sweat blood.’32 These references
add depth and drama to his predicament, taking him out of the present time
and into a deeply divided past in which a person’s struggle for life had religious
and existential dimensions.
Whereas these biblical references carry spiritual meaning for the narrator,
his peregrinations into fantasy are of a different kind. Initially Josef R surrounds
himself with imaginary conversation partners, such as his former lover, Ruzena,
and a stray cat, Tomas. He takes flight into fantasies. In these fantasies, ships
feature prominently as a means of escape, taking him to tropical islands togeth-
er with Ruzena. But as time wears on, these imaginary vehicles of flight betray
him; there are holes in the bottom, the ships begin to sink, and corpses float in
the dark waters beneath. His fanciful escapes turn into dystopian images of de-
struction and death. Gradually, Josef R’s immersion into the phantasmagorical
world of dreams and ancient religion comes undone. Towards the end of the
story, the fantasias have disappeared entirely. This forces Josef R to return to
the present and into the reality of his persecuted self. Up until that moment, his
life had been a chance survival.33 But deportation awaits, and his name, listed
under ‘R’ in the alphabet, will soon be called. He is now faced with two options:
he could heed to this call, or hide. In the book’s last pages, Josef R stands, as so
many Jews before him, at the crossroads.34 We do not know whether he sur-
vives, but we do know that he chooses life. With the last sheets of his writings
burning in the stove, he annuls the name ‘Josef Roubicek’ and disappears from
our view – not unlike the author, whose fake suicide annulled the name ‘Jiří
Weil’ from the lists of the living and signalled the beginnings of his survival.
32 Life With a Star, 112, 95. Other references to the Hebrew Bible include the ancient travelling
salesmen (80); the Ten Commandments printed on money issued at Terezín (95); and the bury-
ing of old Torah scrolls in the cemetery (96–7).
33 For the concept of ‘chance survival’ in the Hungarian context, see the memoir by Andrew
Karpari Kennedy, Chance Survival (London: Old Guard Press, 2012).
34 The idea of Jews standing ‘at the crossroads’ recurs often in modern Jewish history. It in-
dicates, apart from a real and endangered physical reality, a position of deep reflection in times
of crisis. In 1921, for instance, in the midst of post-war revolutionary upheaval, Aladár Komlós,
writing under the pseudonym Koral Álmos, published his essay Zsidók a válaszúton [Jews at the
Crossroads] at the ‘Minerva’ Printing House. The notion also conveys theoretical reflections on
the meaning of and approaches to Jewish historical studies. In April 1939, prior to the Second
World War but during the rise of Nazism, the periodical Oyfn Shaydveg [At the Crossroads] was
published in Paris, calling for a renewed contemplation of the past during the dissolution of
the emancipation period. For a discussion of this periodical and its editors, plus a general
discussion on the contentious relationship between the Holocaust and its place in Jewish his-
torical studies, see Miron, ‘Bridging the Divide,’ 155–93, 172–6.
Across the Rupture 217
Contrary to Josef R, who emerges from the depths of biblical history into a
state of acute decision-making about his immediate fate, as the weeks go by,
Szép, in a desire to understand what happened to him, delves deeper and deep-
er into reflections about the recent past. His sober thoughts about the meaning
of destruction, so soon after the events, focus on the question of his ties to the
Hungarian homeland. Memories of the First World War, when he fought in the
Serbian campaign, pervade the narrative and serve to anchor him more tightly
to the national past. What Szép, in light of his present, nostalgically refers to as
the ‘Peacetime War’ almost becomes a source of comfort. On the forced march
to the brick factory in Csomád, for instance, he recalls how in 1914 he acquired
the ‘art of walking while asleep,’ a skill he now needs again, a man of 60. In
these recollections of his call to arms in name of the Hungarian homeland, his
military glory is contained to rolling perfectly shaped cigarettes on horseback in
the rain. This memory of camaraderie is a fond one.35
These recollections of the Great War, however, do not just function as a ret-
roactive claim to national belonging – they had real echoes in the Jewish world
of wartime Hungary of the 1940s. In the international ghetto in Budapest, Szép
encountered the writer Ákos Molnár, who was exempt from wearing the yellow
star on account of being classified 75 per cent disabled – he lost his right arm
from flying shrapnel three decades prior.36 This upsetting historical continuity
meant that those who were over 60 per cent crippled as a result of their efforts
during the First World War, or those singled out for their ‘counterrevolutionary
merit’ afterwards, were exempted, at least initially, from the anti-Jewish laws of
1938–1941.37 In trying to understand the exclusion of Jews from the Hungarian
national landscape, Szép begins to question his own role as an urban intellec-
tual in the fate that has befallen him. A doubt falls on his patriotism, which
counts as the marker of his assimilation, and he regrets the cosmopolitan mind-
set that blinded him to the treasures of Hungarian soil and tradition. Had he
been a better patriot, would his lot have been different? At times overcome by
quiet melancholia, Szép feels he is incapable of staying alive. ‘It would be fit-
ting,’ he thinks to himself while bombs fall into the night, ‘to die now and not
survive the devastation of my country.’38
Szép survives. So does Weil. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Szép
laments the fate of his country: ‘When would we even recover from the damage
done to the mind and soul of this nation?’ He is horrified by the fact that a coun-
try ‘blessed with such human resources and talent’ could fall prey to anti-Semi-
tism.39 Yet in these ruminations he does not manage to expand any further on
this question, and his hopes do not rise up very far above the rubble. In this
sense, both writers, as well as their narrators, do not survive in the classical
sense – as a heroic tale of survival against all odds – but instead, they live
through death and re-emerge from the experience, tattered and broken, into the
world of the living.40 In their survival too, these authors shared similar experi-
ences. Both men remained in their home countries, which in Szép’s case was
consistent with the trend in Hungary, where about half of the two hundred
thousand Jewish survivors chose to remain in Hungary, composing the largest
surviving community in the region. This was not so for Weil, where after the
war many of his Jewish compatriots left Czechoslovakia for Israel and else-
where. Due to the decision to remain in their places of survival, however, they
both experienced the early years of communism; Szép died in 1953, Weil in
1959. Their early books about the Holocaust experience bracket the short win-
dow of time between two dictatorial eras, and as such, they were simultane-
ously shaped by, and gave shape to, these years of transition and how we think
about them in hindsight. While some kind of communal memory is contained
in these books – whether through Weil’s ‘un-naming’ of historical particulars,
or Szép’s absence of judgment in favour of a deep and general sadness – they
each speak of the ‘unique and unrepeatable lives’ that were lost in the catastro-
phe.41 As such, they are a reminder that the only way we can begin to under-
stand Jewish responses to the Holocaust is by trying to reconstruct, and give
meaning to, one life at the time, and one death at the time, as they are the irre-
placeable fragments of the worlds that were destroyed. Because ultimately we
are dealing with texts about the Holocaust experience, written by people for
whom Jewishness was never a given.
Conclusions
In their literary responses to the Holocaust, Ernő Szép and Jiří Weil both voiced
an intellectual confrontation with the landscapes of war, at the same time as
their books formulated and gave shape to these ruined landscapes. In both
cases, their understanding of events crossed the rupture of war and even time
itself, incorporating past realities in ruminations about an as yet unformulated,
and difficult to imagine, future. As such, the catastrophe is expressed inside a
longer duration perspective of Jewish life in Europe, whether in reflections
about previous attachments to the national homeland (Szép), or the meaning of
more distant biblical notions for the endangered present (Weil). Utopia, in these
cases if at all, belongs to the past, catastrophe to the present. The future seems
to lie beyond what is accessible in writing. In their fragility and courage, these
texts belong to the project of post-war reconstruction, and remain linked to the
Jewish identities of their authors in tangible, albeit porous ways. It is thus in
further comparisons of these early literary texts on the Holocaust experience
across the devastated borders of post-war Europe that we can rescue slices of
the intellectual lifeworlds that had been destroyed. At the same time, they can
tell us something about the traumas, mind-sets and hopes for the future of the
surviving remnant of the Central European Jewish intelligentsia.
Part IV: From Utopias to Post-war Trajectories
Tamás Scheibner
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist
Realism
Imre Keszi in the Thrall of Utopias
Few figures in the history of Hungarian literature and intellectual life have en-
joyed as notorious a reputation as Imre Keszi (1910–1974). Posterity has passed
judgement on his post-1945 activities as a literary critic by labelling him ‘Keszi
the Terrible’. Keszi did indeed play a significant role in the marginalization of
such outstanding writers and thinkers as Béla Hamvas, Károly (Karl) Kerényi,
Sándor Márai, László Németh and Sándor Weöres. He also dealt harshly with
the legacy of his former mentors, all of whom were distinguished literati, in-
cluding Mihály Babits, Gábor Halász and Antal Szerb. The latter two had just
perished in the Holocaust when Keszi chose to attack them. For two years in his
career, he became the leading literary critic of the Communist Party in Hungary
during a very sensitive period. Between 1947 and 1949 he was literary editor of
the party’s daily publication, Szabad Nép [Free People]. During this time, the
communist leadership carried out the transfer of political power and created
the preconditions for the large-scale transformation of cultural life. Although
later memoirs are prone to exaggerate the fierceness of his criticism, in that they
tend to treat his most virulent outbursts as typical of his entire work, it can
hardly be doubted that Keszi genuinely identified with the role that he was ex-
pected to play in the aforementioned position on the communists’ daily organ.
After the war, Keszi was one of the first to strive to popularize socialist realism,
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-011
224 Tamás Scheibner
and it was he who brought the views of Zhdanov to the attention of the wider
literary public in considerable detail.1
In the light of the foregoing outline, it is surprising how little attention has
been devoted to this very substantial figure in twentieth-century Hungarian cul-
tural history. References to his activities in the 1930s and 1940s are especially
rare, even though he was deeply involved in several of the most important pub-
lic debates of the time. What most strikes the contemporary reader of his works
is how different his intellectual character was in that period. In stark contrast to
his Stalinist years, he was particularly open to the consideration of diverse posi-
tions and perspectives. Such intellectual empathy was accompanied by a débat-
teur temperament and an ironic, sometimes even sarcastic, style, which created
a remarkable contrast. Through a series of provocations and accommodations
to different views, Keszi ultimately aimed to integrate a wide variety of cultural
theories, historical accounts and political agendas into one vision. This vision
intended to serve as an answer to the question of what role Jewry should play
in modern Hungary and Europe.
Keszi confronted two basic questions: how should the negative consequen-
ces of modernity and the crisis of Western societies be dealt with and, second,
what role could Jewry specifically play in overcoming this Europe-wide crisis?
Moreover, he sought meaning in what it was to be a Jew. By tracking the multi-
directional intellectual alignments of Keszi’s work, my intention is to reveal the
building blocks of his utopian project to reconcile conflicting ideologies. Fur-
thermore, by tracing his life story, I intend to show the ways in which Keszi’s
views changed, sometimes radically, in response to historical events and cir-
cumstances, while he generally remained faithful to a certain form of utopian-
ism, even in the face of the multiple catastrophes of the twentieth century.
Acculturation in doubt
Keszi was born Imre Kramer into an observant Neolog Jewish family in Buda-
pest in 1910.2 The Kramers, as well as the Taubers (his mother’s family), who
1 See, for example, Imre Keszi, ‘Zsdánov és az irodalom’ [Zhdanov and literature], Csillag 3, no.
18 (1949): 58–61.
2 On the ways in which to define Jewish identity in the context of Hungarian Neolog Judaism,
see: János Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon. Politikai eszmetörténet [The Jewish ques-
tion in Hungary: the history of a political ideology] (Budapest: Osiris, 2001), 229–43; Guy
Miron, The Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Ger-
many, France, and Hungary (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 2011), 155–218; Ferenc Laczó,
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism 225
had originally lived in Prešov (Eperjes) in what is today’s Slovakia, just south of
what is now western Ukraine (Galicia), benefited from the liberal legal system
that emancipated Jewry after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. The
unified economic sphere of the dual monarchy brought prosperity and growth
to both states.3 When Imre was born, his father, Marcell Kramer had by then
been secretary to the Israelite Community of Pest for 15 years in an exciting peri-
od marked by economic prosperity and the rapid transformation of the city of
Budapest. It comes as no surprise that the family was loyal to the crown,4 and
maintained their faith in the pursuit of both assimilation and the preservation
of their religion, despite the unmistakable presence of anti-Semitism in society.
It was the solid economic and social status of the Kramer family, secured
under Habsburg rule, that allowed a young Imre to pursue his interests in
studying whatever he wished. He was not only an avid consumer of culture, but
from an early age he also wrote poetry and practised music.5 The belle époque,
however, was in the distant past for Keszi. He belonged to a generation that was
raised during the First World War, when anti-Semitism was significantly on the
rise.6 As a child, he witnessed the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
with all its legal consequences as far as the status of Jews was concerned. In the
1920s, the extremism of the 1919 Soviet Republic was often linked with a sup-
posed inner character of the Jewry, and anti-Semitism became mainstream in
politics and public discourse. Although the majority of Hungarian Jews did not
challenge practices of assimilation,7 there were many who were doubtful about
Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History, 1929–1948 (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
For the significance of the 1867 emancipation of Jewry and on the nature of dual identity, see,
for example, Ritchie Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749–1939: Eman-
cipation and Its Discontents, (Oxford: Oxford Univ Press), 233 and passim.
3 One of Keszi’s grandfathers was a paper trader based in Vienna, and the other was a wine
merchant operating widely across the country. See the Archives of Petőfi Museum of Literature
(abbreviated hereafter to PIM Archive), V.5243/88.
4 Marcell Kramer had good reason to feel that he had a clear and respected status in society;
during the First World War, he supported a Red Cross convalescent and, for this, apart from
receiving countless letters of thanks, he was awarded a memorial cross by the Royal Court in
January 1916. PIM Archive, V.5243/85.
5 PIM Media Collection CD-1272, 458/2.
6 See Péter Bihari, Lövészárkok a hátországban: középosztály, zsidókérdés, antiszemitizmus az
első világháború Magyarországán [Trenches in the hinterland: the middle class, the Jewish
question, and anti-Semitism in Hungary during the First World War] (Budapest: Napvilág,
2008).
7 See e.g. Viktor Karády, Önazonosítás, sorsválasztás: A zsidó csoportazonosság történelmi
alakváltozásai Magyarországon [Self-identification and choice of fate: historical changes in
Jewish group identity in Hungary] (Budapest: Új Mandátum, 2001). For a thoughtful critique
of Karády’s approach in the context of Hungarian historiography see Gábor Gyáni, Történész-
226 Tamás Scheibner
the prospects of its realization in the light of recent history and contemporary
experiences. Keszi belonged to a significant minority of Central and Eastern
European Jewish intellectuals in the interwar period who were sceptical about
liberal principles and sought out new ideas to reconnect with Judaism.
Keszi was a prolific reader. The vast multilingual library that had been care-
fully built up by his father bolstered his wide-ranging interests. Not surpris-
ingly, books held a high status in his eyes. He also served as a domestic tutor
for the children of a famous publisher, which allowed him access to the latest
trends in the foreign literature of the time.8 As I shall argue below, Keszi’s inter-
ests were indeed exceptionally expansive. It is precisely the amalgamation of
many intellectual stimuli that is at the core of Keszi’s intellectual enterprise, at
least in the initial, most impressive phase of his career.
While self-cultivation was an important aspiration for Keszi, he was, at the
same time, one of the most provocative challengers of the liberal-humanist tra-
dition among Jewish people in interwar Hungary. As I aim to demonstrate, his
thinking could also be placed in the wider context of a multifaceted ‘Jewish
Renaissance’, which evolved in Germany and the Habsburg lands.9 The Bildung-
sideal, as well as a radical criticism of it, were both implicitly present in Keszi’s
writings concurrently, creating a peculiar tension within his works of the 1930s
and 1940s. Self-enrichment for him was, if anything, both intellectual and sen-
sual.
This was, of course, not entirely new, not even at the turn of the century.
Recent scholarship has highlighted the complex ways in which even emblem-
atic figures of Jewish liberalism related to the Bildungsideal. According to Jeffrey
Grossman, fin-de-siècle and post-war disenchantment with humanism dated
back to the nineteenth century in Jewish literature and thought; both Berthold
Auerbach and Heinrich Heine displayed a certain ambiguity in their works to-
wards the possibility of assimilation and the efficacy of Bildung in that proc-
ess.10 Such tensions had deeper historical roots, but they radically intensified in
diskurzusok [Discourses of historians] (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2002): 134–48; Idem, Nép, nem-
zet, zsidó [People, nation, Jew] (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2013): 213–32. The appropriate critique of
assimilationist discourse in historiography, however, has its limits too: it can hardly be ne-
glected that the political language of liberal assimilationism, including the terms assimilation
and emancipation, came to dominate several fora that defined themselves as Jewish.
8 PIM Media Collection CD-1272, 458/2.
9 For a discussion of the semantics of renaissance, see Asher D. Biemann’s inspiring book,
Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 2009).
10 Jeffrey A. Grossman, ‘Auerbach, Heine and the Question of Bildung in German and German
Jewish Culture’, Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies 1 (2011): 85–107. See also idem, ‘Heine
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism 227
Weimar Germany, and provided the central existential dilemma for many Jew-
ish intellectuals. Indeed, as David Wertheim has argued, it was more than any-
thing ‘the Spinozist alternative’ applied to the needs of the 1920s that was a cen-
tral concern for Jewish intellectuals in the Weimar era, namely the hope that
universalism and authenticity, rationalism and spiritualism, historicism and
messianism and, ultimately, liberalism and anti-liberalism could somehow be
reconciled.11 Keszi’s early systems of thought, embedded in the specific Hungar-
ian context, offer an original and intriguing example of how such a reconcilia-
tion could be imagined.
and Jewish Culture: The Poetics of Appropriation’, in A Companion to Heinrich Heine, ed. Roger
Cook (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 251–82.
11 David J. Wertheim, Salvation through Spinoza: A Study of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany
(Leiden: Brill, 2011), 27, 219, passim. On the revival of Spinoza see also Benjamin Lazier, God
Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton: Prince-
ton Univ. Press, 2008).
228 Tamás Scheibner
transition between the 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, in mapping the influences
Keszi absorbed, I will not only discuss his historically informed theories, but
also point out the political significance of his and his intellectual partners’
ideas.
After graduating from the secondary school of the Israelite Community in
1928, Keszi won a place at the College of Music. Studying with Zoltán Kodály
(1882–1967) and Béla Bartók (1881–1945) proved to be a formative experience
for him. He took a lively interest not only in music theory and history but also
in folklore and ethnography. While both composers’ views had changed over
time, they were consistent in attributing the ‘highest moral values to peasant
culture and remained suspicious of cities’ throughout their lives.12 Keszi was of
a similar opinion. Folksongs, as he explained in the mid-1930s, ‘are manifesta-
tions of the spiritual village’ that bourgeois ‘city culture can only pervert and
distract from its own essence, but not cultivate as it is.’13 As the reference to the
‘spiritual village’ in itself suggests, the view that folklore creates a link to an-
cient Hungarian culture was also adopted by Keszi.
The folklore of the village was, for Keszi, the kind of utopian space that
antiquity represented for the classicist Karl Kerényi (1897–1973). In the early
1930s, Kerényi’s lectures at the University of Budapest were social events that
attracted not only students but a wider audience. Keszi, who enrolled there par-
allel to his studies at the College of Music, was among the many admirers of the
charismatic professor lecturing on ancient mythology. Moreover, he was closely
tied to a group of young intellectuals centred around Kerényi,14 who maintained
that ancient Greece was a time and a space where life and spirit were preserved
in perfect unity, where religion and culture had not become objectified but ex-
isted with(in) the people as – in Kerényi’s words – a profoundly lived ‘spiritual
12 Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, introduction to History of the Literary Cultures of
East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, eds, Cornis-Pope
and Neubauer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 3, 54.
13 Imre Keszi, ‘Népzenénk és a szomszéd népek népzenéje: Bartók Béla könyve’ [Our folksongs
and those of the neighbouring people: a book by Béla Bartók], Válasz 2, no.1 (1935): 79.
14 Kerényi’s disciples called themselves the Stemma, and young poets and essayists inspired
by his thoughts established the Árpád Tóth Circle. The latter published a journal with the tell-
ing name Argonuaták [Argonauts]. The editors of the periodical were Imre Trencsényi-Waldap-
fel, the principal link between the two groups, and Anna Hajnal, Keszi’s future wife whom he
met at the Circle. See: Katalin Trencsényi, ‘Az Argohajósok (és más “görögök”) viszontagságos
kalandjai századunk harmincas éveiben’ [The adventures of the Argonauts (and other ‘Greeks’)
in the 1930s], Irodalomtörténet 27 (1996): 392–401; and Zsuzsa Vincze, ‘Palackposta a szellem
szigetéről: A Sziget-kör és a sziget-gondolat’ [Message in a bottle from the island of the Geist:
The Sziget-circle and the idea of the island], Jelenkor 40 (1997): 875–86.
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism 229
reality’.15 This was precisely what Keszi believed could be discovered in village
folklore.
As Keszi’s early publications, and especially his dissertation from 1933, A
magyarországi német népdal [The German Folksong in Hungary] suggest, the
dominant conditions for human existence were, for him, spiritual and psycho-
logical in nature.16 He extensively relied on Völkerpsychologie, one of the most
influential trends in interwar Hungary. His supervisor at the Department of Ger-
man Studies, Jakob Bleyer (1874–1933), was a significant representative of this
emerging discipline.17 But Keszi’s interest in folk psychology was also encour-
aged by one of his favourite professors at the university, the linguist Zoltán
Gombocz (1877–1935).18 Gombocz had studied in Leipzig and played a key role
in the transmission of Hermann Paul’s and Wilhelm Wundt’s ideas to Hungary.
Keszi also peregrinated to Leipzig in 1929, his choice no doubt influenced by his
studies in linguistics. Following Wundt, Gombocz assumed that ‘in our every-
day vocabulary and turns of phrase we unconsciously preserve ancient cus-
toms, laws, superstitions, social structures, the history of objects – that is, the
memory of our entire past.’19 Keszi added the folksong to language that might
also enable access to the archaic layers of the past. Folksongs, in his view,
15 For example, Károly Kerényi, ‘Az antik költő’ [The Poet of Classical Antiquity] Válasz 2
(1935): 186–92; Idem, ‘Vom Wesen des Festes’, Paideuma 1, no. 2 (1938): 59–74; Idem, ‘A val-
láslélektan általános emberi alapjairól’ [On the universal roots of the psychology of religion], in
A lelki élet vizsgálatának eredményei, ed. Pál Harkai Schiller (Budapest: KMPPTE Lélektani In-
tézet, 1942), 320–48. See also Miklós Lackó, ‘Sziget és külvilág: Kerényi Károly és a magyar
szellemi élet’ [The island and the outside world: Károly Kerényi and Hungarian intellectual
life], in idem Szerep és mű: Kultúrtörténeti tanulmányok (Budapest: Gondolat, 1981), 264.
16 Compare with Imre Kramer, A magyarországi német népdal [The German folksong in Hun-
gary] (Budapest: Pfeifer Ferdinánd, 1933). This work was still published under his birth name.
17 For an introduction to Bleyer’s career, see Hedwig Schwind, Jakob Bleyer: Ein Vorkämpfer
und Erwecker des ungarländischen Deutschtums (Munich: Südostdeutschen Kulturwerks, 1960).
See also Hugo Moser, ‘Jakob Bleyer als Wissenschaftler’, Südostdeutsches Archiv 2 (1959): 171–
85. For Bleyer as a politician, see: Gerhard Seewann, ‘“Ungarndeutschtum” als Identitätskon-
zept und politische Ressource’, in Staat, Loyalität und Minderheiten in Ostmittel- und Südosteur-
opa 1918–1941, eds, Peter Haslinger and Joachim von Puttkamer (München: Oldenbourg, 2007),
127–42; and idem, Geschichte der Deutschen in Ungarn: 1860 bis 2006, vol. 2 (Marburg: Herder-
Institut, 2014), 169–77, 181–8, 199–201, 232–60. There is no space here to give a detailed re-
flection on Bleyer’s minority politics, but it should be noted that, after the First World War, he
saw Jewry as the main competitor to the German minority.
18 See his university records at PIM Archive, V.5246/87, his recollections on Gombocz at PIM
Media Collection CD-1272, 458/2, as well as his obituary: Imre Keszi, ‘Gombocz Zoltán emléké-
nek’ [In memoriam Zoltán Gombocz], Magyarságtudomány 1 (1935): 83–7.
19 Zoltán Gombocz, Jelentéstan [Semantics], in idem, Jelentéstan és nyelvtörténet: Válogatott
tanulmányok, ed. with an afterword by Sándor András Kicsi (Budapest: Akadémiai, 1997), 175.
230 Tamás Scheibner
20 It was probably under Kerényi’s influence that Keszi applied the terms of Jungian psycho-
analysis to ethnography. Cf. Tibor Hanák, ‘Kerényi és a filozófia’ [Kerényi and philosophy], in
Kerényi Károly és a humanizmus, eds, László Árkay et al. (Bern: Európai Protestáns Magyar
Szabadegyetem, 1978), 89. Indeed, in a review he even labelled ethnographers ‘the Freudians
of the spirit’. Imre Keszi, review of Nyíri és rétközi parasztmesék [Peasant tales from Nyír and
Rétköz], by György Buday and Gyula Ortutay, Válasz 3, no. 2 (1936): 119.
21 Kramer, A magyarországi német népdal; Imre Keszi, review of Népvándorláskori elemek a
magyar népzenében [Elements from the age of the Völkerwanderung in Hungarian folk music],
by Bence Szabolcsi, Válasz 2, nos. 7–8 (1935): 485–7.
22 PIM Media Collection CD-1272, 458/2.
23 Balázs Trencsényi, The Politics of ‘National Character’: A Study of Interwar East European
Thought (New York: Routledge, 2012), 93. See also: Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, ‘Conservativism,
Modernity, and Populism in Hungarian Culture’, Hungarian Studies 9, nos. 1–2 (1994): 15–37;
Richard S. Esbenshade,‘“Shylocks” and “Intellectual Storm Troopers”: Hungarian Intellectuals
and Antisemitism in the 1930s’, in Varieties of Antisemitism: History, Ideology, Discourse, eds,
Murray Baumgarten, Peter Kenez and Bruce Thompson (Newark: University of Delaware Press,
2009), 201–22; Richard S. Esbenshade, ‘Symbolic Geographies and the Politics of Hungarian
Identity in the “Populist-Urbanist Debate”, 1925–44’, Hungarian Cultural Studies: e-Journal of
the American Hungarian Educators Association 7 (2014), DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/
ahea.2014.174
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism 231
ian qualities. This project, inspired by Frobenius, was applied to Jewry by such
significant young Jewish intellectuals as Károly Pap (1897–1945) and Keszi in
the 1930s.28 The difficulty for the latter was in coping with a profound contra-
diction: how would they find a way ‘to participate in a variety of cultures with-
out privileging any’ – a motive that Paul Mendes-Flohr considers to be the cen-
tral feature of the Jewish Renaissance29 – and yet also remain authentic or re-
gain Jewish authenticity.
It is at this point important to emphasize that Keszi did, however, become
increasingly aware of some of the potential dangers of völkisch ideas. In 1934,
he contributed to a public debate provoked by Németh’s famous essay ‘Snobs
and Peasants’,30 which warned against the pitfalls of, on the one hand, a far-
fetched idealization of Western culture at the expense of an interest in nation-
specific local culture and, on the other hand, the ‘mythology of the peasant’
that extols its ‘primal force’ (őserő, the equivalent of the German word Urkraft).
When Németh was attacked by a variety of representatives of Hungarian völ-
kisch thought,31 Keszi came to his defence,32 and stressed that in a changing
world the duty of a real patriot is not to keep peasant culture impervious from
any influences, which would necessarily qualify as a doomed project, but to
keep its inevitable transformation under control as much as possible. An urban
middle class, which is deeply concerned with the status and living conditions
of the peasantry, should mediate the best parts of modern European culture as
they are transferred to the village and block the elements of urban popular cul-
ture that could be seen as harmful. This would ensure that the divided Hungar-
ian nation unites and grows in accordance with her ‘intrinsic character’ to be a
fully-fledged European nation. Keszi echoed a Frobenian-influenced Németh
here, but while in Németh’s thinking, as we shall see, ethnic essentialism came
to play a larger role by the end of the decade, Keszi took a different route.
28 Their status is well-represented by the anthology of Jewish writers edited by Endre Sós:
Magyar Zsidó Írók Dekameronja (Budapest: Periszkóp, 1943). Keszi also regularly broadcast
on Hungarian radio in the second half of the 1930s.
29 Paul Mendes-Flohr, German-Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 94.
30 László Németh, ‘Sznobok és parasztok: Két betegség a mai magyar irodalomban’ [Snobs
and peasants: two diseases in contemporary Hungarian literature], Magyarország 29 (March
1934): 9.
31 Zsigmond Móricz, ‘Lehet-e a parasztból író?’ [Can a peasant turn into a writer?], Magyar-
ország (30 March 1934); Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, ‘Honnan jöhet a feltámadás?’ [Where can the
revival come from?], Magyarország (1 April 1934); Gyula Illyés, ‘Fiatalok és öregek’ [The young
and the old], Magyarország (11 April 1934).
32 Open letters by Imre Keszi in Magyarország 11 April 1934; 14 April 1934.
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism 233
33 George L. Mosse, ‘The Influence of the Volkish Idea on German Jewry’, in idem, Germans
and Jews: The Right, the Left, the Search for a ‘Third Force’ in Pre-Nazi Germany (New York:
Howard Fertig, 1970), 103. It is worth recalling here that Völkerpsychologie, in its nineteenth-
century origins, itself emerged as part of a Jewish emancipatory effort. Cf. Egbert Klautke, The
Mind of the Nation: Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851–1955 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), 11–57.
34 For a critique of the notion of identity in the German Jewish context, see Scott Spector,
‘Forget Assimilation: Introducing Subjectivity to German-Jewish History’, Jewish History 20
nos. 3–4 (2006): 349–61.
35 Mosse, ‘Influence of the Volkish Idea’, 80–1.
36 For more about Libanon, see Laczó, Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide, 62–97.
37 Károly Pap, Zsidó sebek és bűnök: Vitairat különös tekintettel Magyarországra [Jewish
wounds and sins] (Budapest: Kosmos, 1935). For the debate, see the latest edition: Károly
Pap, Zsidó sebek és bűnök és más publicisztikák, eds, Ilona Petrányi – János Kőbányai (Buda-
pest: Múlt és Jövő, 2000).
234 Tamás Scheibner
Jesus as a Jewish prophet who aimed at the reconstitution of the ‘peasant coun-
try’ of Moses. Uncorrupted Hasidic culture, devoid of the merchant spirit of an-
cient Jerusalem, was central to this imagined Jewish renewal. Pap’s ambition
was to find a way to synthetize Judaism and Christianity, and in a simultaneous
move to set the terms of a modus vivendi for Jews living in Hungary. Keszi ad-
mired the somewhat older and exceptionally talented Pap, and could be re-
garded as one of his closest intellectual allies.
Károly Pap was enthusiastically praised by Németh as well. Németh, who
had been busy outlining the historical ‘wounds’ and ‘sins’ of Hungarians, was
convinced that such self-critical reflection was the precondition for any earnest
attempt to settle Jewish-Hungarian relations. Németh’s treatment of the ‘Jewish
question’ deserves attention because it was an important reference point for
both Pap and Keszi. Up to the late 1930s, Németh had not blamed the Jews col-
lectively, and some of his statements could be understood as pointing to the
(rather limited) possibility of a dual cultural attachment for Jewish writers. He
distinguished between different ‘types’ of Jewry based on their attitude towards
‘non-Jewish’ culture.38 He created a threefold categorization that recognized the
great cultural achievements of those Jews, on the one hand, who had aspired to
assimilation (such as the literary historian Antal Szerb), and, on the other, of
those Jews who had rendered assimilation impossible and treated Hungary and
the Hungarian language as a temporary home in the midst of their eternal wan-
dering (Pap serves as an example here). These two favourable types are set
against the figure of the humanist Jew, whose intention is to dominate the Hun-
garian cultural scene by distracting from the characteristics of a supposedly au-
tochthonous Hungarian literature. This negative type is associated here with
Shylock, thirsting for revenge after being deprived of his former dominant posi-
tion, which Németh considered to be the type of Jewish identity manifested in
the journal Nyugat [West].
Despite the fact that both Pap and Keszi started their careers as regular con-
tributors to Nyugat, they largely subscribed to such views, adopted parts of
Németh’s vocabulary and repeatedly defended Németh from allegations of anti-
Semitism.39 It was only at the end of the decade that Keszi grew critical of Ném-
eth but only because the latter’s attitude towards Hungarian Jews changed. In a
novel, Németh represented the figure of ‘the Jew’ as a freethinker who is a de-
38 László Németh, ‘Egy különítményes vallomása’, Budapesti Hirlap (17 June 1934).
39 See, for example, Imre Keszi, ‘Németh László és a zsidóság’ [László Németh and the Jewry],
Libanon 2, no. 2 (1937): 41–8.
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism 235
40 Imre Keszi, review of Alsóvárosi búcsú [Saint’s day in the lower town], by László Németh,
Libanon 4, nos. 2–3 (1939): 35–6. Cf. János Kőbányai, A magyar-zsidó irodalom története (Buda-
pest: Múlt és Jövő, 2012), 168–9.
41 László Németh, Kisebbségben, vol. 1 (Budapest: Magyar Élet, 1939/1942), 76–8.
42 Imre Keszi, A könyv népe: A zsidó szellem és irodalom kérdéséhez [The people/folk of the
book: contributions to the question of the Jewish spirit and Jewish literature] (Budapest: pub-
lished by the author, 1940). Within this book, Keszi incorporated several of his shorter texts
that had appeared in Libanon between 1936 and 1939. It is difficult to decide how to translate
the title, since the Hungarian word nép could be both ‘people’ and ‘folk’, and Keszi, in my
view, deliberately played with the word's polysemy here.
43 Keszi, Könyv népe, 83–4.
44 Miron, Waning of Emancipation, 176–82.
45 Imre Keszi, review of Írók és elvek [Writers and principles], by Aladár Komlós, Libanon 3,
no. 1 (1938): 22. Keszi identifies Shylock with irrationalism here, while in A könyv népe, as I
demonstrated earlier, he linked Shakespeare’s character with heightened rationalism. He prob-
236 Tamás Scheibner
aimed to dissociate Jewry from corrupted modernity, and emphasized the signif-
icance of the Old Testament in defining the Jewish character.46 The issue also
had a canonical aspect: Keszi objected to Komlós’ alleged overestimation of
such ‘pseudo-Jewish workhorses of cheap rationalism’ as the influential radical
bourgeois journalist Béla Zsolt, who employed a journalistic style in his popular
novels and was ‘a very mediocre writer’ in Keszi’s estimation.
If such ‘pseudo-Jewishness’ existed, one may question how one becomes an
‘authentic’ Jew? This is where völkisch Judaism plays a significant role. Rein-
venting the Jewish people was essential, in Keszi’s view, for the emancipation
of Jewry within an imagined European community of deep-rooted, authentic
peoples. This becomes obvious if we read only those papers of Keszi’s which
address a specifically Jewish audience in the context of his reflections aimed at
the wider public. In a radio debate that took place around 1938, Keszi viewed it
as being of central importance that an unidentified ‘we’ join in the shaping of
the ‘Hungarian face’ (the symbolic physiognomy of the nation). Such a joint ef-
fort at ‘bringing to life the Hungarian myth’ should start by becoming ac-
quainted with shared folk art (that is to say, the ‘subconscious of the people’)
and allowing it to freely inscribe itself, according to its own ‘natural’ laws, into
high culture.47 No alternative was possible according to Keszi. He stressed that
the only way the disrupted continuity of history can be restored, and an autoch-
thonous Hungarian culture created, is by people listening to the sound of the
ancient past as transmitted by the collective. This, however, by no means in-
volves being cut off from the culture of other peoples, something that is in any
case not possible due to the intertwined nature of folk cultures.48
Hungarian culture, in Keszi’s reading, has the chance to regain its true au-
thenticity only by recognizing its shared (but sometimes hidden) heritage with
other cultures of Central and Eastern Europe. And Keszi looked even beyond
this geographical space in the cited radio presentation. While in 1935 and 1936
Keszi, in defence of Bartók, championed the distinctiveness of Hungarian folk
ably saw Shylock as a contradictory figure who possessed both extremely rational and ex-
tremely irrational sides.
46 Cf. Robertson, 311. Kraus was a favourite author of Keszi’s. See, for example, his essayistic
novel partly inspired by his own life: Imre Keszi, A halhatatlanság szamárfülei: Lassú Tamás
zeneszerző emlékiratai [The dog ears of immortality: memoirs of the composer Tamás Lassú]
(Budapest: Zeneműkiadó, 1971).
47 Cf. Keszi, review of Írók és elvek, 21–3; Imre Keszi and Imre Trencsényi-Waldapfel, Human-
izmus és népi kultúra [Humanism and folk culture], Ms., PIM Archive, V.5246/83. It is worth
noting here that Keszi was talking about himself as somebody who was capable of realizing
authentic Hungarian qualities within himself. This supports his thought that the individual can
deeply connect with two equally important peoples at the same time.
48 Cf. Keszi and Trencsényi-Waldapfel, Humanizmus és népi kultúra.
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism 237
The folklore of Europe has its own unity. Go out amongst the people, listen to their tales,
to what they sing, and you will hear the vision of the European landscape come to life.
Are you aware of the world of the folksong? Look at the Western one, the German. It is the
world of horn tunes in a major scale. The basis of the major scale is the major triad: the
sequence of the simplest upper harmonies. The huntsman’s horn is able to sound only
these. German music: it alludes to the forest. Look East: monotone, extended pentatonic
melodies, the endless steppes of Asia. In the dance music of the Romanians, the Bulgar-
ians and the Greeks, there lives on some memory of the Greeks from the mountains. The
Celts bring the endless perspective of the sea into a Europe ossified into Latinate forms.51
49 Imre Keszi, ‘Népzenénk és a szomszéd népek népzenéje: Bartók Béla könyve’ [Hungarian
folk music and the folk music of the neighbouring peoples: Béla Bartók’s book], Válasz 2, no. 1
(1935): 77–80; Imre Keszi, ‘Bartók Béla vagy a középeurópai megértés útja’ [Béla Bartók, or the
road to Central European understanding], Szép Szó 1, no. 6 (1936): 271–6. See also Imre Keszi,
Babiloni vályog [Babylonian adobe] (Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1968), 108–11.
50 Keszi and Trencsényi-Waldapfel, Humanizmus és népi kultúra.
51 Ibid.
52 Imre Keszi, ‘A zsidó zene vallási funkciója’ [The religious function of Jewish music], IMIT
Évkönyv 60 (1938): 214–25.
53 Cf. Béla Bartók, ‘Gipsy Music or Hungarian Music?’, The Musical Quarterly 33 (1947): 240–
57.
238 Tamás Scheibner
The influence of Buber is very palpable here. Even at the end of the 1930s,
Keszi was determined to stick to the vocabulary of a metaphysically grounded
völkisch ideology but, as we can see, he did not give up a humanist outlook ei-
ther and, like Buber, he ‘looked upon the Volk as a stepping stone to a general
European culture.’54 Also, when Keszi called for a self-reflective awakening of
the Volksgeist, he may have been equally inspired by Buber’s words as he was
by Frobenius’: ‘It is a self-reflection of the national soul. They wish to make con-
scious the unconscious development of the national soul; they wish to con-
dense the specific qualities of an ethnic group and use them creatively; they
wish to bring out the national intuitions and thereby lead them to greater pro-
ductivity.’55 It is only then, continued Buber, that Goethe’s dream of world liter-
ature will be realized, when all people express their inner essence and thereby
are emancipated.
It is not clear when Keszi got to know Buber’s writings. During his stay in
Leipzig in 1929 and his subsequent studies in Berlin in 1932, Keszi must have
encountered large communities of ‘Ostjuden’, and might have attended Jewish
society events – all factors that may have increased his interest in Hasidism.
Kerényi may also have called his attention to Buber,56 whose Hasidic stories
were already very popular among the German-speaking Jewish population in in-
terwar Hungary.57 But it was only after the appearance of Pap’s essay in 1935,
which was itself influenced by Buber, that Keszi decided to reflect on the histor-
ical and cultural position Jewry might occupy in Hungary and Europe. Never-
theless, his essays demonstrate significant differences from the views expressed
in Buber’s essays. Just as Pap had done, Keszi also distanced himself from Zion-
ism.58 As was the case for the majority of Hungarian Jews who had been influ-
enced by Buber,59 Keszi never considered the acquisition of a Jewish land essen-
tial to the reinvention of Jewish traditions. While Keszi’s primary target among
Jews was the assimilationist camp, he, as many other Jewish intellectuals also
did, criticized Zionism as a nationalistic project. But it is clear that from 1935 to
1944, Keszi demonstrated more and more interest in völkisch Judaism and Hasi-
dic culture.
In A könyv népe [The People of the Book] from 1940, Hasidism was de-
scribed in a very favourable light. Keszi stated with some envy that Hasidic Jews
were the ones who had come closest to a real völkisch existence.60 Nevertheless,
Hasidism was represented here as a separate route for Eastern Jewry that had
little relevance for other parts of the diaspora. In the early 1940s, however, the
significance of Hasidism grew even greater in Keszi’s eyes. The revision of Hun-
gary’s borders in 1938 and 1940 had the consequence that a large number of
Orthodox and, partly, Hasidic Jews became Hungarian citizens. This, of course,
did not go unnoticed among the Jewish community of Budapest. Furthermore,
during the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, large numbers of Pol-
ish Jewish refugees found temporary asylum in Hungary, and many of them
were Hasidim. In the Hungarian Jewish intellectual scene, a growing interest in
Hasidism resulted in the translation of the first longer work by Buber in 1940,
titled A zsidóság megújhodása [The Renewal of the Jewry], which was followed
by Száz chászid történet [One Hundred Hasidic Tales] in 1943.61 As I shall aim to
demonstrate in a later section, Keszi’s engagement with völkisch Judaism culmi-
nated in his 1944 book of short prose, A várakozók lakomája [The Feast of Those
in Waiting].62 In this, Keszi extensively relied on Hasidic folklore and turned it,
quasi-programmatically, into a key source for artistic creativity.
In light of what I have discussed above, I would not hesitate to represent
Keszi as a Hungarian exponent of the Jewish Renaissance. I would, however,
also like to avoid the impression that he was a dedicated follower of Buber. The
reality is more complicated. Keszi absorbed a variety of other influences apart
from his, and did not voice consistent views regarding the Jewish Volk – indeed,
he occasionally questioned whether it existed at all. This ambiguity, in my read-
ing, was part of a wider tendency in A könyv népe, the key text for understand-
ing Keszi’s position as the 1930s came to a close.
63 Steven E. Aschheim, ‘German Jews beyond Bildung and Liberalism: The Radical Jewish Re-
vival in the Weimar Republic’, in idem, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confron-
tations with National Socialism and Other Crises (London: Macmillan, 1996), 36.
64 Ibid.
65 See e.g. Keszi, Könyv népe, 5–16.
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism 241
At the same time, Keszi denied or radically restricted the possibility of free
choice. For each individual, there is one single authentic choice determined by
one’s background. In A könyv népe, belief in transcendental forces does not
seem to be a precondition for such self-reflection; Keszi’s mode of self-reflection
could be compatible with a secular worldview, but the idea itself is deeply
rooted in Judeo-Christian religious thought. Everyone’s liberty and duty is to
discover their own particular determinants to reach such a state and to come to
terms with them. This is the only criterion on which ethical judgments could be
based when it comes to individual responses to the complex problematics of
Jewish (dis)integration. In A könyv népe, even complete assimilation when tak-
en to its final point or, its opposite, complete rejection, resulting in emigration
to Palestine, appeared to be morally acceptable to Keszi, provided that these
choices were based on thorough existential self-reflection.66
Such ethical pluralism, however, is valid only at the level of the individual,
Keszi claimed. Jewry as a community has a larger ‘spiritual task’,67 and from this
alternative perspective judgement could be passed on different choices. Accord-
ing to Keszi, the history of a collective has nothing to do with causality, but it is
rather defined by fate determined by inner causes.68 On this level, a similar logic
operates to the one we observed at the level of individual self-reflection: the on-
ly ethical option is to realize and embrace the fate of Jewry, that is, Jewish life
in the diaspora.69 Furthermore, such a fate is not necessarily concerned with
the realization of one single people’s or folk’s character determinants, since one
can belong to two communities as a result of one’s fate, that is one can be des-
tined to be a Jew and a Hungarian at the same time. And in such a case one
should progress in the direction of the character of both peoples. This is Schick-
salskunde (or, ‘science of destiny’) applied in a decidedly non-nationalistic
manner.70 But this proved to be the basis upon which Keszi evaluated the vari-
ous ‘types’ of Jewish writers in Hungary in A könyv népe. In contrast to his ear-
lier claims, he did not refrain from passing moral judgement on specific individ-
uals as long as he believed them to be taking the wrong path.71 Certainly, it was
up to Keszi to decide who qualified as a ‘type’. This characteristically illiberal
approach is hardly reconcilable with the predominantly liberal humanist per-
spective his insistence on the Bildungsideal suggested.
Keszi did attempt in his work to qualify contradictions such as these
through his pluralist interpretation of the term ‘Jewry’. He concluded that ‘eter-
nal Jewry,’ as the conscience of European nations, kept guard over the human-
ist spirit of liberty, while ‘historical Jewry’ represented the forces of transcen-
dental excitement and messianism.72 With regard to the historical hic et nunc,
Hungarian Jewry is both, on the one hand, the living agent of the times, the
stimulus carnis (or, thorn in the flesh) that provides constant provocation and
thus keeps everything in motion, and on the other hand, it is an integral part of
the Hungarian people, one that cannot be torn out of it, much like a Hungarian
‘tribe’, in the same sense that Walter Rathenau considered the Jews to be one of
the German Stämme (or, tribes).73 Even though Keszi did not use this exact term
here, to me it does not seem entirely misplaced to evoke it, since a young Imre
Kramer in the mid-1930s choose ‘Keszi’ as his writer’s name. The word refers to
one of the ancient Hungarian tribes (the name is of Turkish origin, meaning
‘fragment’, and it is one that joined the Magyars at a relatively late stage).74
might well be inauthentic and superficial in cultural terms, but have an ‘itchy’ impulse that
keeps the world in motion (Endre Ady, ‘Korrobori’ [1917], Nyugat 1 [1924]). Ady’s text was sub-
ject to several, often conflicting, interpretations throughout the interwar period, and its argu-
ments proved to be crucial for Pap and Keszi’s thinking as well. They both believed that the
Jewish spiritual character’s closest match in Europe was that of the Hungarians, not because of
their inherent similarity but for structural reasons, namely, that they perfectly supplement
each other; one is the other’s inverse – the agile but shallow Jew to the passive and sluggish
but deep Hungarian (Keszi, Könyv népe, 92–3; Pap, Zsidó sebek és bűnök, 63). But the two are so
intimately entwined that setting the two in opposition could not lead to the realization of their
fate, which is shared. The idea that the Trianon peace treaty led to a large number of Hungar-
ians existing in diaspora, as was the case for the Jews, was also popular in Keszi’s circles, and
László Németh was a key figure in spreading such an idea.
71 Keszi, Könyv népe, 82–92.
72 Ibid., 92–3.
73 Michael Brenner, ‘Religion, Nation, oder Stamm: zum Wandel der Selbstdefinition unter
deutschen Juden’, in Nation und Religion in der Deutschen Geschichte, eds, Heinz-Gerhard
Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche (Frankfurt: Campus, 2001), 598.
74 Gyula Németh, A honfoglaló magyarság kialakulása [The formation of the Magyars who
conquered the Carpathian Basin] (Budapest: MTA, 1930), 268–72. In Hungary, when Keszi
was a university student, this book provoked great interest as the first systematic attempt to
explain the origins of the names of Hungarian tribes. As a student considering choosing lin-
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism 243
Such a choice in the case of this author, who was particularly prone to giving
telling names to his literary characters, might be interpreted as a demonstration
of his indivisible double bond to both Jewry and Hungary.
Such an explanation of the double meaning of the term Jewry, however,
cannot explain all the contradictions that exist in the text and does not convert
it into a coherent constellation of thoughts. In any case, this was not Keszi’s
aim, for whom being self-contradictory was one way of dealing with the multi-
ple needs of his time. He consciously aimed to provoke responses in the widest
possible Jewish audience at almost any expense. His sarcastic style, which re-
sembles that of Karl Kraus, surely added to the provocative power of his work.
Keszi’s attacks on superficial Jewish cultural journalism and his frequent use of
anti-Semitic stereotypes and vocabulary (like the term elzsidósodás, that is Ver-
judung in German or roughly ‘Jewification’ in English) seem to have furthered a
similar ambition to that held by Kraus: to secure a position beyond easily recog-
nizable roles and place oneself at the crossroads of established argumentative
pathways,75 a position that is both inside the established discourse and, at the
same time, outside of it, from which the entire discourse can be destabilized,
restructured and renewed.
A critical take on rationalism, as stated above, does not mean an endorse-
ment of irrational thought. During the late 1930s, Keszi grew to doubt some of
the elaborations of national character proffered by Németh and the populist
writers, which he found rather far-fetched. As early as his work in A magyaror-
szági német népdal [The German Folksong in Hungary] from 1933, he suggested
that it was not some eternal, mystical spirit that had assigned a central role to
the peasantry but its sociological makeup, which was the result of random evo-
lution: ‘The social stratification of the Danubian peoples was not forged in the
melting pot of recent history: the peasantry lived its life in this society accord-
ing to its own ways as a separate and isolated class, virtually without contact
with any other.’76 In line with this, Keszi believed that the folksong did not have
a transcendental relationship with the peasant soul, and that its essence could
be grasped by the scholarly apparatuses of modern psychology, sociology, eth-
nography, the study of myth and linguistics. Folksong cultures that can be asso-
guistics as a profession, there is no doubt Keszi knew this book, especially since the ancient
history of the Magyars was one of the themes in which his professor Gombocz was deeply
interested.
75 See Paul Reitter’s analysis of Kraus and his concept of authenticity: The Anti-Journalist: Karl
Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-De-Siècle Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 2008), 26.
76 Kramer, Magyarországi német népdal, 3. Such thoughts were inspired by Béla Bartók, A
magyar népdal (Budapest: Rózsavölgyi és Társa, 1924), vi, lxx.
244 Tamás Scheibner
ciated with particular communities cohere, on the one hand, around stylistic
conventions and, on the other, through conventional modes of expressing feel-
ings, the latter ensuring an emotional spiritual community between individu-
als.77 Keszi regarded spiritual communities in the same way as language and
folk art, as entities that have a high degree of longevity but are by no means
unchanging; while not denying that the study of the mass psychology of a peo-
ple, or rather a class, was of value, he doubted the demonstrability of some
fixed and eternal essence.
Keszi was just as disturbed by political irrationalism as Kraus had been 30
years before. But in contrast to the latter, Keszi maintained that rational control
over the emotional and mental planes was fundamentally important. His reli-
ance on psychoanalytic concepts, and his keen interest in structural linguistics
and Völkerpsychologie are all clear indicators of his constant struggle to find a
sound methodology that would be flexible enough to deal with the self and the
collective at the same time. But Keszi aspired to even more than that. In accord-
ance with his ambition to renew the entire discourse on the relation between
self and community, Keszi invented what he hoped would emerge as a distinct
field of study: conventiology.
tive criteria but the thinker him/herself. The new type of scientists and philolo-
gists would develop multifaceted interests across disciplines, dare to rely on
their imagination and realize that intellectual activities, by not necessarily di-
recting themselves at any particular goal, could also take the form of a ‘training
of the soul’, which find its objective in the development of the self.80 In other
words, Keszi emphasized here again the importance of Bildung in reinventing
the sciences, both human and natural. He dreamed of a ‘new humanism’ that
would emerge out of the organic fusion of systems of thought, an organic ren-
aissance that would transgress temporal limitations and provide simultaneous
access to the otherwise separated planes of time.81 This new humanism should
not be confused with traditional humanist thought, which he tended to oppose.
He explicitly reflected on the utopian character of this vision, ascribing to it the
term ‘utopia of philosophy’, but he insisted, in a messianistic spirit, that re-
demption was to come.82
But redemption could only be hoped for from the East. We have seen so far
that Keszi developed a keen interest in peasant culture and regarded the people
as the primary source of a cultural renaissance that might lead the way out of
the contemporary pan-European crisis. But, in his account, not all types of folk-
lore are fit to serve as the basis of such a rebirth, only Eastern European folk
art. In this part of Europe, the peasantry had not been contaminated by other
social classes and was better able to follow its own course of development. In
line with Bartók and Kodály, Keszi maintained that ‘[t]he folksong [in Eastern
Europe] was not incorporated into the cathedral of art poetry and art music, it
abided without interaction and remained unique.’83 At the beginning of his ca-
reer, in the course of studying the structure of Swabian folksongs, Keszi came
to the conclusion that in spite of their liminal nature, the style of these folk-
songs remained dominantly Western, and were thus ‘less authentic’ than their
Slavonic, Romanian or Hungarian counterparts.84 The term ‘authentic’ here rep-
resents a cultural value created by a large, homogeneous class. Keszi thus main-
tained that redemption could only come from Eastern Europe, where such a
class, he believed, still existed.
Indeed, the aforementioned reference to a future classless society, an ‘art
above classes’85 was not an accident. Keszi had a particular interest in syncretiz-
ing otherwise mutually exclusive theoretical trends, and Marxism was one of
80 Ibid., 51.
81 Biemann, Inventing New Beginnings, 9.
82 Keszi, ‘Konvenciológia’, 59.
83 Kramer, Magyarországi német népdal, 3.
84 Ibid., 3, 8–10. By Swabians I refer to the ethnic German minority living in Hungary.
85 Keszi, ‘Konvenciológia’, 59.
246 Tamás Scheibner
them. As early as 1930, he became a member of the leadership of the youth or-
ganization of the social democrats, as well as the Hungarian Workshop [Magyar
Munkaközösség].86 The latter was an anti-capitalist movement originating in
Czechoslovakia, and called for the consolidation of suppressed classes to form
a more effective opposition. However, their emancipatory project had an addi-
tional ethnic dimension, as they sought to protect the Hungarian minority in
Czechoslovakia from the ‘tyranny’ of Czech and German capitalism.87 Linking
the interests of a Volk and a class was, after all, nothing unusual, especially
since the word Volk, or its Hungarian equivalent nép, was a polysemic term. In
fact, in the Hungary of the early 1930s, it was quite common to merge socialist
ideas with German-inspired Volksgedanke, especially among the youth. This is
a chapter of Hungarian intellectual history that still awaits systematic analysis.
The economic crisis provoked an extremely rich variety of responses from mem-
bers of youth organizations, and more often than not these responses were the-
oretically eclectic. The number of fractions, circles and societies rapidly grew,
and political and theoretical twists and turns among the individuals active in
this scene were frequent.
Keszi’s path was not devoid of such turns either. After graduation from the
university, he took a position in rural Hungary, and from 1933, encouraged by
Németh, he gravitated towards the populist writers’ movement that had ex-
pressed very little interest in urban workers. Then he cut links with the work-
ing-class movement, a decision that may have been motivated in part by the
arrest of the former comrades he worked with.88 His first publications appeared
in a journal critical of the communists; he himself expressed doubts about so-
cialist realism,89 and regarded the Soviet Union’s formation as a failed attempt
at emancipation that in practice served the interests of a new elite.90 But he did
not entirely leave Marxism behind. Just as Pap had done, Keszi linked the re-
birth of Jewry to a wider social renewal that aimed to emancipate the poor
through class struggle (though not through revolution, which they both catego-
rically rejected).
These historical roots left their mark on Keszi’s way of thinking and concep-
tual framework; he regarded the arrival of a classless society as a historical ne-
cessity. In the field of culture, this meant that folk art, as it is known, would
disappear. Similarly to the non-Marxist László Németh,91 Keszi regarded this as
a loss, but an inevitable rather than a fatal one. The social emancipation of the
peasantry and their upward mobility to the middle class would unavoidably
awaken a desire to reflect on their own traditions. This process of self-realiza-
tion, however, is accompanied by ascetic, purgative tendencies, which break up
the unreflective spiritual community, a state that is a precondition for the exis-
tence of folk art. For Keszi, this was a process beyond good or bad; he regarded
it as a given that man could not influence its development. But what role can
the individual play, then, in the intellectual/spiritual renewal? As I have sug-
gested in a previous sub-chapter that discussed the possibility of free choice,
Keszi continuously struggled with the question of determinism so fundamental
to both teleological religious thought and Marxism. His answer seems to be that
man could have an influence on how that renewal took place.92
Cultural renewal was not to be expected by imitating Eastern European folk-
lore. Like Kerényi, Bartók and several other of his contemporaries, Keszi saw
the idea of simply ‘preserving’ cultural values as counterproductive, even if it
was at all possible. Keszi, however, reframed the issue by using the vocabulary
of Saussurean structuralist linguistics that he acquired from the previously
mentioned linguist Gombocz. He pointed out that it is not sufficient to be con-
cerned with the material of the folksong (langue), but attention also had to be
paid to its culture (parole), and it would be erroneous to imagine that folk art
can be maintained immutably in a normative manner: ‘To speak of folk culture
is tantamount to supporting an intellectual caste system. It is time not for cul-
ture to become folkloristic but for folk culture to become culture proper’, as he
put it.93 Unlike Jakob Bleyer, who welcomed German folksong collections and
encouraged their promotion, Keszi was critical of a practice built on recording
and imitating folksongs. Revealingly, what Keszi valued in poets from the popu-
list writers’ movement, such as Gyula Illyés and József Erdélyi, was that they
distanced themselves from the narrow poetics of folk poetry and preserved it by
building their work creatively upon it.94
The ambition to overcome the tension between determinism and individual
action, between tradition and invention, between community and personality
91 László Németh, ‘Nép és író’ [Volk and writer], Napkelet 7, no.5 (1929): 357–9.
92 Kramer, Magyarországi német népdal, 10.
93 Ibid., 12.
94 Keszi, ‘Konvenciológia’, 58.
248 Tamás Scheibner
and turned it into an intimately familiar event by evoking German and Christian
expressions, among others.98
The crux of Keszi’s work is as follows: how is it possible to transmit a tradi-
tion that in written form records only the holy day’s rituals and leaves the story-
telling largely to those present at the actual event? In the piece ‘Az elbeszélés
magva’ [The Kernel of the Story], we read the following:
what is most striking in all the Haggadah is, after all, that it is the story of the Exodus,
therefore the actual Story, that is, the kernel of the celebration is absent from its text. Iso-
lated pieces of the Story, obscure allusions, casual Midrashim: well, yes, these certainly
can be found. But a narrative, a fine, systematic, voluble narrative, which would be suit-
able for answering the child’s question, the child who is in fact asking: Why is this night
different from all other nights? – that is truly out of the question.99
The reason for this, the narrator explains, is that in this way it is possible to
avoid the ossification of essence into ceremony:
the rigid and decorative angles of the ceremonial part serve to give a kind of heightened
and permanent significance to the story’s elegant and subjective flexibility; they are a
kind of exhibition frame that validates the beauty of some timeless and eternal style,
which every year the narrator’s individual piety fills with a new, glorious image. To nar-
rate, amid ceremonies repeated every year, with different words every year, from a differ-
ent angle, differently every time, the history of the Exodus!100
98 Grossmann, ‘Heine and Jewish Culture’, 267. Heine’s work was published in Hungary in
1925: A bacharachi rabbi, trans. Irén Sass (Budapest: Garai, 1925).
99 Keszi, Várakozók lakomája, 90.
100 Ibid., 91.
101 Ibid., 92.
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism 251
102 See Keszi’s own comments on this work: PIM Media Collection CD-1272, 458/2.
103 Cf. Keszi, Könyv népe, 9.
104 PIM Archive, V.5246/70/15.
252 Tamás Scheibner
dah in the given historical situation.105 The closing lines of the story of Abraham
and Sarah in ‘Az őrizet éjszakája’ [The Night of the Watch] clarify his position
rather unambiguously: ‘So act against evil and battle it with truth, artifice,
strength and meekness, as much as you can. Divine aid will battle alongside
you, even if you are not counting on it. And keep this advice until next Pesach.
And then read this story anew.’106
The story that follows, ‘A gödölye története’ [The Story of One Little Goat],
however, warns the reader to exercise caution in identifying evil. The story of
the little goat being eaten by the cat demonstrates how complex the relation-
ship between the states of being ‘guilty’ and ‘innocent’ can be, even in a situa-
tion where our intuitions might suggest that these states are easy to assign and
the relationship between them is rather straightforward. The text calls attention
to the fact that passing judgement is beyond the capacity of humans, even
when we confront a situation in life in which it seems unambiguous who the
transgressor and who the victim are: ‘he who has seen the depravity of worldly
power, and the layer upon layer of injustice that has accumulated, will know
that above the vaults of the truths of worldly power, the final word is that of
heavenly Truth.’107 The ‘Farewell’ that closes the volume, and simultaneously
symbolizes the end of the order of service of Pesach (though it allows for several
modes of behaviour to be followed), warns against overweening pride, the im-
possibility of knowing the truth and overestimation of rationality: ‘In a mecha-
nistic world, where mechanical chaos and asinine causality reign, instead of
the playful freedom and the discursive caprice of the immeasurable wisdom of
God’s commands … struggling and waiting is possible only in God. And as far
as taking decisions is concerned, at all events He is the one who does so.’108 The
ability to pass judgement is reserved exclusively to God.
A várakozók lakomája was published only a couple of weeks before the de-
cisive date of 19 March 1944, when Adolf Hitler’s troops set foot on Hungarian
soil while Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary, was visiting Germany. Reception
of the book was restricted to two short reviews in the liberal newspaper Esti Kur-
ír and the anti-Nazi conservative daily Magyar Nemzet in mid-March, just a few
days before both dailies were closed down. In the latter periodical, László Bóka,
who was considered to be a primary representative of the young humanist intel-
ligentsia, praised Keszi’s ‘human decency’ in attempting to mix traditions, but
105 Notably, the first full translation of the Haggadah prepared by Károly Pap and published
in 1936 left the phrase ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ out, while Jer. 29:7 was added to the end, a
passage that instructs believers to stay in exile. Cf. Komoróczy, ‘Szabadulás ünnepe’, 2.
106 Keszi, Várakozók lakomája, 171.
107 Ibid., 186.
108 Ibid., 198.
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism 253
stated (in rather ambiguous terms) that Hungarian literature will ‘cast out from
itself’ such a work. Keszi, who was doing labour service at the time, and would
shortly face deportation, was forced by history to come to a similar conclusion.
Even though he managed to save his life by going into hiding, he radically
changed his attitude towards the ideas of epistemology, human agency and par-
allel tradition.
109 See Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), 1–16. Even if the term
was not coined by Aron, he arguably boosted its career.
110 At the time that A várokozók lakomája appeared, the mass deportation and destruction of
the Jews had not yet begun, which may have been a factor in Keszi’s about-turn. At the same
time, no Jew who suffered more serious persecution accepted the kind of role he did in the
formation of the communist dictatorship.
111 PIM Archive, V.5246/85.
254 Tamás Scheibner
nior party functionaries.112 The writings collected in his volume A sziget ostroma
[The Siege of the Island], published in 1948, mostly appeared in these two peri-
odicals.
Few of Keszi’s interwar allies were spared attack in its pages, but Kerényi’s
circle was the particular focus. In criticizing authors branded as idealists, Keszi
was among György Lukács’s most dedicated allies, and his ruthlessness may
have been partly ascribable to the fact that he was himself affected: ‘When I
oppose the idea of the island, the false aristocratism typified by the artist’s
superiority, the mysticism, the mythologizing and other multifarious forms of
romantic anti-capitalism that surface as a reaction to rancid imperialism, I find
myself confronting a sphere of ideas in whose diffusion I myself played a part’,
Keszi wrote in the preface.113
Indeed, his pre-1945 life was, from a post-war communist perspective, full
of suspicious moments. He could be charged with having links to Jakob Bleyer,
who was both part of an anti-Semitic segment of the Catholic establishment and
politically (though not ideologically) flirted with the newly established Nazi Re-
gime in the final months of his life.114 To be associated with Németh, who was
silenced after the communist takeover, was also not a good personal connec-
tion. Another affiliation that was particularly troubling was Keszi’s admiration
for József Erdélyi, who was not only anti-Semitic but, a few years after Keszi
had sung his praises for being the most promising Hungarian poet, had pub-
lished a poem endorsing the Jewish blood libel myth and joined the national
socialist Arrow Cross Party. While Erdélyi was correctly associated with rightist
extremism in the post-war press, linking Bleyer to the Nazis was largely due to
false accusations, and the same was true of Kerényi. The latter’s theory of myth
was fiercely criticized, most prominently by Lukács who challenged its ‘irration-
alism’. Lukács, absurdly, blamed Kerényi for paving the way to Nazism.115 Fi-
112 For the introduction of socialist realism in Hungary, see Tamás Scheibner, ‘Introducing
Socialist Realism in Hungary, 1945–1951: How Politics Made Aesthetics’, in Socialist Realism
in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses,
eds, Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol (London: Anthem, 2017).
113 Imre Keszi, Előszó: A sziget ostroma [Foreword: the siege of the island] (Budapest: Dante,
n.d. [1948]), 4.
114 Cf. Seewann, Geschichte, 184; Norbert Spannenberger, Der Volksbund der Deutschen in Un-
garn, 1938–1944, unter Horthy und Hitler (München: Oldenbourg, 2002), 18. It should be noted
that Bleyer’s relationship with the Catholic clergy was rather troubled, as they increasingly
favoured a homogenous Hungarian nation state. Cf. Norbert Spannenberger, Die katolische
Kirche in Ungarn, 1918–1939: Positionierung im politischen System und “Katolische Renaissance”
(Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006), 137–58.
115 György Lukács, ‘Kerényi Károly: Napleányok’, Társadalmi Szemle 6–7 (1948): 491–5. See
also Géza Komoróczy, 'Út a mítoszhoz [The road to myth]' in Mitológia és humanitás: Tanulmá-
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism 255
nyok Kerényi Károly 100. születésnapjára [Mythology and humanity: studies in honour of Károly
Kerényi's 100th birthday], (Budapest: Osiris, 1999), 254–5.
116 Keszi himself alludes to this indirectly: PIM Archive, V.5246/70/15. Andor Németh, author
of the book Kafka ou le mystère juif (Paris: Vigneau, 1947), who was originally a social democrat
but compromised with the communists and became an editor of their literary journal Csillag
[Star], called Keszi a former ‘orthodox Jewish racist’ (orthodox zsidó fajvédő) in his memoirs
written in the early 1950s. Andor Németh, ‘A Csillag története’ [The history of the journal Csil-
lag], Literatura 35 (2009): 341.
117 Imre Keszi, Emberség és irodalom: A sziget ostroma [Humanity and literature: the siege of
the island] (Budapest: Dante, n.d. [1948]), 112.
118 Ibid.
256 Tamás Scheibner
tion to the numerous links through which the Jewish Renaissance can be con-
nected to nineteenth-century interest in revivalist thought (specifically to Jacob
Burckhardt’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s work). In this respect, the Jewish Renais-
sance was just one among many attempts to overcome the crisis of modernity
by relying on revivalist modes of thought. Identifying a renaissance as a ‘mode
of thought’ or a ‘figura of imagination’ with characteristic vocabulary,119 typified
by its ‘purifying redoing of past’, its sense of its own singularity120 and its aspi-
ration to create a ‘complete human being’,121 might make us realize that the gap
between the Jewish Renaissance and other revivalist modes of thought was not
unbridgeable.
This was especially the case for someone like Keszi, who was open to leftist
messianism. As exemplified by the manner in which Lukács promoted it in
post-war Hungary, Stalinism aimed, in its own particular way, to revitalize an-
cient and early modern (in the form of the Italian Renaissance) culture. This
was to be achieved, significantly, at a higher level by creating socialist realist
artworks understood to be an elevated synthesis of European cultures,122 the pri-
mary feature of which was that it transcended temporal limitations by making
past and future simultaneous. This could ultimately be reconciled with renais-
sance thinking, especially by someone who had long been struggling to bring
distant types of thought together in an idiosyncratic way.
123 Imre Keszi, ‘Pap Károlyról’ [On Károly Pap], in Károly Pap, Azarel (Budapest: Franklin,
1949), v–xiv.
124 Cf. Róbert Győri Szabó, A kommunizmus és a zsidóság Magyarországon 1945 után [Commu-
nism and the Jews in Hungary after 1945] (Budapest: Gondolat, 2009), 75–88, 89–101.
125 For measures that were partly anti-Jewish, or could have been seen as such, see ibid., 167–
204.
126 Imre Keszi, Alapkő (Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1952).
127 The standard analysis of the genre remains that by Katherina Clark, The Soviet Novel: His-
tory of Ritual, 3rd ext. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2000).
128 Soviet-friendliness under socialism was retrospectively extended to the imperial period.
The writer and culture politician Béla Illés invented a Russian imperial officer ‘Captain Gusev’
who allegedly rebelled against the Tsar and sided with the Hungarians in the 1848/49 revolu-
tion and freedom fight. This fictional figure was treated as a factually existed one, made its way
into historiography schoolbooks, and even a street was named after him. For a detailed story
and context see See Boldizsár Vörös, Történelemhamisítás és politikai propaganda. Illés Béla
258 Tamás Scheibner
However, Keszi offers a novelty even for those familiar with socialist realist
novels, one that is relevant to questions of Jewish-Hungarian coexistence. The
events are presented from a perspective that is unusually broad in comparison
with similar novels; the action, which from the outset has two strands (set in
Hamburg and Borsod), is supplemented by scenes from London and Paris, but
with detours to Sweden and Riga as well. From the synopsis of the novels, it
emerges that in the second volume Keszi would have plunged one of his heroes
into the Paris Commune, and in the sequel he would have set some of the action
in the United States.129 Such a broadening of scope also offered Alapkő’s author
an opportunity to expatiate on the role of Hungarian Jewry in the country’s in-
dustrialization; one of the ingredients of this was the mediating role taken on
by the Jews. The three key figures in the founding of a steel mill are a relatively
progressive Hungarian noble, who is nevertheless unable to step beyond the
‘boundaries of his class’, a French engineer, who comes forward as an investor,
and the noble’s advisor, the Jewish Józsua Fern, who is able to offer perspective
on socio-economic processes equally from the Hungarian, Habsburg-imperial
and European angles, and whose relatives in Riga provide the capital necessary
for the undertaking. Fern’s role here is not only to mediate between the peasan-
try and the nobility, between workers and capitalists but also between East and
West, while his commitment to the Hungarian nation remains unimpeachable,
as indicated by both the martyrdom of the youngest of Fern’s sons in the War of
Independence and the several years of imprisonment in Austria Fern himself
suffers. Keszi thus strives to show that the Jews were in fact the leaven of the
socialist society being created.
The novel received a lukewarm and uneven reception. While it gained some
praise,130 a devastating review in early 1953 accused Keszi, among other things,
of lack of patriotism, an apathetic approach to the topic and cosmopolitanism,
in fact criticizing it for allowing its plebeian class-struggle approach to override
the grand narrative of national reconciliation.131 The tone of the piece demon-
strates clearly the antipathy a significant section of the Hungarian intelligentsia
held towards Keszi. In the mid-1950s, Keszi tried to draw close to the circle
around the reform communist Imre Nagy,132 and was the first to openly raise the
need to abandon the term socialist realism.133 This, however, did not make Keszi
popular, as many regarded him as an unprincipled opportunist. Tibor Déry, a
writer of great authority and a figure central to the 1956 Revolution, for in-
stance, particularly disliked Keszi, and Déry was not alone in his opinion. Un-
like several former Stalinists, Keszi remained in a marginalized position within
the communist opposition that started the Revolution, had no direct access to
Imre Nagy’s circle and played no significant role in de-Stalinization.134
Keszi remained, in many respects, intellectually isolated to the very end.
Ironically, the newly established regime of János Kádár accused him of playing
a role in the planning of the Revolution; as a result, in 1957 he lost not only his
job but a selection of his works could not be published either.135 When, in 1958,
Keszi’s Elysium, one of the first Hungarian novels to report on the experience of
Nazi camps appeared, it received little attention.136 The novelist and Nobel lau-
reate Imre Kertész claimed that the only authentic work of art about the Holo-
caust is that which does not put the world order to rights, does not close off the
period of persecution by appealing to ‘liberation’ and does not reduce the expe-
rience of totalitarianism into a historical period that is circumscribable and
comprehensible as a temporary anomaly in European history. He advocates in-
stead that it should be presented as a living problem demanding constant care
and attention.137 Elysium is diametrically opposed to such an approach.
In Keszi’s novel, the teenager Gyurka is taken to a relocation camp near the
Waldsee where the children are relatively well cared for, but are subjected to
medical experiments. A section of the camp is outfitted with children’s play-
grounds and offers certain privileges; in the novel, this area is ironically called
Elysium (those who survive their treatment can end up here for a time as a ‘re-
132 See Éva Standeisky, Az írók és a hatalom 1953–1963 [Writers and power 1953–1963] (Buda-
pest: 1956-os Intézet, 1996), 55.
133 Cf. ‘Gyorsírói jegyzőkönyv az 1956. szeptember 17-én tartott közgyűlésről’, in Írók lázadása:
1956-os írószövetségi jegyzőkönyvek [Revolt of the writers: meeting minutes of the writer’s union
in 1956], ed. Éva Standeisky (Budapest: MTA ITI, 1990), 291.
134 In 1948, Déry, with the support of Aladár Komlós, the writer Milán Füst and others, com-
posed a letter denouncing Keszi to Márton Horváth, a member of the Party’s Central Committee.
They accused Keszi, among other things, of being a ‘Zionist’. Tibor Déry, Levél: A műítész kar-
ácsonya hátteréről és Keszi Imre [Letter: on the background to The Critic’s Christmas and the
assessment of Imre Keszi], in Szép elmélet fonákja. Cikkek, művek, beszédek, interjúk (1945–
1957), ed. Ferenc Botka (Budapest: PIM, 2002), 131–44.
135 Endre Illés (Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó) to Imre Keszi, Budapest, 12 February 1957, PIM Ar-
chive, V.5246/90/482.
136 Imre Keszi, Elysium (Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1958).
137 See e.g. Imre Kertész, The Holocaust as Culture (London: Seagull Books, 2011).
260 Tamás Scheibner
Conclusions
Imre Keszi’s oeuvre has been overshadowed by his activities following the Sec-
ond World War to such an extent that his previous works have largely been
ignored. These, however, reveal a different thinker – one whose ambition was
to overcome the crisis of modernity by reconciling apparently contradictory or
distant traditions in an eclectic manner. In the interwar period, Keszi thereby
aimed to find a balance between genuine internationalism and patriotism,
while rejecting both cosmopolitanism and nationalism, which he identified as
the primary causes of Europe’s decline. Ultimately, such thoughts compare to
those promoted by Marxism-Leninism. Unlike Marxism, however, he took a crit-
ical stance towards rationalism as identified with the Enlightenment, and
sought renewal in both religion and myth mediated by the traditional commun-
ities allegedly uncorrupted by urban modernity. He shared an obsession with
many of his contemporaries for the distinct spirit of one’s people, and regarded
language as crucial in not only self-understanding, but also as a means of over-
coming crisis. He trusted in the capacity of language (broadly conceived) to af-
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism 261
fect reality once it was revitalized by deep-rooted but partly forgotten traditions,
and firmly believed that the contemporary crisis could be overcome by reinstat-
ing effective communication in this renewed language. In all these respects,
Keszi was a man of his times. His exceptional eclecticism made Keszi a remark-
able figure in interwar intellectual history; he stood out through his sheer effort
to reconcile all these common ideas of the time into one single, if not entirely
logical, system. Such a synthetic attempt urges us to explore the many variants
of post-romantic cultural criticism from Marxism (and Leninism) to Völkerpsy-
chologie, from Schicksalskunde to Jewish Renaissance, from structuralist linguis-
tics to interwar political populism as entangled modes of thought.
If Keszi is, in a sense, the quintessential thinker of interwar Central and
Eastern Europe, he is also clearly an extreme figure in another sense. This ex-
tremeness relates to his quest to find a role for Jewry in Hungarian society and,
ultimately, in Europe, a preoccupation that may not have been highlighted in
every one of his works, but constituted a profound existential issue for him vir-
tually throughout his life. It may be difficult to understand a posteriori that
Keszi continued to believe in the mediatory role of the Jews, even when he was
called for labour service and his community was outlawed and faced collective
annihilation. His insistence on his theories of Jewry up until the point of the
deportations, which ruthlessly revealed the illusionary nature of the ideas he
had nurtured for some 15 years, might partially explain the unusually radical
shift his thinking took when he turned himself into a devoted Stalinist in just a
couple of months. At the same time, Stalinism should be viewed in the context
of early twentieth-century revivalist thought, and from this perspective his
seemingly abrupt about-turn appears a little more plausible. Keszi’s career was
spent in the thrall of utopian creeds that ultimately proved self-destructive. His
trajectory also shows that utopianism and eschatological thinking might be in-
terpreted as preconditions that made a good number of Central and Eastern
European intellectuals receptive not only to Leninism, but even to a Stalinism
of which most had little accurate knowledge.
Finally, let me comment on a theme which was only indirectly addressed
by this paper. Using Keszi as an example also shows that criticism pertaining to
the notion of identity need not result in its complete abandonment, and in the
boycott of the terms associated with it (like assimilation and emancipation). For
Keszi, Jewishness was both a subjective and a collective matter; he may have
rejected normativity on one level, but he practiced normative criticism on an-
other. This ambiguity might be viewed as a criticism of the notion of identity in
itself, for identity has proven, and continues to prove, to be inadequate in de-
scribing one’s Jewishness. At the same time, Keszi’s usage of the available polit-
ical vocabularies of the time, dominated as they were by notions such as assim-
262 Tamás Scheibner
Jews are still nomads, not with their feet but with their minds. They run to the future, run to
utopias; dissatisfied with the present, they are ever drawn to the most advanced ideas.
Henri Wald
Introduction
Professors represent a special type of intellectual, for their importance is two-
fold: in addition to possessing personal relevance within a certain profession
(as many are also writers, singers, doctors, engineers, architects, etc.) or field of
expertise (literature, history, sociology, medicine, engineering, etc.), they also
wield long-term influence on successive generations. Beyond being objects of
love, envy or even hate for their position in society, they function as role models
for young men and women, so their evolution has perhaps even more bearing
on a nation – or on any given group, for that matter – than that of other intel-
lectuals.
This dynamic is even more cogent when it comes to the relationship be-
tween a society’s majority and its various minorities. Just as the attitudes of pro-
fessors who belong to the majority – especially in relation to minorities – can
be, and have so often been, mimicked by their students, so can the attitudes of
professors who belong to the minority serve as examples for their own adher-
ents, especially in response to adversity.
Examples include Romanian intellectuals like Nae Ionescu (1890–1940),
whose nationalistic ideas have influenced many generations of students and
non-students alike, and pseudo-intellectuals like Alexandru C. Cuza (1857–
1947), who built a university career based on politics rather than academic cre-
dentials and unfortunately left his mark on a number of impressionable young
men and women. And then there are the Jewish intellectuals like Martin Berco-
vici (1902–1971) and Ernest Abason (1897–1942), whose reaction to the Second
World War’s anti-Semitic legislation forbidding Jewish access to higher educa-
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-012
264 Felicia Waldman
Historical context
Understanding the ramifications of the problem requires a brief note on the
shifts in Romanian political discourse and the public policy they produced dur-
ing the second half of the nineteenth century.
Over time, under the various rulers of the Danubian Principalities (includ-
ing the infamous Phanariotes), Jews were alternatively invited and repressed,
depending on the economic needs of the moment. They were welcomed when-
ever local trade needed a boost and persecuted once it gathered momentum.
Yet, it was not until the Organic Regulation for Moldova of 1831 that a clear
anti-Jewish legal stipulation was first formalized.2 Thus, at the end of the Pha-
nariote period there were native Jews [pământeni], Jews recently settled by
princely decree [hrisoveliți] and foreign Jews [sudiți], many of whom were in fact
native or recently settled Jews who had registered for protection with the consu-
lates of Russia (1782), Austria (1783), France (1796) or the UK (1803), which had
been newly opened by a stipulation of the capitulation rights granted to the
Christian powers by the Ottoman Sublime Porte following the Treaty of Kuciuk
Kainardji. However, under the Organic Regulations of both Moldova (1831) and
1 This study does not take into account the medical school, which was part of the University of
Bucharest before the Second World War but subsequently became a separate university, where
a number of Jewish doctors taught in the 1930s, including Oscar Sager, Arthur Kreindler, M.
Goldstein, E. Façon, Rudolf Brauner, B. Menkes and M. Blumenthal.
2 ‘…It is incontestable that the Jews, who have spread throughout Moldova and whose number
is growing every day, live in their vast majority on the account of the locals and exploit almost
all resources to the detriment of industrial progress and public welfare. In order to prevent this
shortcoming to the greatest possible extent, the same commission will mark in the census table
the status of each Jew, so that those who do not have a clear status, do not practice any pro-
fession and live in this country without any official approval could be eliminated, and that any
such individual trying to enter Moldova in the future could be stopped.’ (Chapter III, Article
94).
Avatars of being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest 265
Wallachia (1832), which required that recipients of any civil and political rights
be Christians, all Jews were now categorized as ‘foreigners’, meaning that those
who did not happen to be foreign subjects were simply outlawed.
Still, the Revolution of 1848 brought with it a breath of fresh air, as the list
of the revolutionaries’ demands included the emancipation of the Jews; many
Jews took part in or even sponsored the movement, including Hillel Manoach,
Solomon Halfon and Davicion Bally. Although the revolution failed and the
Jews were not emancipated, they did temporarily receive better treatment, espe-
cially under Alexandru Ioan Cuza following the unification of the two principal-
ities in 1859. But this improvement, which included the possibility to obtain nat-
uralization under the Civil Code of 1864, was to be short-lived, as Cuza was soon
ousted from power and his reforms abandoned. Moreover, for various reasons
outside the scope of this study, many revolution participants who had sup-
ported the emancipation of native Jews later became its most fierce opponents.
This was true of important political and cultural figures like Mihail Kogălnicea-
nu (1817–1891) and Ion Brătianu (1821–1891), whose ascension to power paved
the way for anti-Semitic acts such as the brutal and arbitrary deportations of
1867, a scandal that resonated across the globe.
Contrary to Jewish hopes, the Berlin Congress of 1878 did not bring about
much change as it failed to make the international recognition of Romania’s in-
dependence contingent upon the emancipation of the country’s Jews. With the
exception of the roughly 880 Jews who were individually naturalized for having
fought in the Romanian War of Independence in 1877 – for a country that re-
fused to give them rights and persecuted and deported so many of their co-reli-
gionists – and the additional notable exception of less than 200 other Jews
(bankers, businessmen, scholars) also naturalized for their value to the state,
the vast majority of Romanian Jews were the last minority to obtain citizenship
in modern Europe. This occurred with the 1923 ratification of the Romanian
Constitution, and only then as a result of international pressure to make the rec-
ognition of Greater Romania’s new borders – established in the aftermath of the
First World War, which Romanians term the ‘War of Unification’, as it led to the
recovery of Transylvania, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina – contingent upon
the true emancipation of Romania’s Jews.
The subsequent interwar period was characterized by more-or-less open
anti-Semitism, depending on the political strategies of the moment. Most of the
parties in office between 1918 and 1937, such as Alexandru Averescu’s People’s
Party (1920–1, 1926–7), Ion Brătianu’s Liberal Party (1922–5), Nicolae Iorga’s Na-
tional Democratic Party (1931–2) and Alexandru Vaida-Voevod’s National Peas-
ant Party (1932–3), were overtly anti-Semitic in their positions, stimulating pub-
lic and governmental discussion of the possible introduction of a numerus clau-
266 Felicia Waldman
Thus:
3 Tuvia Friling, Radu Ioanid and Mihail E. Ionescu, eds, Final Report of the International Com-
mission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania (Bucharest: Polirom, 2005), 30.
4 Ibid., 31.
5 Lucian Nastasă, ‘Suveranii’ universităților românești. Mecanisme de selecție și promovare a
elitei intelectuale. I. Profesorii Facultăților de Filosofie și Litere (1864–1948) [The ‘sovereigns’
of Romanian universities: mechanisms of selection and the promotion of the intellectual elite]
(Cluj-Napoca: Limes, 2007), 446.
Avatars of being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest 267
setti that one of the potential candidates, Al. Graur, ‘will meet with redoubtable resistance
of a national nature’ because he was a Jew.6
6 Ibid., 449.
268 Felicia Waldman
David Emmanuel wrote no less than 14 books, some of which are still consid-
ered seminal works in their field. For his significant role in introducing the
study of modern mathematics in Romania and for his rigorous approach to the
discipline, Emmanuel was elected honorary chairman of the first congress of
7 Jacob Loebel was one of the most important Jewish figures of nineteenth-century Romania.
After helping his brother-in-law Jacob Marmorosch establish the first Romanian bank in 1848,
he contributed to the development of the insurance market in Romania by opening and head-
ing a local branch of Azienda Assicuratrice di Trieste (1857–64). He was also instrumental in
the founding of the Bank of Romania in 1866. His poor health and the drama of his wife’s death
led to his early demise at the age of 39, but not before establishing the Jacob and Carolina
Loebel Foundation, which offered scholarships to worthy students and sponsored one of the
first Jewish boys’ schools in Bucharest.
Avatars of being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest 269
8 Cf. Harry Kuller (coord.), Evrei din România. Breviar bibliografic [The Jews of Romania: a
bibliographic review] (Bucharest: Hasefer, 2008), 130–5.
270 Felicia Waldman
lologist. He started publishing in 1894 while still a student, using the name
Hecht-Candrea to sign his articles. Toward the end of his studies he took a spe-
cial interest in dialectology and, together with Mihai Canianu (born Moritz Ca-
hana [1867–1933], a Jewish folklorist, translator and publicist who did not suc-
ceed in making it into academia) compiled two geographical dictionaries, one
dedicated to Dolj County in 1896 and one to Putna County in 1897. Each was
awarded the prize of the Romanian Geographical Society.9
Candrea specialized in Romance languages, lexicography and linguistic
geography at the Sorbonne and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris
(1897–1902) where he studied with Gaston Paris, Jules Gilieron and Paul
Meyer.10 While a student in the French capital, he worked as a substitute assis-
tant professor at the Romanian language chair of the École Spéciale des
Langues Orientales Vivantes, headed at the time by E. Picot. In 1902 he de-
fended his doctoral thesis titled ‘Les éléments latins de la langue roumaine: Le
consonantisme’, and in 1903 returned to Romania, where he taught high-school
French in Craiova and Bucharest. In 1913 he became substitute associate profes-
sor in the Department of Romance Philology, then docent in 1916, tenured asso-
ciate professor in 1922 and finally full professor in 1927 in the Department of
Dialectology and Romanian Folklore at the University of Bucharest. Inciden-
tally, one of his students was Horia Sima.11 Candrea was interested in various
aspects of linguistics (lexicology, lexicography, dialectology, toponymy, anthro-
ponomy), philology (textual criticism) and folklore, and made original contribu-
tions to each of these fields. He delivered courses in Romance languages, Bal-
kan linguistics, onomastics, toponymy and folklore. He wrote textbooks for the
teaching of French, Italian, German, English and Russian, and also spoke Alba-
nian and Megleno-Romanian. In 1905, along with Ovid Densuşianu (1873–
1938), he participated in the founding of the Romanian Philological Society and
the publication of its Bulletin; from 1923 to 1937 he contributed to the cultural
journal Grai şi suflet [Language and Soul] which was also edited by Densuşianu.
An enthusiast for the complex field of etymology – along with lexicography
and dialectology, the precursor to comparative linguistics – as well as a lover of
folklore and an avid fan of toponymy, Candrea authored (sometimes with Den-
suşianu and others) 15 books, including several specialized dictionaries, some
9 Lucia Wald, ed., Lingvişti şi filologi evrei din România [Romanian Jewish linguists and phi-
lologists] (Bucharest: Hasefer, 1996), 79–84.
10 Ecaterina Ţarălungă, Dicţionar de Literatură Română [Dictionary of Romanian literature]
(Bucharest: 2007), 52.
11 Horia Sima (1907–93) was a fascist, Romanian nationalist politician. After 1938 he was the
second and last leader of the fascist-nationalist and anti-Semitic paramilitary movement
known as the Iron Guard.
Avatars of being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest 271
of which are still in use today. He retired in 1936 at the age of 64, but continued
to teach; in 1948 he immigrated to France, where he died two years later.
Candrea represents a slightly different case than that of David Emmanuel.
Although he did not convert to Christianity, he did change his name to improve
his access to the cultural world of Romania, and unlike Emmanuel, he did not
become manifestly involved in the Jewish community. However, just like Em-
manuel – but perhaps for more evident reasons, given the above – he was
highly appreciated by the authorities.
The problem becomes even clearer upon comparing Candrea’s case with
that of another Jewish philologist, linguist and folklorist of international repute,
and former student of Bogdan Petriceicu Hașdeu at the Faculty of Letters and
Philosophy of the University of Bucharest, Lazăr Șăineanu (born Eliezer Schein,
23 April 1859, Ploiești; died 11 May 1934, Paris). Like Candrea, Șăineanu was a
remarkable scholar who made a decisive contribution to the development of Ro-
manian philological studies, and just like Candrea he changed his name to gain
easier access to Romania’s cultural milieu. However, unlike Candrea he im-
mersed himself in the Jewish community, writing for its magazines and fighting
for its naturalization, which put him in conflict with the authorities and resulted
in his exile. Thus, Șăineanu’s decision to manifest his Jewishness puts him clos-
er to David Emmanuel but with an opposite outcome: by all possible means he
was prevented from attaining a tenured teaching position, even after ultimately
converting to Christianity.12 We can see that it was not even a matter of the
choices made by the Jews who wanted and deserved to become professors, for
Șăineanu did almost everything conceivable to attain this goal; yet, even con-
version was not enough. One explanation may lie in the fact that while Emma-
nuel worked with mathematics, Șăineanu focused on the culture and language
of Romania. In the straightforward words of historian, writer and politician Va-
sile A. Urechia (1834–1901), a Jew ‘could never awaken in the minds and hearts
of the young generation the image of our past laden with lessons for the fu-
ture.’13 But this does not explain Candrea’s positive case. It merely proves how
personal and visceral anti-Semitism was at the time; for, unlike Candrea, Șăi-
12 The highest position Șăineanu could attain was professor of German at the Higher Educa-
tion School of the University of Bucharest, which was not strictly an academic institution (cf.
the 1896–97 Annual Report of the University of Bucharest).
13 Laszlo Alexandru, ‘Un savant călcat în picioare (I)’ [A trampled upon scholar], Tribuna, no.
151 (2008). Lazăr Șăineanu’s case was so outrageous that it became the subject of several im-
portant works of scholarship, including George Voicu, ‘Radiografia unei expatrieri: cazul Lazăr
Șăineanu’ [Radiography of an expatriation: the case of Lazăr Șăineanu], Caietele Institutului
Național pentru Studierea Holocaustului din România “Elie Wiesel”, no. 1 (2008), and the
above-mentioned Nastasă, “Suveranii” universităților românești. Similar fates were shared by
272 Felicia Waldman
Moses Gaster (1856–1939) and Hariton Tiktin (1850–1936), to name just two other examples. All
three obtained tenured academic positions abroad.
14 Wald, Lingvişti şi filologi, 82.
15 Lya Benjamin, ‘Starea juridică a evreilor şi implicaţiile cotidiene ale legislaţiei antievreieşti,
1940–1944’ [The legal status of the Jews and the daily implications of the anti-Jewish legisla-
tion, 1940–1944], in Reflecţii despre Holocaust: Articole, Studii, Mărturii, ed. Felicia Waldman
(Bucharest: Editura Asociaţiei Evreilor din România Victime ale Holocaustului, 2006), 184.
Avatars of being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest 273
16 Alex Ştefănescu, ‘La o nouă lectură: Tudor Vianu – perioada postbelică’ [A new reading of
Tudor Vianu: the post-war years], România literară, no. 19 (2004).
17 Benjamin, ‘Starea juridică’, 184.
274 Felicia Waldman
‘idealistic’. In September 1944, in the very first issue of Scânteia [The Sparkle],
the Romanian Communist Party organ, he was accused by communist philoso-
pher Constantin Ionescu Gulian of ‘not having understood, or wished to under-
stand, dialectic materialism’18 as it was explained by Gulian in his book Philoso-
phy of Culture – an accusation that Vianu was not even allowed to address.
Ironically, his appointment as a full professor shortly before that, in the
summer of 1944 after almost 15 years of waiting, had been made possible by Ion
Petrovici, a minister in the Antonescu government to whom Vianu remained
grateful until the end of his life.19
Nevertheless, in 1945 Vianu was appointed director of the National Theatre
for a term lasting roughly one year. He then served as Romanian ambassador in
Belgrade between 1946 and 1947, a post that earned him severe criticism for
making concessions to the new regime. Literary critics such as Gelu Ionescu are
of the opinion that this appointment was merely part of a government trend,
immediately after the armistice, to employ young people and independent per-
sonalities with a democratic reputation in an attempt to present a multi-col-
oured – not just red – front. In any case, once Ana Pauker (1893–1960) came to
power she quickly dismissed them, just as she dismissed the old career diplo-
mats. Vianu was no exception. Regardless of any personal motives or influences
that pushed him into this game – Gelu Ionescu, for example, believes that soci-
ologist, journalist and politician Mihai Ralea (1896–1964) may have been a fac-
tor – one can imagine what Vianu must have felt when, after experiencing his
colleagues and students calling for his removal from the university, he was sud-
denly invited to become a diplomat.20
Soon, however, the good life would quickly come to an end. In 1948 Vianu
was excluded from the Romanian Academy. The Department of Aesthetics at
the University of Bucharest was closed and he was transferred to the Depart-
ment of Foreign Literature. Between 1949 and 1954 he was constantly harassed
with attempts to remove him from the system of higher education; a staff report
from 1954 accused him of ‘cosmopolitism’ and proposed ‘his removal from the
academic staff of the faculty’.21 It was again Mihai Ralea’s intervention that
seems to have saved him.22 To the luck of his students, Vianu managed to re-
main at the university, and even to found the Department of World Literature
History in the Faculty of Letters, opening the path to the field of comparative
literature.
Starting in 1954, following Stalin’s death and a six-year quarantine (1948–
54) during which he was allowed to publish only seven articles on literary
topics approved by official censors, Vianu once again began publishing highly
erudite critical studies on the classics of Romanian and foreign literature, first
in the cultural journal Gazeta literară [Literary Gazette], established in 1954,
and later in Contemporanul [The Contemporary]. In 1955, again upon recommen-
dation by Mihai Ralea, he was readmitted to the Romanian Academy, this time
as a full member. The good life had returned. Vianu began delivering lectures
and travelling abroad. He was appointed director of the Library of the Roma-
nian Academy in 1958 and elected to the UNESCO National Commission, as well
as to the UNESCO Executive Committee in 1962. He contributed to numerous Ro-
manian and foreign publications, published many new books and re-edited
some of his older ones, but he always remained loyal, first and foremost, to
teaching.
In 1962 he took the final step in what may be regarded as his concession to
the communist regime and enrolled in the communist party,23 which allowed
him to be decorated and to receive the State Award in 1963. He wrote over 30
books in his lifetime, many of which are still considered relevant today. Vianu
presents a case of many concessions to the communist regime, many merits, a
significant amount of suffering due to his Jewish origins, as well as to his per-
sonal choices, from both the wartime and communist political establishments,
and many professional gains. It should be noted, however, that while his
choices may at times have been questionable, they harmed no one, except per-
haps himself.
The last Jew to achieve tenure on the academic staff of the University of Bu-
charest before the Second World War was the physicist Radu Grigorovici (born
20 November 1911, Cernăuți; died 1 August 2008, Bucharest), still considered to
be the founder of the Romanian research school for the physics of amorphous
semiconductors.
He was the son of Bukovinian politician Gheorghe Grigorovici (1871–1950) –
first a deputy in the Austro-Hungarian Parliament in Vienna and then in the Ro-
manian Parliament in Bucharest, as well as a founding member (1927) and pres-
ident (1936–8) of the Romanian Social Democratic Party – and Tatiana (1877–
1952), born Pisterman, a convinced Marxist and holder of a PhD from the Uni-
versity of Bern, an unusual feat for a woman of that time. She descended from a
Jewish family from Camenița (Kamianets-Podilskyi), which relegated her for her
marriage to a Christian Orthodox man.24 Radu Grigorovici was raised, much like
Tudor Vianu, in a Christian environment, and never thought of himself as Jew-
ish.
After graduating in 1928 from Aron Pumnul High School in Cernăuți, Grigor-
ovici earned his BA in chemistry (1931) and physics (1934) from the local univer-
sity. He then worked as a substitute tutor at the Experimental Physics Labora-
tory of Professor Eugen Bădărău (1887–1975). In 1936 he moved to the Faculty
of Sciences at the University of Bucharest where Bădărău had been invited to
lead the Molecular, Acoustic and Optical Physics Laboratory. It was here that
Grigorovici earned his PhD in physics in 1939 with his thesis titled ‘The Disrup-
tive Potential in Mercury Vapours’.25
Despite his Jewish roots, which were probably well hidden behind his pa-
rents’ political activism to the extent that almost no one knew of them, at the
beginning of 1944 he was drafted by the Romanian Army and for five months
took part in the Crimean campaign. Upon his return, he once again joined the
academic staff of the University of Bucharest. In 1949 he obtained tenure as an
associate professor of optics, teaching courses on basic, instrumental and ap-
plied optics, electronics of the solid, etc. Between 1947 and 1957, alongside his
academic career, he worked as an engineering consultant at Lumen Factory and
later at Electrofar.
In 1958 he obtained the title of docent, but soon thereafter in 1960, he was
forced for political reasons to give up his academic career. The main factor was
most likely his family’s political history rather than his Jewish background.
However, his life showcases, with historical and political context, yet another
possible fate for a Jewish professor in Romania within the time frame of our
study. He was fortunate to be able to continue his research in the field of ele-
mentary amorphous semiconductors and non-crystalline solids at the Physics
Institute of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest, where he was appointed head
of section in 1960 and deputy scientific director in 1963. In 1970, when the insti-
tute was subordinated to the State Committee for Nuclear Energy, Grigorovici’s
directorial position was confirmed, but in 1973 at the age of 62, he chose to re-
tire. Nevertheless, he continued his research in a part-time position at the same
institute. In 1977 he moved to the Institute of Physics and Materials Technology
in Măgurele, but his contract was cancelled just one year later.
24 Horst Klein, ‘Tatiana Grigorovici (1877–1952). Zum 60. Todestag der Austromarxistin’, Jahr-
buch für Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, no. 3 (2012): 132–41. Cf. Ortfried
Kotzian, ‘Radu Grigorovici: O viață pentru Bucovina’, Analele Bucovinei 19, no. 1 (2012): 38.
25 Dan H. Constantinescu, ‘Radu Grigorovici – sau intelectualul’ [Radu Grigorovici: the intel-
lectual], http://danhconst.net/public-heap/Radu_Grigorovici_CdF.pdf (accessed 22 January
2015).
Avatars of being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest 277
cant merits but suffered due to political rather than ethnic reasons, yet, he was
able to make many professional gains. He made no immoral choices, even to
save his career. Furthermore, despite Grigorovici’s Jewish background, his case
is even more interesting for his close friendship with physicist Gheorghe Manu
(1903–61), a member of the far-right Legionary Movement – his mother may
have been an atheist Marxist but she apparently did not convert to Christianity,
technically making Grigorovici a halakhic Jew (although this detail seemed to
have escaped the vigilance of the fascist authorities in wartime Romania). The
speech he gave at Manu’s commemoration in 2001 reveals a surprising under-
standing for his friend’s participation in the fascist movement.26 In this regard,
Grigorovici’s story can be compared to that of journalist, writer and playwright
Mihail Sebastian (born Iosef Hechter, 1907–45), whose relationship with philos-
opher, logician, journalist and his former professor, Nae Ionescu (1890–1940) –
a notorious anti-Semite – and friendship with Mircea Eliade (1907–85), the fa-
mous religious historian who joined and actively participated in the far-right
Legionary Movement during the 1930s, have been the subject of several stud-
ies.27 Yet the similarities are limited, as Grigorovici’s friendship with Manu
never faltered to the degree that Sebastian’s relationship did with either Ionescu
or Eliade.
The traumatizing experience of those years, when in Romania, too, she was blamed by
some journalists for her Sephardic origins, would mark her for the rest of her life. She al-
ways kept to herself, as if she were constantly afraid; this was visible even in the way she
walked, with caution, brushing the walls with her shoulder pointed slightly forward.30
Although she did not have a communist past, Façon was hired in 1944 as a sub-
stitute assistant professor of Italian language and literature at the University of
Bucharest. Four years and one book later (The Active Man’s Conception, 1946),
she obtained tenure, and by 1951 she was already an associate professor. She
became full professor in 1965. In 1966, she was appointed head of the depart-
ment; two years later, she became a docent.31
28 Cf. Doina Condrea Derer, ‘Nina Façon, o viață dedicată studiului. Evocare de Doina Condrea
Derer’ [Nina Facon, a life devoted to study: evocation by Doina Condrea Derer], Orizonturi Cul-
turale Italo-Române 4, no. 10 (2014).
29 ‘Nina Facon biografia’ [The biography of Nina Façon], http://www.referatele.com/referate/
romana/Nina-Facon (accessed 22 January 2015).
30 ‘Nina Façon, o viață dedicată studiului. Evocare de Doina Condrea Derer’, see note 28
above.
31 Wald, Lingvişti şi filologi evrei din România, 176.
280 Felicia Waldman
Façon wrote nine books and published nine translations. She was editor-in-
chief of the academic journal Bulletin de la Societe Roumaine de Linguistique Ro-
mane; she contributed to Studii italiene. Analele Universității din București [Ital-
ian Studies: Annals of the University of Bucharest] (Romania), Forum italicum
(USA), Beitrage zur romanischen Philologie (GDR), Cultura neolatina (Italy), and
Studi e problem i di critica testuale (Italy); she produced Italian textbooks and
dictionaries and was a founding member of the Romanian Society of Romance
Linguistics. Her works, which most often combined literature with philosophy,
were well-documented and unbiased by Marxist perspectives.
We also know that, as dean of the Faculty, Façon defended her colleague
Valentin Lipatti, an associate professor of French who was under threat of los-
ing his job because of his ‘unhealthy origins’ – he was the son of an important
interwar landowner and was suspected of having joined the communist party
not out of conviction, but only to save himself. Incidentally, Tudor Vianu had a
similarly courageous attitude in defence of Lipatti.32
Thus, the first Jewish intellectual to be hired at the University of Bucharest
as soon as the anti-Jewish legislation had been abrogated, even before the end
of the war, was able to enjoy a fairly complete and rewarding professional ca-
reer without being or becoming a communist and without making compromises.
Façon presents a case of no concessions, no immoral choices, ample merits, sig-
nificant suffering from both wartime and communist authorities due to her eth-
nicity – and to a lesser extent, to her choices that defied the establishment –
and much deserved professional gains.
The second Jewish intellectual to obtain tenure at the University of Buchar-
est after the Second World War was linguist and philologist Jacques Byck (born
19 October 1897, Bucharest; died 10 October 1964, Bucharest). A graduate of the
Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Bucharest (1918–22),
where he studied with Candrea, among others, he was able to continue his edu-
cation in Paris for a very short time. Upon his return to Romania, he was hired
as a high school teacher in Bucharest and Câmpina (1922–40). During the 1930s
he also worked as an editor for the cultural journals Viața românească [Roma-
nian Life] and Adevărul literar [ The Literary Truth]. His lifelong passion for old
manuscripts and the early Romanian language became clear from his very first
book (Old Romanian Texts, 1930), which proposed a new and innovative schol-
arly transcription, an editing system as well as a comparative approach to re-
lated texts. His interest in grammar and stylistics resulted in several articles, six
32 ‘Facultatea de Filologie în anii 50’ [The faculty of philology in the 1950s], Romania liberă,
[Free Romania] 20 May 2008, http://www.romanialibera.ro/aldine/history/facultatea-de-filolo-
gie-in-anii-%E2%80%9850-125034 (accessed 22 January 2015).
Avatars of being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest 281
In recognition of his merit as the peerless expert in old Romanian, he was also
appointed director of editing old texts at the Linguistics Institute of the Roma-
nian Academy, where he set forth the academic norms for the transliteration of
Cyrillic letters into the Latin alphabet.37
Byck edited the works of some of the classics of Romanian literature, con-
tributed to the Grammar of the Romanian Language, which was published by
the Romanian Academy in 1954, wrote articles on lexicology, orthography, sty-
listics and other topics, and remained beloved by his students for his extraordi-
nary pedagogical talents. Furthermore, having been employed at the beginning
of 1945, he did not have much to do with communist propaganda. Indeed, that
Byck was not a good communist is confirmed by a note written by the party’s
propaganda department in February 1951. Byck had been invited to deliver lec-
tures at the Mihai Eminescu School of Literature, an institution set up by the
propaganda department to prepare ‘new novelists’, who were uninfluenced by
the past and thus would better render the realities of building socialism. How-
ever, as was made abundantly clear in a meeting organized on 8 February 1951
to evaluate the school’s activities, Byck’s class on literary language and the
sources of the writers’ language expounded ‘hostile ideas’, and the school was
accused of not having vetted the lectures and of trusting the speaker just be-
cause he was a member of the academic staff of the University of Bucharest.38
Thus, Byck presents a case of many merits; he made no concessions or im-
moral choices, but suffered a significant amount at the hands of both wartime
and communist authorities for his ethnic origins and for his non-alignment to a
regime to which he did not show much sympathy; yet, he also made important
professional gains.
Alexandru Graur (born Alter Brauer, 9 July 1900, Botoșani; died 9 July 1988,
Bucharest) was a remarkable personality in the field of classical philology and
linguistics, and a descendant, on his mother’s side, of the above-mentioned Sa-
nielevici family, which gave Romania many scholars of international repute.
After graduating from the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the Univer-
sity of Bucharest with a BA in classical philology and the Romanian language
(1922), he worked for one year (1923–4) as a substitute history teacher at Spiru
Haret High School in Bucharest. In 1924 he was hired as a full-time teacher at
Unirea High School in Focșani. However, that same year he obtained a scholar-
ship from the Ministry of Public Education, which allowed him to leave for
Paris, where he continued his studies with Antoine Meillet and other major rep-
40 As Cristian Gaspar strives to show in his paper ‘Just another Comes Itineris?: Alexandru
Graur and Romanian Classical Philology between Two Worlds (1945–1955)’, an abstract of
which is available at https://www.academia.edu/4567160/_Alexandru_Graur_and_Romanian_-
Classical_Philology_Between_Two_Worlds_1945_1955 (accessed 22 January 2015). We know, for
instance, that in 1951 Graur gave a reference for the above-mentioned Valentin Lipatti in which
he expressed his doubts that, given his family ties, Lipatti could be a good communist (cf.
‘Facultatea de Filologie în anii 50’).
Avatars of being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest 285
reality proved him wrong. At many times in the late 1940s and early 1950s he
was accused of being inadequately Stalinist, despite his eagerness to serve the
regime, and he was eventually punished. His life may have been rich, but it
ended in poverty and disappointment. After his retirement in 1974, the author-
ities forgot him, as they forgot many of their former friends. This was perhaps a
blessing, as others would finish their lives in even more dire straits. The only
place he was still welcome was the Jewish community, which he had helped
during the war. He began going there frequently and launched a column on lin-
guistics in the Jewish newspaper Revista Cultului Mozaic [Jewish Religious Re-
view]. It was only the Jewish community that remembered and celebrated his
eightieth birthday in 1980.41 Thus, Graur presents a case of ample merits, many
concessions, but also immoral choices – no one forced him to attack his former
colleagues and professors in his overzealousness to serve the regime. He suf-
fered significantly from Romania’s interwar and wartime political establishment
due to his ethnic origins and, to a lesser extent, from the communist regime due
to his personal choices. He also enjoyed many professional gains.
The last Jew to be hired at the University of Bucharest before the 1948 com-
munist reform of the education system was Iancu Fischer (born 4 December
1923, Iași; died 18 October 2002, Bucharest), an expert in classical philology
who obtained a tenured position in the summer of that year, just before the
communist reform was enforced.42
Fischer’s father owned some 500 hectares of forest in Vaslui County, an un-
usual amount of wealth for a Romanian Jew of that time, yet was dispossessed
of these assets in 1940 under the wartime anti-Semitic laws. Fischer started high
school in his hometown but finished in Bucharest. During his last year in school
he met Alexandru Graur, which would become a determining factor in his ulti-
mate choice of career. He later became Graur’s student and disciple at the Pri-
vate Jewish College (1942–4). After graduating from the Faculty of Letters and
Philosophy, which he was able to attend from 1944 to 1946, he was hired at the
University of Bucharest, and in 1948 became one of Graur’s teaching assistants.
In 1949 he also began working at the Linguistics Institute of the Romanian
Academy.
But Fischer’s luck was short-lived. In 1952, when the issue of his ‘unhealthy
origins’ was dug up, he was dismissed from his academic position. However, in
41 Cf. Dumitru Graur, ‘In Memoriam Alexandru Graur’, text posted 31 March 2014, http://www.
animafori.ro/blog/161-in-memoriam-alexandru-graur (accessed 22 January 2015).
42 As he himself relates in an interview given to Raluca Alexandrescu, which was published in
Observator cultural [Cultural Observer]: Raluca Alexandrescu, ‘Implicare în cetate și rezistență
activă. Interviu cu Iancu Fischer’ [A life of direct involvement and active resistance: Interview
with Iancu Fischer], Observator cultural, no. 37 (7 November 2000).
286 Felicia Waldman
1954 he managed to return as a lecturer, but this stint would end soon as well,
as four years later he was fired again. Despite these and other adversities, in-
cluding the dissolution of his personal file, as all members of his family had
immigrated to Israel, he obtained his PhD in 1966 under Graur’s supervision
and in 1968 was able to return to the university as an associate professor.
And all the while, in lieu of maintaining a low profile, if not giving in to
communist pressure altogether, Fischer chose to openly express his views. His
field of interest and expertise was classical studies (Latin, Greek and their vari-
ous dialects), as well as the history of the Romanian language and early Roma-
nian literature (Anton Pann, Grigore Alexandrescu), which could have let him
steer clear of the political upheavals of his time. Yet Fischer decided to fight the
regime in his own way. He always used genuine scholarly principles and meth-
odologies in his research and writing – while keeping abreast of the latest inter-
national academic developments – in lieu of promoting communist ideological
dogma. He also exercised ‘linguistic resistance’ by refusing to use the wooden
language of communist propaganda, and worked with lucidity during the ‘re-
laxation periods’, when many other intellectuals were so easily misled by the
pseudo-reforms of the system.43 Moreover, he had the courage to criticize the
regime’s educational policies in regard to the teaching of Latin in schools, sug-
gesting that more, not less, should be done to preserve it.
Fischer was a member of the editorial committees of Studii și cercetări ling-
vistice (as of 1956), Studii clasice (as of 1957), Revue Roumaine de Linguistique
(as of 1965), Biblioteca classica orientalis (Berlin, 1962–5), Klio (Berlin, 1988),
founding member (1958) and president (as of 1989) of the Romanian Society of
Classical Studies, president of the Romanian Society of Linguistics (1973–8) and
a member of several international academic associations.
Iancu Fischer presents a case of genuine merits, no concessions, significant
suffering at the hands of both the wartime and communist political establish-
ments for his ethnic origins and his family’s financial status, as well as some
much-deserved gains. His case is even more interesting for the fact that despite
his ‘unhealthy origins’, and in the absence of any communist affiliation, he
managed to obtain a tenured academic position at the University of Bucharest
and keep it for 55 years – albeit with two interruptions – while continually re-
fusing to give in to the regime.
the University of Bucharest: 150 years of Romanian philological education, 1863–2013] (Buchar-
est: Editura Universității din București, 2013), 148.
46 Cf. http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull121/12101403535.pdf (ac-
cessed 22 January 2015).
Avatars of being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest 289
signed by King Michael. From 1945 to 1948 he served as president of the Credit
Bank of the Jewish Teachers, Writers and Artists of Romania [Casa de credit a
profesorilor, scriitorilor și artiștilor evrei din România].
Based on his past adherence to the Communist Party, in 1948 Boldan ob-
tained tenure as an associate professor at the Faculty of Philology at the Univer-
sity of Bucharest. His tenure was granted despite his lack of a PhD and no pub-
lications to his name – his first book, a monograph on the literary work of Alecu
Russo (1819–59), written in the spirit of the epoch and from a sociologizing per-
spective, with no particular intellectual claim, was published that year. Unlike
the tenured promotion of Alexandru Graur, who may have been repaid for his
communist past but had obvious qualifications for the job, Boldan’s seems to
have been a payment for his propagandistic activity and general closeness to
the regime. This supposition is confirmed by Boldan’s further nomination, after
a brief appointment as deputy editor-in-chief of the education journal Gazeta
învățământului [Educational Gazette] (1951–3), as dean of the Faculty of Philol-
ogy (1953–4), even earlier than Alexandru Graur (1954–6), although by that time
he had authored only two monographs and was not particularly renowned for
any literary achievement. He was later appointed rector of the Foreign Lan-
guages Institute from 1955–6 and rector of the University Pedagogical Institute
of Bucharest for a four-year term between 1956 and 1960. From 1960 to 1971 he
acted as deputy editor-in-chief of the journal Limbă şi literatură [Language and
literature]. From 1968 to 1971 he was also secretary general of the Society of His-
torical and Philological Sciences.
Loyal to the communist propaganda, Boldan promoted, throughout his en-
tire lifetime, a sociologizing perspective on literature, which proposed a ‘recon-
sideration’ of the classics and a ‘scientific valorization of literary heritage’ by
stressing the ‘progressivist side’ or ‘ideological errors’ of various writers. He
was an adept of the proletcultist approach, which used literature as an instru-
ment of communist ideology.47 However, it cannot be known whether this was
his sincere conviction or simply a stand dictated by his will to maintain an aca-
demic career. In addition to the monograph on Alecu Russo and one on Cos-
tache Negri (1812–76), he produced about 15 didactic studies on various cultural
personalities, which have been labelled ‘correct’ for lack of any other special
merit, and several high-school textbooks. He is also the author of a Dictionary of
[Romanian] Literary Terminology, the only one of its kind ever published. His
son, Adrian Boldan, moved to Israel and became a Haredi Jew.
47 Cf. Ion Simuț, ‘Canonul literar proletcultist (III)’ [The Proletcultist literary canon], Romania
litarară, no. 29 (2008).
290 Felicia Waldman
Boldan thus presents a case of few merits, many concessions to the commu-
nist regime, some suffering at the hands of the Romanian wartime political es-
tablishment due to his ethnic origins, and a significant amount of professional
gains.
Another Jewish professor given tenure in 1948 at the University of Buchar-
est is the above-mentioned historian of philosophy, philosopher of culture and
axiologist Constantin (Henri) Ionescu Gulian (born 22 April 1914, Bucharest;
died 21 August 2011, Bucharest), whose complex personality presents a very
special case. While he remains in the annals of Romanian and international phi-
losophy for some of his works on ethics, the theory of culture and the history of
philosophy, he is nonetheless remembered as the ‘exterminator of Romanian
philosophy’.48
Gulian was a promising young man. During secondary school he took
courses in violin, music theory and orchestra at the Bucharest Conservatory. He
later graduated from the Department of Romance Philology of the Faculty of
Letters and Philosophy at the University of Bucharest in 1938. In following
years, he published several research articles that showed a clear Marxist orien-
tation, but these did not bring him much notoriety.
It was the arrival of the communist regime that opened the door to his visi-
bility and subsequent academic career. As early as 1945, even before the com-
munist era officially began in 1948, Gulian was appointed secretary of the newly
established Romanian Communist Party’s Workers’ University, which aimed to
spread the ‘philosophy of the working class’ and ‘dialectic materialism’ among
the workers-turned-students. Gulian was still there one year later when the uni-
versity was relaunched under a new name, Ștefan Gheorghiu University, after
the turn-of-the-century trade unionist (1874–1914).49
In 1947 Gulian earned his PhD with a thesis titled ‘Introducere în noua etică’
[Introduction to the New Ethics], in which he examined the human norms of
conduct in the new post-war society and investigated the dialectics of freedom
and necessity, as well as the social and historical grounds of ethical values. In
his thesis he quoted the unavoidable Marx, as well as other German philoso-
phers such as Georg Simmel, Max Scheler, Alfred Weber and Max Weber, a sig-
nificant achievement given the historical and political circumstances of the
time. The thesis was published immediately and received praise from the estab-
48 Cf. Vladimir Tismăneanu, ‘C. I. Gulian, exterminatorul filosofiei românești’ [C. I. Gulian: the
exterminator of Romanian philosophy], România literară, no. 2 (2012).
49 Cf. Paula Mihailov Chiciuc, ‘Universitatea PCR’ [The Romanian Communist Party’s univer-
sity], Jurnalul național (2006), http://istoriacomunismului.blogspot.de/2006/09/universitatea-
pcr.html (accessed 22 January 2015).
Avatars of being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest 291
In this department [the History of Philosophy] there were people who could have taught
things other than what they were required to teach. Among them was Constantin Ionescu
Gulian, who is still alive today. He was young at the time, and already known for some
articles published before 1948. I myself had one of his books, published, I think, in 1947,
a work on ethics in which he discussed in an academic style – based first and foremost on
German literature – various systems, trends and orientations in the field. As a specialist,
you could appreciate the book, or fail to appreciate it, but you could not deny that the
author had read a lot. By 1951, however, Gulian was unrecognizable. The identity emanat-
ing from that book had vanished and another had emerged in its place!53
50 Vladimir Tismăneanu, Lumea secretă a nomenclaturii; Amintiri, dezvăluiri, portrete [The se-
cret world of the nomenclature: memoirs, disclosures, portraits] (Bucharest: Humanitasi, 2012),
e-book.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
53 Mircea Flonta, Decapitarea filosofiei românești [The decapitation of Romanian philosophy],
Ziarul Financiar (13 May 2003).
292 Felicia Waldman
What makes the transformation hard to understand is the fact that Gulian was
not one of the workers transported by communism to an academic position for
which he had no qualifications. On the contrary, he had all the prerequisites to
become a good philosopher. He had been a student of the philosopher Isaac
Brucker, benefitted from exposure to an extensive philosophical culture and,
apparently, owned an impressive book collection. However, as Flonta remarks,
his conversion to Stalinism was complete, and turned him into what Tismănea-
nu would call a ‘gravedigger for Romanian philosophy’.54
Gulian was immediately rewarded for his quick transformation. After the
1948 dissolution of the Romanian Academy and establishment of the Academy
of the People’s Republic of Romania, which allowed the authorities to remove
the former academicians who did not enthusiastically join the ranks of the new
regime, and to gain tighter control over the scientific and philosophical re-
search undertaken in the country, Gulian was appointed to head the Depart-
ment of Philosophy of the academy’s newly established Institute of History and
Philosophy (1949–54). Once the institute was divided and an Institute of Philos-
ophy was created in 1954, Gulian was appointed its director and remained so
until 1971.
In 1955 he was elected a member of the Romanian Academy, which gave
him further control over the orientation of Romanian scientific research in phi-
losophy, as well as other fields. In 1964, Gulian was awarded the Labor Order
(First Class) for his services in promotion of Stalinist ideology. Furthermore, he
survived the public policy changes incumbent with Ceaușescu’s 1965 accession
to power, which included the new government’s different national-communist
perspectives on almost everything; as Tismăneanu puts it, Gulian ‘reinvented
himself as an expert in African folklore and structuralism, and remembered the
great figures of Western philosophy, which he had mystified in his earlier writ-
ings.’55
Between 1966 and 1990 he was president of the Academy’s Department of
Philosophical, Psychological and Juridical Sciences and then president of its
Department of Philosophical, Psychological and Pedagogical Sciences from
1990 to 1992. Gulian was one of the first members of the Academy of Social and
Political Sciences, set up by the communist regime in 1970 in order to double
the already communized Romanian Academy.56 He was also director of the phi-
losophy journal Cercetări filosofice [Philosophical Research] from its inception.
Gulian presents a case of 100 per cent concessions and many immoral
choices, no suffering – except perhaps from the anti-Jewish legislation of 1938–
44 – and 100 per cent professional gains. Although he had the opportunity to
do so after 1990, he never expressed any regret for his past. His story is further
complicated by the fact that he possessed certain merits. He published numer-
ous articles in Romanian and international academic journals and over 30
books on ethics, the philosophy of crisis, the history of modern philosophy, his-
tory and the theory of culture, axiology, Marxism and structuralism, Hegel,
Nietzsche, etc. About half of these were translated into foreign languages. He
was also a member of the Hegel Society and the Association of French-speaking
Sociologists, and was invited to teach as a visiting professor at universities in
Moscow, St. Petersburg and Warsaw, as well as Paris, Brussels and Heidelberg.
Due to his dogmatic Marxist views and methodologies, as well as his embrace
of Stalinism, no one – including his former students, some of whom have be-
come important philosophers in their own right – has undertaken to write a
complete study of his career, with the exception of Tismăneanu’s short entry in
his above-mentioned book on Romanian communist nomenclature. However,
some scholars believe his research into German classical philosophy still de-
serves attention today.57 We can therefore conclude that his personal conduct,
which was the subject of his first book, has prevented any genuine initiative to
evaluate his merits. Perhaps this is Gulian’s greatest punishment: oblivion.
Access to an academic position at the Faculty of Philosophy and Law of the
University of Bucharest was not dependent on such overzealousness, as is pro-
ven by the case of Ion Banu (born 16 June 1913, Bucharest; died 12 May 1993,
Bucharest). A graduate of the very same faculty of the University of Bucharest,
Banu chose to escape the constraints of his time by taking refuge in ancient
European and Eastern philosophy and the methodology of the history of philos-
ophy, and earned his PhD with a thesis on Heraclitus.
Banu obtained tenure at the University of Bucharest in 1948, first as an as-
sociate professor, then as a full professor in the Department of History of An-
cient and Medieval Philosophy. We know from Vladimir Tismăneanu that the
former social-democratic lawyer was one of the few intellectuals who ‘tried to
that it was possible to be a member of the tenured academic staff of the Univer-
sity of Bucharest in communist times without excessive compromise. His case
presents certain merits, few concessions to the communist regime, some suffer-
ing at the hands of the communist authorities for his moral choices, and to a
lesser extent for his ethnic origin, and many professional gains.
Another Jewish intellectual to obtain tenure in 1948 as a member of the aca-
demic staff of the University of Bucharest was Ion Vitner (born Wittner, 19 Au-
gust 1914, Bucharest; died 12 April 1991, Bucharest). After graduating from Titu
Maiorescu High School in 1932 – an irony of fate considering the time and en-
ergy he would later spend fighting the memory and cultural legacy of Maiores-
cu – he published, in the avant-garde journal Unu [One], several poems and
short stories using his birth name, I. Wittner. He would also exhibit a series of
surrealist drawings in Bucharest bookstores, an indication of his affinity for lit-
erature and art. Around the same time, he joined the Marxist circles linked to
the journal Cuvântul liber [Free Speech]. From 1933 to 1935, Vitner contributed
to this journal under the pen name Ion Vântu, writing several articles that indi-
cated his affinity for politics.
Notwithstanding his obvious attraction to writing and drawing, he studied
dentistry, graduating from the Faculty of Medicine in 1939 and earning his PhD
in dentistry one year later. However, the anti-Semitic laws of wartime Romania,
already in force in 1940, prevented him from practicing his profession. Further-
more, due to his communist connections he was detained in forced domicile un-
til 1942, when he was deported to a camp in Transnistria. Back in Bucharest in
the fall of 1944, he was hired as an editor for the communist press organ Scân-
teia (1944–6). He was also a member of the editorial committee of Orizont [Hori-
zon] (1944–7), deputy editor-in-chief and then editor-in-chief of Contemporanul
[The Contemporary] (1946–9) and editor-in-chief of Flacăra [The Flame] (1949–
50). He contributed to other communist papers as well, such as Tribuna nouă
[The New Tribune], Veac nou [New Age], Studii [Studies], Scânteia ilustrată [The
Illustrated Sparkle], Gazeta literară [The Literary Gazette], Tribuna [The Trib-
une], Viaţa românească [Romanian Life], Scânteia tineretului [The Youth’s Spar-
kle], Secolul 20 [20th Century], Revue roumaine [Romanian Review] and România
liberă [Free Romania], signing his articles ‘Ion Vitner’.
Vitner’s conversion from avant-gardism to socialist realism played a deci-
sive role in his contribution to the birth and predominance of proletcultist pseu-
do culture and the promotion of the sociologizing perspective on literature. De-
spite his cultural background, he had no problem promoting ideological aberra-
tions such as ‘Soviet and Stalinist humanism’, ‘Western literary decadence’ or
296 Felicia Waldman
‘the new man, the Stalinist revolutionary hero’.62 He also engaged in an over-
turning of the Romanian literary canon, calling revered authors of Romanian
classics, like Mihai Eminescu or Tudor Arghezi, failures, while lauding insignif-
icant writers like Dumitru Th. Neculuță as a genius.
Vitner’s most famous achievement was the vicious press attack he launched
in 1947 against literary critic George Călinescu, which, together with his services
to the communist cause, earned him a tenured academic position at the Faculty
of Philology of the University of Bucharest in 1948. By 1949 he was already a full
professor and a member of the executive committee of the Writers’ Union, and
had replaced Călinescu – who was ‘transferred’ to the Institute of Literary His-
tory and Folklore – as head of the Modern Romanian Literature Department.
However, he would later be replaced and marginalized in 1956, when the Hun-
garian uprising triggered a reconsideration of communist dogmatism and Vitner
paid the price for his overzealousness of previous years. Nonetheless, he was
not fired and continued to function in the same department until his retirement
in 1970. He was also allowed to continue being a member of the executive com-
mittee of the Writers’ Union until 1960.
During the ideological relaxation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Vitner
somewhat abandoned his proletcultist vehemence. His critical language became
more relaxed and his approach more formalist. He began using universal con-
cepts and theories, and even began quoting from classic Romanian authors like
Henric Sanielevici and Garabet Ibrăileanu, in addition to Marx. Yet, he never
managed to escape the Marxist paradigm. It was only in the late 1970s, and in
his travel memoirs, that he finally became more objective and less tributary to
communist ideology, but he remained a Marxist until the end of his life. He
wrote about 20 books, many of which have no literary value, yet they may be
useful in the study of communist propaganda. Vitner presents a case of very
few merits, many immoral choices and concessions to the communist regime, a
significant amount of suffering due to his ethnic origins – but also due to his
political choices during the Second World War and to a lesser extent during the
communist regime – and many professional gains.
Another interesting case is that of Silvian (Sylvain) Iosifescu (born 21 Janu-
ary 1917, Bucharest; died May 2006), the son of Pincu and Tonya Iosifescu,
whose Romanian last name meant that their child was under no pressure to
change his.
A 1939 graduate of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University
of Bucharest, Iosifescu started writing years earlier while attending Matei Basar-
ab High School, where he published texts in the school’s journal. For a brief
time he used pseudonyms such as Sorin Irimie, and even Monica Șerbănescu,63
but then began using his own name. As a member of the communist party,
which was illegal at the time – he contributed to the communist paper Cuvântul
liber, a service for which he was rewarded in 1945 with his appointment as edi-
tor at the party’s main press organ, Scânteia, and at the State Publishing House,
where he worked until 1949.
Following a series of articles on Aldous Huxley and psychoanalysis, his first
volume, People and Books [Oameni și cărți], was published in 1946, which es-
tablished him as a literary critic. Thus, he was not without qualifications when
in 1948 he was hired by the Department of Literary Theory of the Faculty of Phi-
lology at the University of Bucharest as a reward for his communist past. He
would later head the department for many years.
To quote Mircea Martin, one of Iosifescu’s former students:
Few people today know that one of the most convincing pleas in favour of psychoanalysis
in our interwar press belonged to Silvian Iosifescu, age 19 in 1936. Between 1940 and 1946
the same author would write the most pertinent Romanian study devoted to Aldous Hux-
ley. In fact, Huxley would be the most invoked and analyzed writer in the subsequent
works by this literary theoretician.64
However, it is clear that his promotion was a reward for his active participation
in communist propaganda, particularly from 1945 to 1947, when the new au-
thorities attempted to ‘cleanse’ the universities of their former intellectual elite.
Iosifescu rushed to accuse professors such as Nae Ionescu and Petre P. Panai-
tescu, who had been close to the far-right Legionary Movement. His accusations
were not without merit, but were fraught with contradiction. Ionescu and Panai-
tescu were intellectual nonentities who had obtained their positions for political
reasons rather than academic credentials, which was also true in his own
case.65
Iosifescu was one of the main representatives of communist literary theory
in the 1950s. While his literary criticism from this period shows his mastery of
literary concepts and his prolific inspiration – he published five books in ten
years – it also exposes his submission to the dogmatic theoretical and methodo-
logical canons of the time. This mixture of genuine talent with dogmatism in
his attitude and approach often resulted in oversimplified analysis of both Ro-
manian and foreign writers. For instance, in keeping with the communist vo-
cabulary, he accused Tudor Arghezi (1880–1967) of literary decadence, Camil
Petrescu (1894–1957) of intellectual isolation, Lucian Blaga of mystical preoccu-
pations and Urmuz (1883–1923) – the founding father of absurdist literature –
of cheap humour. Beyond the criticism it delivers, his work comprises an inten-
tion to set forth new literary norms to be followed by writers in keeping with the
political imperatives of the time.
However, it remains unclear why Iosifescu revised his approach to literary
criticism over the following decade.66 Although he remained loyal to his leftist
ideology and sociologizing perspective on literary phenomena, he based his
subsequent articles and books on objectivity, lucidity and rigor, analyzing texts
through a combination of scholarly methods less influenced by Marxist dogma.
His new style, founded on the assumption that all works were live organisms,
revealed to a much larger extent his genuine passion for reading, a formerly ab-
sent flexibility in interpretation and a willingness to view a text from several
angles simultaneously.
Moreover, Iosifescu began giving particular attention to literature con-
nected to philosophy and psychology (aphorisms, moral stories, confessions),
science (science fiction) and history (historical novels, memoirs, journals, travel
logs, biographies, etc.), which he analyzed in Frontier Literature, a book he pub-
lished in 1969.
Whether focusing on one book or on a writer’s entire oeuvre, on some par-
ticular aspect of an author’s biography or on the characteristics of a generation,
from the 1960s onward, in contrast to his earlier work, Silvian Iosifescu postu-
lated that there were no absolute truths in criticism, only more or less justified
points of view – a frame of mind favouring direct impressions over methodolog-
ical dogmatism.
As a result of this change in attitude and approach, many of Iosifescu’s later
works are still appreciated today. A true intellectual and genuinely erudite
scholar, he published a total of 29 books, 4 anthologies and 5 translations.
Iosifescu presents a case that begins with significant concessions to the
communist regime, but undergoes a diametric shift in the opposite direction to
that of Constantin Ionescu Gulian. He is nonetheless rewarded with many pro-
fessional gains while experiencing relatively minor suffering. Iosifescu provides
66 Perhaps he was taking advantage of what appeared at first to be a relaxation of the com-
munist party’s tight control, but turned out to be just an exchange of one restrictive dogma for
another; despite their obvious differences, Dejism and Ceausism were equally problematic.
Avatars of being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest 299
67 As he related in an interview. Cf. Mariana Conovici, ‘Henry Wald – 80’, Ramuri, no. 9 (Sep-
tember 2002), quoted from http://romanianjewish.org/?page_id=661 (accessed 22 January
2015).
300 Felicia Waldman
Conclusions
This brief review of the Jewish professors who managed to obtain tenured aca-
demic positions at the University of Bucharest in the first half of the twentieth
century reveals the choices they had and the subsequent fates they met.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the vast majority of Jews
did not even have Romanian citizenship, the very idea of a Jew becoming a uni-
versity professor in Bucharest, or anywhere else in Romania, was utopian at
best. Yet, this did not prevent several from trying (Hariton Tiktin), and some
even obstinately (Lazăr Șăineanu). Only two – David Emmanuel and Ion Aurel
Candrea – managed to become exceptions to the rule, and it is still unclear
why. The former succeeded despite making no compromises, while the latter
choose to make small concessions, like changing his name and staying clear of
the Jewish community. Utopia became reality for each, and did not end in catas-
trophe; indeed, Emmanuel died just in time to avoid both twentieth-century Ro-
manian catastrophes – wartime far-right extremism and post-war communism –
and Candrea managed to survive the first and flee the country just before the
second.
The other two successful cases before the Second World War are even more
bewildering: Tudor Vianu, a Christian regarded and treated as a Jew by all re-
gimes, despite the fact that he was born from baptized parents, and Radu Gri-
gorovici, a Jew regarded as a Christian despite the fact that his Jewish mother
did not formally convert to Christianity. Each survived the regime change, man-
aging to remain at the university despite the lack of a communist past, yet with
many hurdles and at a price indeed. Neither had anything to do with the com-
munist utopia, but each came close to catastrophe, albeit for different reasons –
Vianu for his Jewish origins and Grigorovici for the political past of his parents.
However, their reactions contrasted sharply. While Grigorovici chose not to
make concessions, Vianu was ready to compromise, sometimes too ready,
although not to the extent of hurting others, as we can see from his interven-
tions in favour of his colleagues, despite the obvious risks this posed to his po-
sition. He thus acquiesced to the utopia – even if he did not believe in it – at the
very moment it began to become clear that it was heading in the wrong direc-
tion.
The choices and subsequent fates of the four Jewish intellectuals who man-
aged to obtain tenured academic positions at the University of Bucharest be-
tween 1944, when Romania changed sides in the Second World War, and 1948,
when the communists took root and began reforming the educational system,
show that it was still possible to achieve tenure without compromise. Alexandru
302 Felicia Waldman
Graur indeed had a communist past, openly believed in the utopia – for under-
standable reasons, as evidenced by his interwar experiences – and was ready to
make all necessary concessions, including attacks on his former professors and
colleagues, for which he would later pay a price in the few painful years and
many hurdles he faced towards the end of his life.71 However, Nina Façon, Jac-
ques Byck and Iancu Fischer got by without believing in the utopia or acquiesc-
ing to it, and survived at the university until the ends of their careers without
compromising, although they suffered and encountered significant risks, some
of which brought them to the brink of personal catastrophe.
Adepts of the utopia by default, the seven Jewish intellectuals brought to
the University of Bucharest by the 1948 communist reform of the education sys-
tem prove that choices were still available, even while catastrophe was unfold-
ing under their very eyes. With the exception of physicist Alexandru Sanielevici,
all actively contributed to the communist press attacks against the country’s
former intellectual elites from 1944 to 1948, and in some cases for good reason,
considering the elites’ more-or-less active political involvement with the far-
right movement. However, these attacks were carried out using the wrong argu-
ments, as they focused on intellectual abilities, which for the most part did not
merit doubt. All were also rewarded with academic positions for their propagan-
da services, yet their professional qualifications varied widely, as did their sub-
sequent political stands and evolutions. Emil Boldan may not have earned his
position of associate professor through adequate literary achievement, but he
was most likely a good high school literature teacher; Ion Vitner was ultimately
a dentist, despite his best literary attempts. However, whether out of true belief
in the utopia or mere career ambition, each remained unflinchingly loyal to the
Marxist paradigm while promoting the proletcultist approach to literary
criticism to the bitter end, although Vitner had ample reason to reconsider once
he was marginalized as a ‘reward’ for his overzealousness. On the other hand,
Constantin Ionescu Gulian and Silvian Iosifescu were not without merits when
they were rewarded with academic positions for their communist zeal, and both
remained convinced Marxists to the end. However, while Gulian persisted in his
communist dogmatism and never showed the faintest doubt about his choices,
even when he seemed to be evolving and reinventing himself as an expert in a
new field, Iosifescu was able to shake off this approach and eventually show
his true colours, which justifies why Gulian is remembered today as the exter-
minator of Romanian philosophy and Iosifescu as a scholar of great merit. And
last but not least, Ion Banu and Henri Wald proved that it was possible to con-
71 We can ultimately conclude that life was somewhat easier for those who chose not to com-
promise than for those who did.
Avatars of being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest 303
tinue believing in the utopia while living amid full catastrophe, yet not cede to
the excesses of the communist regime, regardless of the price.
In sum, the lives of these Jewish intellectuals show that, despite upheavals
large or small, a rewarding career was possible in academia, or at least in re-
search, regardless of choices made in serving the communist regime. The calcu-
lation was but a matter of the price to pay, and for what reward.
Karolina Szymaniak
On the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach – The Life
of a Yiddishist Intellectual in Early
Twentieth Century Poland
Introduction
‘She was born with a talent to be a writer [shraybern] who – with the power of
the word – creates a new world. What she became is a recorder [farshraybern]
of the world that was destroyed before her very eyes’,1 wrote Yitskhok Yonaso-
vitsh in his obituary of Rachel Auerbach (Rokhl Oyerbakh, 1899–1976), a mod-
ernist Yiddish-Polish writer and Yiddishist cultural activist who was to become
a prominent figure in Khurbn2 [Destruction] research. Rachel Auerbach is re-
membered today mainly for her achievements during and after the Second
World War. She is often called ‘one of the chief memoirists of the Warsaw ghet-
Annotation: My research on Auerbach’s biography and work was made possible thanks to the
support of the Jewish Historical Institute, a joint fellowship granted by the Beth Sholem-Alei-
chem, the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture and the
Institute of the History of Polish Jews and Israel Poland Relations of Tel Aviv University,
and the fellowship of the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena. I would like to thank my colleagues from
the Kolleg and the editors and fellow authors of this volume for their advice, comments and
criticism. I extend special thanks to Adam Puchejda for his help in preparing the first version of
this text, Natalia Aleksiun and Anna Szyba for their help with some archival materials, Lila
Holtzman and Yossi Shoval for sharing their memories with me, and Kamil Kijek, Grzegorz
Krzywiec, Maria Antosik Piela, Joseph Grim Feinberg for offering their advice in response to
my questions. I would also like to thank the editors of this text, Jaime Elizabeth Hyatt and
Adam Bresnahan, whose work helped me improve it. Needless to say, any mistakes in this
article are mine and mine alone.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-013
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 305
3 Ruth R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (New
York: The Free Press, 2000), 192.
4 David Engel, ‘The Holocaust: History and Metahistory in Three Recent Works’, Jewish Quar-
terly Review 95, no. 4 (2005): 685–93.
5 Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 171.
6 Deborah E. Lipstadt, ‘Assembling Eichmann’s Shackles’, in Gender and Jewish History, eds,
Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011),
305–19, here 307 (emphasis in the original).
306 Karolina Szymaniak
literary elite and the world of Jewish masses, religious and secular, Diaspora
nationalists and Zionists.’7
The metaphor that I evoke in the title and analyze more specifically in the
context of Auerbach’s relation to the Polish state provides a condensed image
of what I perceive as both the utopian and catastrophic traits of her own cultur-
al politics. In a broader sense, however, it can also narrativize the history of the
Yiddishist project that she and many Jewish intellectuals adhered to and ad-
vanced. The peculiar position of Yiddish in modern multilingual Jewish culture
discussed in this article as well as within the political and cultural orders of
Central and Eastern Europe produced a specific sense of urgency among its ex-
ponents, a phenomenon that on another occasion I called ‘culture in the state
of emergency’.8 This produced a set of discursive strategies and figures that re-
flected ‘the anxiety of a community whose language, and physical survival,
were felt to be in a state of perennial danger.’9
As a public intellectual, Auerbach dedicated her life to Yiddish language
and culture and the history of the Destruction. Thus, her work spans the two
conceptual poles that organize the history of Jewish intellectuals in East Central
Europe in this volume, marking utopia on the one hand, and catastrophe on the
other. While the catastrophic dimension of Auerbach’s biography, writings and
her role in research on the Destruction seems to be self-evident, the utopian di-
mension requires more explanation, which will in turn further complicate the
notion of catastrophe.10
While underscoring its achievements and its significance for understanding
Jewish history, recent scholarship on Yiddish culture and Yiddishist projects in
the twentieth century has come to better understand not only its utopian traits,
7 Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto and
the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 200.
8 Karolina Szymaniak, ‘Krytyka literacka jako instytucja nowoczesnej kultury jidysz. Próba
opisu dyskursu’, [Literary criticism as an institution of modern Yiddish culture: an attempt
at discourse analysis] (PhD diss., University of Kraków, 2009), especially chapters 1.1 and 4.2.
9 Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, 97.
10 The connotation of catastrophe as a harbinger of new beginnings was also important for the
radical politics of the period, Jewish and non-Jewish, albeit not so much in Auerbach’s intel-
lectual biography. For a discussion of different representations and politics of apocalypse in
Yiddish modernist literature see Avraham Novershtern, Kesem ha-dimdumim. Apokalipsah ve-
meshikhut be-sifrut yidish [The lure of twilight: apocalypse and Messianism in Yiddish litera-
ture] (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2003). On modernist visions and political implications of the
decay of traditional shtetl life among the last generation of Jewish youth in pre-war Poland see
Kamil Kijek, ‘Radykalizm polityczny młodzieży sztetlowej okresu międzywojennego’ [Political
radicalism of shtetl youth in the interwar period], in Zagłada Żydów na polskiej prowincji, eds,
Adam Sitarek, Michał Trębacz and Ewa Wiatr (Łódź: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2012), 55–98.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 307
but also the growing catastrophism of Yiddishist discourse of the late 1920s and
1930s.11 Some Yiddishists called this catastrophism, in Yisroel Shtern’s words, a
‘Tishah Be’av, or a mourner ideology’12 and juxtaposed it a more optimistic vi-
sions, of which the vision of an international diasporic empire – the Yiddish-
land is but one telling example. These served as a powerful tool in Yiddish intel-
lectuals’ constant fight for the proper recognition of their own culture in Po-
land, and gave them a medium that helped them reflect on the patterns of re-
ception, inclusion and exclusion of minority cultures in Poland.13
However, it seems that Yiddishism was further removed from the realities of
Jewish life in the interwar period. In the Second Polish Republic, as Joanna Na-
lewajko-Kulikov has suggested, Yiddishism gradually became more about ‘exor-
cizing reality’ than about reality itself. Several factors worked against the suc-
cess of the Yiddishist project: the Polonization policies of the state, which in-
cluded the persecution of Yiddish educational institutions, the general sociolin-
guistic dynamic and move towards monoligualism in the second generation,
and the diminishing power of Yiddish as a language of choice for Jewish intel-
lectuals.14 On the other hand, intellectuals such as Auerbach believed that the
dynamics of national movements in East Central Europe and the experience of
discrimination and anti-Jewish violence worked in favour of projects like Yid-
dishism. But this belief usually remained at the level of discourse and was less
often translated into everyday practices and patterns of cultural consumption.15
The experience of the Destruction of Jewish life in East Central Europe and
the need to record it and find a proper means for its expression, as well as the
11 Nathan Cohen, ‘Reading Polish among Young Jewish People’, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry
28 (2015): 172–86.
12 Ibid., 178. For discussions of catastrophist motifs in Yiddish and Polish-Jewish culture out-
side the context discussed here see, among others, Joanna Lisek, Jung Wilne – żydowska grupa
artystyczna (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2005), 198–207, and Euge-
nia Prokop-Janiec, ‘Europa, Europa: Publicystyka u schyłku dwudziestolecia’, in Eugenia Pro-
kop-Janiec, Pogranicze polsko-żydowskie. Topografie i teksty (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersy-
tetu Jagiellońskiego, 2013), 231–47.
13 See Karolina Szymaniak, ‘Speaking Back: On Some Aspects of the Reception of Polish Lit-
erature in Yiddish Literary Criticism’, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 28 (2015): 153–72.
14 Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov, ‘Zaklinanie rzeczywistości, czyli jidysz w Drugiej Rzeczypospo-
litej’ [Exorcising the reality, or Yiddish in the Second Polish Republic], in Kultura i społeczeńst-
wo II Rzeczpospolitej, ed. Włodzimierz Mędrzecki and Agata Zawiszewska (Warsaw: Instytut
Historii PAN, 2012), 105–6.
15 Kamil Kijek, Dzieci modernizmu. Świadomość i socjalizacja polityczna młodzieży żydowskiej
w Polsce międzywojennej [Children of modernism: political consciousness, culture and social-
ization of the Jewish Youth in interwar Poland] (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wro-
cławskiego, 2017).
308 Karolina Szymaniak
16 Anita Norich, Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 112.
17 Księga metrykalna urodzeń: powiat Borszczów [Register of births in the Borszczów District],
AGAD, 300/2517, 95–96, line 162 (166). The date 8 December is on the birth certificate, but
December 18 appears on some university documents and was used by Auerbach in the post-
war period.
18 Rachel Auerbach, ‘Podanie o przyjęcie na studia’ [University application], AUW, Teczka
studencka: Rachel Eiga Auerbach, 44.229. In a slightly less reliable (when it comes to dates)
CV dated 18 September 1945, Auerbach states that she finished primary school in 1913. See
Rachel Auerbach, Curriculum vitae, 14 September 1945 (London), YVA, P.16/1.
19 Rebeka Blumental, ‘Hatsharah’ [Affidavit], 14 November 1962, YVA P.16/1. Auerbach and
the Blumentals were on friendly terms. While Nachman Blumental studied in Warsaw, his sib-
lings Mendel, Rebeka and Sara pursued at least part of their studies in L’viv. For a time, Mendel
and Rebeka Blumental and Rachel Auerbach were flatmates. See Mendel Blumental’s registra-
tion forms, Katalog studentov, DALO, fond 26, opys 15, sprava 663, 670, 677, as well as Rebeka
Blumental, ‘Hatshara’. I would like to thank Anna Szyba for inspiring me to look at the Blu-
mentals’ university records.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 309
20 In 1924 the Faculty of Philosophy was divided into the Faculty of Humanities and the Fac-
ulty of Mathematics and Science.
21 See Rachel Auerbach’s registration forms, Katalog studentov, DALO, fond 26, opys 15, spra-
va: 658, 660, 663, 665, 669, 670, 731, 732.
22 Rebeka Blumental, ‘Hatsharah’; ‘Z wydawnictw młodzieży przed “Dniem młodzieży syjonis-
tycznej”’ [From the youth publications before the day of Zionist youth], Chwila (28 December
1926): 4.
23 See Curriculum vitae, 9 April 1930. In Auerbach, ‘Podanie o przyjęcie na studia’ the given
date is 1926.
24 Rachel Auerbach’s registration forms, ‘Katalog studentov’, DALO, fond 26, opys 15, sprava
731, 30, 732, 36.
25 ‘Walne Zgromadzenie Związku Kobiet Żyd.’, [General meeting of the union of Jewish wom-
en], Chwila (21 July 1925): 3.
26 ‘Spis członków czynnych sekcji literackiej Ż.T. Art. Lit.’ [List of active members of the lit-
erary section of the Jewish Artistic and Literary Association], TSIDAL, fond 701, opys 3, sprava
1049a, 8. In this document only family name Auerbachówna is mentioned (without first name),
as a representative of Jewish Polish literature, so the identification with Auerbach is not clear.
On the association see Żydowskie Towarzystwo Artystyczno-Literackie we Lwowie. Sprawozdanie
jubileuszowe 1926/27–1936/37 [Jewish Artistic and Literary Association in L’viv. A Jubilee Re-
port, 1926/27–1936/37]. Lwów: ŻTAL, 1937).
27 Rachel Auerbach, ‘Hatsharah’, 14 November 1962, YVA P.16/1.
28 ‘Doktorskaja dyssertatsya’, 1, 4. The exact reasons for the late submission remain unclear.
One of the drafts of the dissertation preserved in the Ringelblum Archive is dated as early as
1926. See Rachel Auerbach, ‘Indywiduum i indywidualność. Obiektywne warunki oryginalności
indywidualnej’, [Individual and individuality: objective conditions of individual originality], in
Katarzyna Person, ed., Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, vol. 7:
Spuścizny (Warsaw: ŻIH), 2–100.
310 Karolina Szymaniak
the lack of clarity and precision and originality, as well as some mistakes in rea-
soning.29 Auerbach was informed about the rejection on 11 March 1931.30 In a
letter to New York-based writer Moshe Shtarkman, she mentions that she had
conflicts with her professor and tried to pass her final exams in Vilnius.31 In the
same letter she also considers the possibility of pursuing her further education
in psychotechnics in the United States in order to later return to Europe ‘as a
wanted specialist’. It was not until she moved to Warsaw in 1933 that she began
working to finish her studies at Warsaw University, where she took courses in
psychology and history. She even obtained a scholarship from the Journalist’s
Syndicate to finance her studies while working on a study with the intriguing
title ‘The Psychology of Typos’. However, her university records show that she
was having financial difficulties. First, she resigned from several courses she
had signed up for, and after three semesters gave up on her studies entirely.
Thus, it seems that she never obtained a degree, even though she completed
her university education and prepared a dissertation in the field of psychology.
In the end, however, her psychological training influenced all of her writ-
ings. Together with her modernist impetus, it is precisely this psychological in-
sight that makes her Holocaust and post-Holocaust studies, essays and other
writings unique and often revelatory. Her interest in bodily and physical reac-
tions as well as in physiognomy and facial expressions influenced her under-
standing of the nature of the act of testifying and made her sensitive to physical
aspects of witnesses’ accounts.32 In light of her future role in the Destruction
research, her historical training is similarly interesting and important, although
she did not consider herself a historian. She was especially interested in social
and economic history, an interest characteristic for the field of Jewish history of
the period. She also passed state exams authorizing her to teach history and in-
troduction to philosophy at the secondary level.33
Since the mid-1920s she published in both the Yiddish and Polish-Jewish
press and worked for the L’viv Zionist Yiddish daily Der Morgen (later: Der
Nayer Morgen) until 1930. In 1929, she co-founded one of the most ambitious
Galician Yiddish intellectual journals – the Tsushtayer – and helped organize a
cultural movement aimed at establishing Galicia as a centre of modern Yiddish
culture. She also edited a literary supplement to Folk un Land, a weekly pub-
lished by the Left Poalei-Zion, where she likewise worked as a secretary. It was
then that she started to develop her vision of an engaged but non-partisan,
cross-party Yiddish culture that would serve both as a unifying force to secure
the future of the Jewish nation and as a platform where individuals of different
denominations could come to work together. This new culture was, according
to Auerbach, a sine qua non of any social and political reform. ‘Without culture,
no organization of life upon new principles is possible.’ This view was yet an-
other version of a modern Jewish culturalist programme that had begun to take
shape in the first decades of the twentieth century.34 As Kenneth Moss re-
marked, in interwar Poland ‘the culturalists’ claims to autonomy were placed
on the defensive and ‘cultural activity was conscripted by Zionist or Jewish so-
cialist movements. Ultimately, national conflicts and anti-liberal agendas ended
up pushing the culturalists into the background.’35 However, this does not mean
that they didn’t make any mark on the interwar period.
The early 1930s marked another period of disappointment for Auerbach:
she became disillusioned with the apparent failure of her Yiddishist projects
and with the politics of the Polish state and Polish society’s hostility towards
Jews. It was probably at that time that she started thinking about the possibility
of emigrating, even if she had not given up on advancing her Yiddishist ideas in
Poland. While still editing the Tsushtayer, she helped establish the ‘Fraynd fun
YIVO’ – Society of Friends of the YIVO in L’viv, serving as one of their secreta-
ries until December 1931.36 Founded in 1925, the YIVO conducted research on
various aspects of the culture and life of Central and Eastern European Jewry
University of California, 2016), 51: ‘The only woman regularly associated with the Yiddish his-
torians was Rachel Auerbach, but she did not train or practice as a historian.’
34 Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2009).
35 Moss, Jewish Renaissance, 291.
36 On the establishment of the Association and elections of the board see ‘Akcja na rzecz Ż.I.N.
we Lwowie’, Chwila (7 March 1931): 8. Documentation of Auerbach’s activities with regard to
Shmuel Niger’s coming to L’viv: Rachel Auerbach to Shumel Niger, 1931, AYIVO, Shumel Niger
Papers, folder 888. On Auerbach finishing her service, see Rachel Auerbach to the YIVO board,
25 December 1931, LCVA, fond 287, ap. 13, b. 3.
312 Karolina Szymaniak
with a special focus on Yiddish culture; it had a clear Yiddishist agenda.37 The
Institute sought to train future intellectual elites, and one of its aims was ‘to
bolster the morale and cultural vitality of a beleaguered people’ and encour-
aged their fight for the national rights.38 YIVO’s research sought to strengthen
the project of national Yiddish culture and resolve the problems faced by many
of its proponents.39
Auerbach remained close to the YIVO circles and their methodology, which
later had an influence on her ghetto writings. After moving to Warsaw, she col-
laborated with the institute’s local branch and closely observed the role the In-
stitute played in Jewish social life.40
The 1935 YIVO Congress gave Auerbach occasion to reflect on the purpose
of the organization.41 In the wake of a major discussion about the Institute’s re-
search agenda and political involvement,42 Auerbach observed that Jewish in-
tellectuals, disappointed with party politics and disillusioned by their lack of
political agency, pinned too many hopes on the Institute, hopes she thought it
could not and should not fulfil if it wanted to remain capable of efficiently com-
pleting its most important work.43 She believed these expectations derived to a
37 For a comprehensive analysis of YIVO’s history and role see Cecile E. Kuznitz, YIVO and the
Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2014)
38 Samuel Kassow, ‘Travel and Local History as a National Mission Polish Jews and the Land-
kentenish Movement in the 1920s and 1930s’, in Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Tradi-
tions of Place, ed. Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt and Alexandra Nocke (Ashgate: Routledge,
2008), 241–64.
39 Kamil Kijek, ‘Inteligencja a naród w dobie kryzysu. “JIWO Bleter” jako przestrzeń komuni-
kacji jidyszowych elit i mas żydowskich’ [Intelligentsia and nation in the days of crisis: YIVO
Bleter as a platform of communication between the Yiddish elites and Jewish masses], in Z
dziejów trójjęzycznej prasy żydowskiej na ziemiach polskich w XIX i XX wieku, ed. Joanna Nale-
wajko-Kulikov, (Warsaw: Neriton, 2012), 369–95; Kamil Kijek, ‘Max Weinreich, Assimilation,
and the Social Politics of Jewish Nation-Building’, East European Jewish Affairs 1–2 (2011):
25–55.
40 Auerbach’s name is listed among the lecturers of the Warsaw branch of the institute. See
‘Tsu di kultur-institutsyes in Poyln’ [To the cultural institutions in Poland], Literarishe Bleter 48
(1935): 781.
41 as, ‘Wszechświatowy zjazd Żyd. Instytutu Naukowego w Wilnie. Uroczyste otwarcie’ [World
congress of the Yiddish Scientific Institute], Nasz Przegląd (17 August 1935): 5.
42 See Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 40–2; Christopher Hutton, ‘What Was Going on at
the 1935 YIVO Conference’, in Politics of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Literature, and Society,
ed. Dov Ber Kerler (London: AltaMira Press, 1998), 29–39.
43 Rachel Auerbach, ‘A visnshafltekhe anshtalt tsi an universal-agentur far leyzn ale yidishe
problemen’ [An academic institution or a universal agency for solving all Yiddish problems],
Wilner tog (19 August 1935): 2.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 313
large extent from the underdeveloped institutional basis of modern Yiddish cul-
ture as a stateless culture.
During this period, Auerbach was among the proponents of a rather exclu-
sivist vision of Jewish national culture and the role of the Jewish intellectual.
She thought that Jews not directly engaged with Yiddish culture were threaten-
ing the survival of the Jewish nation. Auerbach also demanded this kind of en-
gagement from intellectuals who had no native knowledge of Yiddish. For the
Jewish people to survive, she thought, it was necessary for Jewish intellectuals
to actively adopt the language and culture of the majority of the nation. This
was a view shared by many Yiddishists.
In 1933 Auerbach, burning all the bridges behind her, as she put it, moved
to Warsaw, home to the largest Jewish community in Poland and a major Yid-
dish cultural and publishing centre. Although harmed by the economic crisis,
Warsaw provided the estranged Yiddish Galician writer with a much-desired
Yiddish-speaking intellectual milieu. ‘The Warsaw metropolis attracted us and
dazzled’, wrote Auerbach in a post-war memoir, but she was quick to add that
the Warsaw of the 1930s was not the same city as it had been at the beginning
of the 1920s,44 when, in Dovid Katz’s apt formulation, Berlin and Paris were sat-
ellites of this Yiddish metropolis.45 The Warsaw of the 1930s, however, was for
many Jewish intellectuals not so much the final destination but rather a transit
point on the inevitable path of emigration. Although it had already been a point
of transit in the 1920s, the 1930s marked a period of major disappointment for
the up-and-coming generation of Yiddishist intellectuals. For one, the prospects
for stable employment were considerably more limited. And with acculturation
progressing, more and more intellectuals voiced their scepticism and disap-
pointment with the prospect of the further development of Yiddish culture. Yid-
dish writer Yisroel Shtern felt that ‘in order not to lose his native optimism, he
felt that he had to walk quickly through the “Jewish” streets of Warsaw to avoid
hearing the younger generation chatting in Polish.’46 Despite this situation War-
saw was still one of the capitals of the diasporic Yiddish culture.
Auerbach soon became very active in the Yiddish literary milieu, but she
never took a leading role in organizing Yiddish cultural life like she had in
L’viv. She was constantly struggling with financial problems and was over-
whelmed with worries about her life companion, Romanian-born poet Itsik
44 In the years of her most intensive activism in Galicia, her views of Warsaw were far from
enthusiastic: ‘This city doesn’t attract me at all’ she wrote to Ravitch. See Rachel Auerbach to
Melech Ravich [undated postcard], SLM, ARC *4 1540 12 35.1.
45 Dovid Katz, Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (New York: Basic Books, 2004),
283.
46 Cohen, ‘Reading Polish’, 178.
314 Karolina Szymaniak
Manger, one of the leading poets of his generation. She met Manger in 1932 and
had a very complicated and stormy relationship with him.47 Her poor economic
situation was not unique for Yiddish intellectuals, who, as a result of the weak
economic and institutional base of Yiddish culture in Poland, typically had to
take up several jobs, including physical work. Auerbach also understood her
position in terms of generational change, recognizing that her generation had
fewer possibilities in comparison to those who came a decade earlier,48 and in
terms of gender difference – as a woman in the male-dominated literary milieu.
She supported herself by writing and translating for newspapers of diverse
political leanings, such as the Zionist Haynt, the folkist Der Moment and the
Bundist Naye Folkstsaytung49 and Foroys. She also published extensively in the
Polish-Jewish press, including in the Nasz Przegląd [Our Overview], Nowy Dzien-
nik [New Journal] and Opinia [Opinion]. However, she claimed that she only did
it for money and was repulsed by the work, a stance that will be further dis-
cussed in the next chapter. This did not prevent Auerbach from accepting a post
at Der Moment’s Polish-language publication Nowy Głos [New Voice]. Nonethe-
less, Auerbach’s willingness to compromise had its limits. When a new revision-
ist daily offered her a post, she was quick to refuse: ‘I didn’t want to be sud-
denly “blessed” by their money’ she explained in a letter to her friend and fel-
low-writer, Melekh Ravitch.50
She published extensively on topics ranging from psychoanalysis and peda-
gogy to the history of literature and culture, contemporary literary criticism,
modern art, and cultural politics, both in Yiddish and Polish. She also pub-
lished fragments of her fiction.51 However, two topics were most prominent in
her work at the time. First and foremost was Yiddish culture, its past, present
and future, and the role of the Jewish intellectual. Secondly, she was very inter-
ested in women’s history and literature as well as the contemporary situation of
women and the ways in which to improve it. Her writings on the history of
women might be understood as an attempt to provide female public intellec-
47 Efrat Gal-Ed, Niemandssprache – Itzik Manger – ein europäischer Dichter (Berlin: Suhrkamp,
2016), 302–10.
48 Auerbach, Varshever tsavoes, 21.
49 For concise analyses of the three journals and the changes in their politics throughout the
interwar period see Nalewajko-Kulikov, ed., Z dziejów trójjęzycznej prasy żydowskiej.
50 Rachel Auerbach to Melekh Ravitch, 21 April 1939, SLM, ARC *4 1540 12 35.4.
51 For an overview of Auerbach’s interwar writings see Khayele Bir, ‘A shtil ketsl mit sharfe
negl. Vegn Rokhl Oyerbakhs zshurnalizm’ [A silent cat with sharp claws: on Rachel Auerbach’s
journalism] in Khut-shel-khesed. Lekoved Khave Turniansky, eds, Israel Bartal, Galit Hasan-Ro-
kem, Claudia Rosenzweig, Ada Rapoport-Albert, Erika Timm, Vicky Shifriss, vol. 2, לה-כה,
and Carrie Friedman-Cohen, ‘Rokhl Oyerbakh: roshe perakim le-cheker chayeyah ve-yetsiratah’
[Rachel Auerbach: her life and writings], Khulyot 9 (2005): 297–304.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 315
tuals with a usable past and to secure a position for women within the male-
dominated public sphere of the period.52 Whereas the former remained promi-
nent throughout Auerbach’s whole career, the latter ultimately lost its signifi-
cance for her, giving way to the task of ‘documenting and perpetuating the
memory of the Holocaust’.53
When the war broke out she was ready to leave Poland together with a
group of journalists being helped out of the country by the Polish government,
but she ultimately decided against it because she was planning to join her fam-
ily in L’viv.54 She ended up staying in Warsaw persuaded to remain for the long
term by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, a historian who she loosely knew from the
YIVO circles and who worked for the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish re-
lief organization. Convinced that Jewish intellectuals had certain responsibil-
ities for their compatriots, Ringelblum told Auerbach that ‘not everybody could
allow themselves to leave’.55 At the same time, Ringelblum was trying to secure
the future of those intellectuals who stayed to ‘rescue the human resources’.56
Two years later, in 1941, Ringelblum invited Auerbach to work for the under-
ground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto called Oyneg Shabes [The Joy of Shabbat],
one of the most important documentation projects of the Holocaust era.57
Auerbach prepared ‘daily reports’ for the Archive that form what is known
as her ghetto diary. Written with a sharp sense of observation and modernist
sensibilities, the diary is one of the most powerful documents of the Holocaust.
Surprisingly innovative and well ahead of their time, some of her wartime and
immediate post-war writings have recently begun to catch the attention of
scholars.58 While still in the ghetto, she prepared a monograph on the soup
kitchen as part of the Oyneg Shabes research project ‘Two and Half Years of
War’ – a unique project of the history and sociology of life in the ghetto.59 After
the mass deportations of Gross-Aktion Warsaw in July 1942, she recorded an ac-
count of the escapee from the Treblinka death camp, Abram Krzepicki, which
she prefaced with the unsettling essay ‘Phenomenology of the Death Camp’.
Her work on Treblinka transformed into what Boaz Cohen describes as ‘the most
extensive description of the death camp to date.’60
In early March 1943, Auerbach escaped to the German side of Warsaw
where she became part of the Jewish underground, collaborating with the Jew-
ish National Committee and continuing her documentation work in hiding. It
was then that she started to envision the international tribunal for the German
perpetrators and started deliberating on the questions of guilt, punishment and
revenge. Decades later, she became instrumental in preparing documentation
for the Eichmann trial.61
After the war, she was one of the three surviving members of the Oyneg
Shabes group and she took it upon herself to preserve Ringelblum’s legacy. The
meaning of this immense documentation project was not obvious to everybody
right after the war, even within the Jewish community, and Auerbach had to
pressure Jewish leaders to search for surviving documents and find what she
perceived to be a national treasure.62 The first cache of the Archive hidden
under the ghetto ruins was found in September 1946. The second was uncov-
ered after Auerbach had already left Poland.
In 1945, Auerbach settled in Łódź, the centre of post-war Jewish culture in
Poland,63 and became a collaborating academic and member of the Advisory
Board (Rada Naukowa)64 of the Central Jewish Historical Commission of the
Central Committee of Polish Jews (later the Jewish Historical Institute).65 She
was an active member of the Association of Jewish Writers,66 edited the literary
and historical sections67 of the Yiddish journal of the Central Committee of Pol-
ish Jews Dos Naye Lebn,68 worked for the Polish-Jewish journal Mosty, and, as
before the war, published bilingually. She edited her wartime writings for publi-
cation, collected testimonies and wrote extensively on the topic of Holocaust re-
search and commemoration; She participated in the preparation of methodolog-
ical instructions for collecting historical materials,69 the type of work she was to
continue in Israel. It was during this time that she came to know Philip Fried-
man, a renowned historian and the first chairman of the CŻKH. She became his
close associate and remained a member of his ‘invisible web’70 after Friedman
had left Poland.71
She was particularly concerned with the problem of the visibility of the De-
struction. She saw film as a powerful educational, social, and artistic medium
65 Natalia Aleksiun, ‘The Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, 1944–1947’, Polin:
Studies in Polish Jewry 20 (2007): 74–97; Stephan Stach, ‘Geschichtsschreibung und politische
Vereinnahmung. Das Jüdische Historische Institut in Warschau 1947–1968’, Simon Dubnow In-
stitute Yearbook 7 (2008): 401–31, here 402–10; Feliks Tych, ‘The Emergence of Holocaust Re-
search in Poland: The Jewish Historical Commission and the Jewish Historical Institute (ŻIH)’,
in Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements,
eds, Daniel Bankier and Dan Michman (New York: Berghahn, 2008), 227–44; Jockush, Collect
and Record!, 84–120.
66 Lists of members, AŻIH, Związek Literatów i Dziennikarzy Żydowskich w Polsce, 368/34, 1,
4–7, 13–18, 24, 35. See also different payrolls of the Association, Akta personalne. Sprawy fi-
nansowe, AŻIH, Związek Literatów i Dziennikarzy Żydowskich w Polsce, 368/40.
67 Employee registration forms for Rachel Auerbach, AŻIH 303/XIII/181; Lists of employees,
AŻIH, 303/XIII/182; Rachel Auerbach, Curriculum vitae, 13 June 1945, YVA P.16/1.
68 Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov, ‘Syjonistyczna z lekkim zabarwieniem PPR-owskim. Dos Naje
Lebn (1945–1950) gazeta Centralnego Komitetu Żydów w Polsce’ [Zionist with a delicate Polish
Worker’s Party-tone: Dos Naye Lebn, 1945–1950 – newspaper of the Central Committee of Jews
in Poland] in Żydzi a lewica. Zbiór studiów historycznych, ed. August Grabski (Warsaw: Żydow-
ski Instytut Historyczny, 2007), 257–78.
69 Rachel Auerbach, Curriculum vitae, YVA P.16/1. She most probably participated in prepar-
ing Yiddish instructions for the historical documentation: Metodologishe onvayzungen tsum
oysforshn dem khurbm fun poylishn yidntum [Methodological instructions for research of the
destruction of the Polish Jewry] (Łódź: Tsentrale Yidishe Historishe Komisye, 1945), though
she mentions also helping with the Polish edition.
70 Natalia Aleksiun, ‘An Invisible Web: Philip Friedman and the Network of Holocaust Re-
search’, in Before the Holocaust Had Its Name: Early Confrontations of the Nazi Mass Murder
of the Jews, eds, Regina Fritz, Éva Kovács and Béla Rásky (Vienna: New Academic Press, 2016),
149–65.
71 For Auerbach’s posthumous tribute to Friedman see Auerbach, ‘Dr Filip Fridman z"l’, 178–
84.
318 Karolina Szymaniak
for representation the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Hence, she penned a
memorandum promoting the idea, collaborated on several film projects, with
Aleksander Ford and Natan Gross, and prepared herself a few film scenarios.
As the new regime settled down and the communists took control of the
Commission, she came to understand that she would never be able to ad-
equately pursue research on the Holocaust and or commemorate Polish-Jewish
culture in Poland.72 She saw ‘the sole reason of [her] survival’ in documenting
the Jewish Catastrophe and in ‘bearing witness to the crime, in the indictment
of the murders’.73 Thus, the changes in policy on Jewish historical research that
were becoming evident in 1948 strengthened her resolve to emigrate. Her first
destination of choice, however, was not Israel. She preferred France or the
United States, where her relatives lived. While still in Poland, she experienced a
profound sense of loneliness, writing to Melech Ravitch: ‘I have no strength to
live in absolute loneliness.’74 It was not until January 1950 that she left Poland
to arrive in Israel the next month.
The post-1950 chapter of Auerbach’s biography is the relatively best known
and has received the most scholarly attention. Recent works have detailed Auer-
bach’s role in debates on German-Jewish relations, the nature of Holocaust re-
search and the Eichmann trial, as well as her work on the theory and practice of
oral history.75 However, we still know relatively little about her Yiddish, Polish
and Hebrew journalism from the period, her literary output, her work in the
72 Rachel Auerbach, ‘Mivtsah judenrein (1). Ha-makhon ha-histori ha-yehudi be-varshah ey-
neno od’ [Judenrein action: The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw is no more] Davar (11
October 1968): 4. The next instalments of this series were published 13, 25 and, 28 October
1968. The last, ‘Acherit ha-cheker ha-histori ha-yehudi be-Polin’ [The end of Jewish historical
research in Poland] discusses in detail changes in the Commission and the Institute. On the
Institute in the period of Stalinization and later see Stephan Stach, ‘Walka klas w getcie? Ba-
dania nad Zagładą prowadzone w ŻIH w Warszawie w okresie stalinowskim’, in Żydzi i judaizm
we współczesnych badaniach polskich, vol. 5, ed. Krzysztof Pilarczyk (Kraków: Polska Akademia
Umiejętności, 2010), 273–87 and Stach, ‘Geschichtsschreibung und politische Vereinnahmung’,
410–31.
73 Rachel Auerbach, Bechutshot Varsha 1939–1943 [On the Warsaw streets, 1939–1943], trans.
Mordechai Halamish (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1954), 8. English translation quoted in Cohen, ‘Ra-
chel Auerbach’, 198.
74 Rachel Auerbach to Melech Ravitch, 23 June 1947, ARC 4* 1540: 12.36.7.
75 I am mentioning here only some important contributions that touch upon different aspects
of Auerbach’s engagements: Cohen, ‘Rachel Auerbach’; Orna Kenan, Between Memory and His-
tory: The Evolution of Israeli Historiography of the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang, 2003);
Dalia Ofer, ‘The Community and the Individual: The Different Narratives of Early and Late
Testimonies and Their Significance for Historians’, in Bankier and Michman, Holocaust Histor-
iography in Context, 529; Samuel Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Post-
war France (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005).
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 319
I am experiencing many difficulties, but I have never regretted the decision to settle down
here and not somewhere else. Just two weeks ago I received an offer to move to Canada.
Although my closest friends are there, and in case of a war it is a calmer and safer place,
it is absolutely out of the question. Never in my life have I experienced so strongly the
feeling of being in the right place. And all this despite the fact that a Yiddish writer’s life
is not all roses here.76
It was not only the life of a Yiddish writer in Israel that was not all roses; it was
also her life as a survivor and survivor historian.77 In April 1954 she started her
twenty-four-year tenure at Yad Vashem,78 a national remembrance institution
founded in 1953,79 where she was appointed head of the department responsible
for the collection of testimonies.80 Like other survivor historians, she saw her
work there as a continuation of the documentation work that was started in the
Warsaw Ghetto and had continued in Poland right after the war, and as a
76 Rachel Auerbach to Philip Friedman, 20 February 1951, Papers of Philip Friedman, AYIVO,
RG 1258, folder 461.
77 Auerbach wrote on the profound loneliness of survivors on numerous occasions, not only in
the Israeli context. In a collection of Israeli reports, she commented: ‘Our enemies call us not
quite killed [nisht derkoylete] and they sharpen their axes to finish the job. Our fellow Jews call
us surviving remnants [sheyres ha-pleyte] and are not overly happy with us.’ Auerbach, In land
Yisroel. Reportazshn, eseyen, dertsylungen [In the land of Israel: reports, essays, stories] (Tel
Aviv: Y.L. Perets Farlag, 1964), 341.
78 On Auerbach’s tenure at Yad Vashem, see Cohen, ‘Rachel Auerbach’, and Joseph Kermish,
‘Rokhl Oyerbakh – di grindern funem eydes-verk fun Yad Vashem’ [Rachel Auerbach – the
founder of testimony work for the Yad Vashem] in Rachel Auerbach, Baym letstn veg. In geto
Varshe un af der arisher zayt [The final road: in the Warsaw Ghetto and on the aryan side] (Tel
Aviv: Yisroel Bukh, 1977), especially 312–18.
79 On the founding of Yad Vashem see Boaz Cohen, Israeli Holocaust Research: Birth and Evo-
lution, trans. Agnes Vazsonyi (London: Routledge, 2013), 3–9.
80 Rachel Auerbach, Curriculum vitae, 1955, YVA P.16/1. Cohen, ‘Rachel Auerbach’, 199 men-
tions that the date of appointment was March 1954.
320 Karolina Szymaniak
81 Rachel Auerbach to Stanisław Vincenz, 12 September 1958, ASV, 17610/II, 376; Rachel Auer-
bach to Philip Friedman, 14 May 1951, AYIVO, RG 1258, folder 17. See Aleksiun, ‘An Invisible
Web’, 344.
82 Gabriel N. Finder, ‘Introduction’, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 20 (2008): 29.
83 Roni Stauber, ‘The Debate over the Mission of Yad Vashem as a Research Institute – The
First Years’, Yearbook of the Simon Dubnow Institute 9 (2012): 347–66; Cohen, Israeli Holocaust
Research, 134–49.
84 Cohen, Israeli Holocaust Research, 140–1; Boaz Cohen, ‘Setting the Agenda of Holocaust
Research: Discord at Yad Vashem in the 1950s’, in Bankier and Michman, Holocaust Historiog-
raphy in Context, 255–92.
85 Cohen, ‘Rachel Auerbach’, 206–7. See also Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy, 126–37. I believe
that she assumed this role much earlier, namely while writing her report from the visit to the
site of the former Treblinka camp.
86 Cohen, Isreali Holocaust Research, 137–138.
87 David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant, Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide (Waltham,
MA: Brandeis University Press), 129.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 321
she had expected. For Auerbach, this act of giving ‘a wretched testimony’ was
deeply traumatic, and it took her a long time to recover from it.88
In the context of the trial she wrote to Stanisław Vincenz:
As I have already explained to you, my work is not a gainful employment in the common
sense of the word. It is a heavy vocation, to use a sublime expression. And since not all
my collaborators treat it this way, I have to make up for that alone, shoulder the lion’s
share of the effective work, which totally excludes any personal life.89
Seven years after the trial Auerbach was forced to retire from Yad Vashem: she
had lost a confrontation with her home institution and was growing embittered
and lonely.90 She was later allowed to return to her department as an advisor.
In her last years, she devoted herself to completing her unfinished book proj-
ects. Dying of breast cancer, and struggling with her memory, she was still
working on her last book, dictating it to her secretary.91 The book was published
posthumously in 1977.92 Auerbach died on 31 May 1976, leaving a legacy that
still awaits a proper assessment.
88 Rachel Auerbach to Stanisław Vincenz, 10 September 1961, ASV, 17610/II, 389. See also the
similar statement in a letter to Arieh Kubovi quoted in Cohen, ‘Rachel Auerbach’, 218.
89 Rachel Auerbach to Stanisław Vincenz, 10 September 1961.
90 Cohen, ‘Rachel Auerbach’, 218–20.
91 Interview of the author with Lila Holtzman, 31 May 2015.
92 Rachel Auerbach, Baym letsn veg.
93 On Jewish multilingualism see Benjamin Harshav, ‘Multilingualism’, in Benjamin Harshav,
The Polyphony of Jewish Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 23–40.
94 Max Weinreich, ‘Internal Bilingualism in Ashkenaz’, trans. Lucy Dawidowicz, in Voices
from the Yiddish, eds, Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Schocken Books, 1975),
279–80.
322 Karolina Szymaniak
was associated with the low culture of women and the uneducated men.95 This
later transformed into a stereotype of a ‘folk culture of the unlettered masses’
that loomed large over the development of modern Yiddish culture throughout
its entire history, exploited both by its critics and proponents.96 Along with the
two Jewish languages, co-territorial vernaculars were used for official and
everyday contacts with respective authorities and non-Jewish populations.
The period of modernization, or, as Benjamin Harshav calls it, the modern
Jewish revolution,97 brought about a complete transformation of this sociolin-
guistic reality, where each language had a clear defined role and place. This
gave rise to the modern Jewish polysystem,98 as some scholars call it, a dynamic
and open network of Jewish and non-Jewish languages, ideologies, institutions
and discourses in which every individual participates voluntarily. On the other
hand, the rise of nationalisms in the region was fostering a view of modern na-
tional identity and culture based on one language only connected to a specific
territory. Thus, multilingualism on one hand, and debates on the use of lan-
guage and national identity, and the Jewish homeland on the other became seri-
ous issues of modern Jewish politics. However, as Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov
has recently argued, such debates were not unique in East Central European
politics.99 What distinguished the Jewish community was not only, as Nalewaj-
ko-Kulikov claims, multilingualism as ‘a state of mind’, but also, as I would
add, the diasporic character of some of the projects of Jewish modernity and
their peculiar relation to the territory and space of Eastern Europe.100
95 On the gendered politics of Yiddish and Hebrew in traditional and modern Ashkenazi soci-
ety see Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
96 The alleged intrinsic folk nature of Yiddish culture also became a merit when Jewish in-
tellectuals, similar to intellectuals of other nations, discovered folklore and the people as
powerful concepts for defining their modern political and cultural agendas and forming imag-
ined national communities. In leftist discourse, this stereotype found expression in the positive
image of the working masses.
97 Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993). See also Benjamin Harshav, ‘Theses of the Historical Context of the Modern Jewish Rev-
olution’, in Harshav, The Polyphony of Jewish Culture, 3–22.
98 On polysystem theory see: Itamar Even-Zohar, Polysystem Studies, Poetics Today 11, no. 1
(1990).
99 Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov, ‘Stan umysłu. Przypadek żydowskiej wielojęzyczności w Euro-
pie Środkowo-Wschodniej’ [A state of mind: the case of Jewish multilinguism in East Central
Europe], in Drogi odrębne, drogi wspólne. Problem specyfiki rozwoju historycznego Europy Środ-
kowo-Wschodniej w XIX-XX w., ed. Maciej Janowski (Warsaw: PAN Instytut Historii, 2014), 221–
2.
100 Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars (Bloo-
mington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 47.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 323
101 Itzik N. Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Jewish Folklorists of Poland (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2003), xi.
102 Joshua Shanes, ‘Yiddish and Jewish Diaspora Nationalism’, Monatshefte 2 (1998): 178.
103 Hence, in the most recent and compelling history of modern political thought in East Cen-
tral Europe, the term Yiddishism does not appear at all, and the story of Jewish political
thought is framed within the discourse on the so-called Jewish question and its possible sol-
utions. The fierce language debates that defined much of the turn of the century Jewish politics
are only mentioned in passing. See Balázs Trencsényi, Maciej Janowski, Monika Baar, Maria
Falina and Michal Kopecek, ‘The “Jewish Question”: The Entanglement of Assimilation, Anti-
Semitism, and Zionism’, in A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, vol. 1,
Negotiating Modernity in the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’, eds, Balázs Trencsényi, Maciej Janow-
ski, Monika Baar, Maria Falina and Michal Kopecek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016),
544–63.
104 For Poland see Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 21, 49–61.
105 Which was characteristic both for the representatives of the Jewish enlightenment, and
later Zionists and socialists until the early 20th century.
106 Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, 21.
107 On the reductive identification of Yiddishism with Bundism see Fishman, The Rise of Mod-
ern Yiddish Culture, 48–55.
324 Karolina Szymaniak
Rivalries with Zionists, most of whom were also Hebraists, as well as with
proponents of rooting national Jewish identity in the non-Jewish languages,
such as Polish or Russian, were inevitable. Although in 1908, during the famous
Czernowitz conference,108 Yiddish was recognized as a national Jewish lan-
guage, next to Hebrew, Yiddishists and Hebraists exhibited a strong tendency
towards national monoligualism. What divided them in case of Poland, among
other things, was their attitude towards the so called Polish-Jewish culture, a
formation that considered Polish as a vehicle for expressing Jewish cultural and
national identity.109 Yiddishists, it seems, rejected it more vehemently. The drive
to monolingualism was weaker among those who believed that non-Jewish lan-
guages could also serve the purposes of national expression.
The story of Jewish nationalism(s), perhaps more than any other, further
complicates views on this relation between language and national identity,
which is characteristic of classic theories of nationalism.110 When describing the
political and cultural reality of interwar Poland, it is important to bear in mind
that despite these ideological rivalries, Jewish culture and politics developed
within a complicated translingual and transcultural space in which different
systems interacted: religious and secular, traditional, and modern, Yiddish, He-
brew, Polish-Jewish and Polish.111
Many Jewish intellectuals were at least bilingual, if not trilingual, and par-
ticipated in one way or another in the three most important languages of this
modern Jewish polysystem in the interwar Poland. Moreover, the dynamics of
the language question changed over time and place and took on an entirely
new shape after the Holocaust.112 Significant is the fact that boundaries between
different languages and the cultures associated with them were often blurred
not only in the lives of individuals, but also in the everyday practices of differ-
ent institutions and political parties.
112 On these changing dynamics see Karolina Szymaniak, ‘Język(i) historii, język(i) współczes-
ności, czyli kłopot z polisystemem. Bialik w lekturze krytyków jidysz’ [Language(s) of the past,
language(s) of the present, or a trouble with the polysystem: Bialik read by Yiddish critics], in
Literackie spotkania w międzywojennej Polsce (tom studiów nad Chaimem Nachmanem Bialikiem
i jego polskich tłumaczem Solomonem Dykmanem, eds, Marzena Zawanowska and Regina Gro-
macka (Kraków: Austeria, 2012), 215–61.
113 Before the war, she did not know any Hebrew, which she learned (but never mastered)
only after immigrating to Israel.
114 Rachel Auerbach, ‘Once There Was a King’, trans. Anita Norich, in Norich, Discovering
Exile, 135.
115 Rachel Auerbach, ‘Ideowe podstawy popularyzacji Funduszu Narod.[owego]’ [Ideological
basis of the popularization of the National Fond], Chwila (15 March 1925).
326 Karolina Szymaniak
not hinder her developing Yiddishism, which later came to play a central role in
her writings and activism. As indicated above, the relations between Yiddishism
and Zionism are more complex than the usual contrasts between Yiddishism
and Hebraism or Zionism and Bundism (Jewish socialism)116 allow. Indeed,
some of the major figures in the history of the Yiddishist movement, including
Ber Borokhov and Emanuel Ringelblum, were leftist Zionists,117 Also General
Zionists did not exhibit classic Zionist anti-Yiddishism.118 In Auerbach’s early
texts she articulates the position of an engaged Zionist who understood the
meaning of diaspora culture for Jewish national identity.119
However, as Auerbach became more involved with Yiddishism, she grew
disappointed with dominant Zionist views on culture and language in Poland
and Palestine.120 Discussing the biography of Menachem Linder, an important
collaborator in the Oyneg Shabbes group, she emphasized similarities in their
lives:
[T]here was a certain similarity of our ideological development and approach to the cul-
ture and language question in Jewish society in general and in the Zionist movement in
particular. My first journalistic article … was titled ‘The Zionist-Yiddishist Misunderstand-
ing’. He too … started to move away from the Zionist academic circles during his studies
at L’viv University because of the slogan: ‘ivrit o polanit’ [modern Hebrew or Polish] that
was a convenient legitimation of the current assimilation, and because of the denial of
the function of Yiddish language in preserving Jewish national identity.121
116 Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, 48. On the Bund’s contribution see ibid., 48–
61. On the Bund in interwar Poland see Gertrud Pickhan, Gegen den Strom: Der Allgemeine
Jüdische Arbeiterbund “Bund” in Polen, 1918–1939 (Stuttgart: Deustche Verlag-Anstalt, 2001),
and Jack Jacobs, Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 2009).
117 Samuel Kassow, ‘The Left Poalei Zion in Interwar Poland’; Gitelman, The Emergence of
Modern Jewish Politics, 71–85.
118 Mendelsohn, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 57–8; Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland: The
Formative Years, 1915–1926 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 180–1.
119 Auerbach, ‘Ideowe podstawy’.
120 On Yiddish in pre-Israeli Palestine see Yael Chaver, What Must Be Forgotten: The Survival
of Yiddish Writing in Zionist Palestine (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004).
121 Auerbach, Varshever tsavoes, 244–5. The article mentioned in the quotation was probably
published later, and it is telling that Auerbach chose not to mention her earliest publications
when writing after the war.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 327
122 In the article, I use the term ‘assimilation’ as it was used in interwar discourse – it should
be understood not as a descriptive, but as a highly loaded term. In contemporary research, it is
more appropriately referred to as ‘acculturation’. On the problems in defining and using the
term see Agnieszka Jagodzińska, ‘Asymilacja, czyli bezradność historyka: o krytyce terminu i
pojęcia’ [Assimilation, or the historian’s helplessness: on the critique of the term and concept],
in Wokół akulturacji i asymilacji Żydów na ziemiach polskich, ed. Kamil Zieliński (Lublin: Wy-
dawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2010), 15–31; Todd M. Endelman, ‘Assimi-
lation’, in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/
article.aspx/Assimilation (accessed 3 February 2017); Kateřina Čapková, ‘Beyond the Assimila-
tionist Narrative: Historiography on the Jews of the Bohemian Lands and Poland after the Sec-
ond World War’, Studia Judaica 1 (2016): 129–55.
123 Rachel Auerbach, ‘“Jehudas Selbstverachtung”: Dos kapitl ideen-perverzye’ [Jehudas self-
loathing: a story of ideological perversion] Morgen (25 October 1930): 7. The title, as Auerbach
explained, was an allusion to Franz Werfel’s notion of ‘Israel’s self-hatred’ from his drama
Paulus unter den Juden. However, at the moment of writing, she could not remember the exact
formulation of the author. It was hardly the first instance of such criticism, but the article is
important in the context of the development of Auerbach’s cultural agenda. One of early twen-
tieth century examples was Mates (Matisyohu, Mateusz) Mieses’ article ‘Bizkhut hasafah ha-
yehudit’ [In defence of the Jewish language], Ha-olam (5 June 1907), quoted and discussed in:
Katz, Words on Fire, 272–3.
124 The subsequent part of the text concerning the Tsushtayer project is partly based on my
article ‘Split Tongue: Tsuhstayer and the Yiddish Artistic Milieu in Galicia’, trans. Joanna Gon-
dowicz, Midrasz Special English Edition (2007): 16–20. On the same topic see Carrie Friedman-
Cohen, ‘Kvutsat Tsushtayer be-Galitsyah, 1929–1933’ [The Tsushtayer group in Galicia, 1929–
1932], Khulyot 10 (2007): 159–77. Friedman-Cohen uses some archival and press sources not
quoted in my article.
125 On diaspora nationalism in Galicia prior to the First World War and the role of Yiddish see
Joshua Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2012). On Yiddish in Galicia see Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz, ‘Yiddish as
an Expression of Jewish Cultural Identity in Galicia and Vienna’, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry
12 (1999): 164–76; Armin Eidherr, Sonnenuntergang auf eisig-blauen Wegen: Zur Thematisierung
von Diaspora und Sprache in der jiddischen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: V&R uni-
press, 2012), 87–168.
328 Karolina Szymaniak
phlet, Auerbach framed this task in a slightly different way, recurring to organi-
cist discourse. Admitting that assimilation, depicted as an illness of the national
organism, impacted not only intellectuals, but also the masses, she nonetheless
remained optimistic that assimilation was neither deeply-rooted nor irreversi-
ble. She claimed that the role of the intellectual was to strengthen the ‘natural’
resistance to these processes.134
Analyzing the Tsushtayer’s approach to language exclusivism and political
engagement can help us better understand the development of Auerbach’s Yid-
dishism. Both topics caused controversy at the project’s inception, during the
April 1929 Galician writers’ congress and later when the journal was being es-
tablished. The first controversy concerned multilingual writers: some partici-
pants believed that only writers who wrote in Yiddish should be part of the
movement, while those publishing simultaneously in Hebrew or Polish should
be rejected.135 The demand that journal authors publish exclusively in Yiddish
was upheld (at least in theory),136 a decision that was aimed both at Polish-Jew-
ish writers and Hebraists. The anti-Hebraist stance, which Auerbach later tried
to temper in her post-war writings, is present in her journalism from the period.
Contrary to Yiddish, ‘the actual language of the Jewish people’, she claimed that
Hebrew, a language not even spoken by Zionists themselves, could not provide
the bedrock for a living Jewish culture.137 The rejection of Polish as a language
of Jewish culture some authors justified by linking aesthetics and the politics of
identity, claiming that Polish was incapable of giving full expression to the
modern Jewish experience. Assessing the achievements and the failure of the
project, A. Rubentsal argued that a Jewish artist writing in a non-Jewish lan-
guage was limited to a certain set of topics and motifs easily recognizable as
Jewish by the non-Jewish audience, and that only in a Jewish language could
the artist be truly free.138
This did not mean that Auerbach and her fellow editors ceased to write in
Polish. In a letter to Moshe Shtarkman in New York, Auerbach explained it in
133 Yitskhok Shiper, ‘Mitn ponem tsu der provints’, Yidish 1 (1930): 3–4.
134 Rachel Auerbach, ‘Galitsye…’, Yidish 1 (1930): 2.
135 Bentsye Ginsberg, ‘Literarishe shvalben oder kroen in Galitsye’, Literarishe Bleter 27 (1929):
530.
136 Yisroel Ashendorf and Rachel Auerbach to Melekh Ravitch, 19 May 1929, SLM, ARC *4 1540
12 204.1. This rule seems to have been applied only to creative writing.
137 Auerbach, ‘Jehudas Selbstverachtung’.
138 On this motif in Yiddish literary criticism see Szymaniak, ‘Krytyka literacka’. Aleksandra
Geller describes the growing hostility to Polish-Jewish culture in the late 1930s in the context of
Literarishe Bleter. See Aleksandra Geller, ‘“Literarisze Bleter” (1924–1939)’, in Nalewajko-Kuli-
kov, Z dziejów trójjęzycznej prasy żydowskiej, 108.
330 Karolina Szymaniak
139 Rachel Auerbach to Moshe Shtarkman, undated [1931], AYIVO, Papers of Moshe Shtark-
man, RG 279, box 1, folder 3.
140 This statement is based on my work with archival documents, the above-mentioned inter-
view with Auerbach’s secretary, as well as my correspondence with Yossi Shoval (letter to the
author 28 August 2016).
141 This interpretation is inspired to a certain extent by Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection.
Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982).
142 See Auerbach’s remarks about proletarian writers and the application of Marxism in the
field of literary criticism in Rachel Auerbach to Melech Ravitch, 26 October 1931, SLM, ARC *4
1540 12 35.2.
143 ‘Fun undz’, [From Us], Tsushtayer 1 (1929): 2.
144 See Karolina Szymaniak, ‘Świat książek. Krytyka literacka na łamach wybranych period-
yków jidysz w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej do 1939 roku’ [The world of books: literary
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 331
criticism in selected East Central European Yiddish periodicals until 1939], in Nalewajko-Kuli-
kov, Z dziejów trójjęzycznej prasy żydowskiej, 472–3.
145 Friedman-Cohen, ‘Kvutsat’, 172–4.
146 Yisroel Ashendorf to Melekh Ravitch, [June] 1930 and 11 November 1931, SLM, ARC *4 1540
12 204.2.
147 Avrom Trembovelski, ‘Di YIVO-aktsye in mizrekh-galitsye’ [The YIVO-Action in Eastern
Galicia], Literarishe Bleter 35 (1932): 559. Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Cul-
ture, 118–31 and 143–54.
148 Nalewajko-Kulikov, ‘Zaklinanie rzeczywistości’.
332 Karolina Szymaniak
ical parties, nobody will accomplish anything. Unless in a distant future, after
10, 20 years.’149 She believed that only a cultural shock, ‘a fierce blow from out-
side’150 could help reverse these tendencies and prove both her and her ideas
right. Writing these words in 1932, she knew little of the kind of future she was
going to have to face. Auerbach’s politics of language was to take a new shape
during the war and Holocaust.
Scholars of Holocaust history and literature have often reflected upon the mean-
ing of Jewish multi- or translingualism. As David G. Roskies remarked: ‘In Jew-
ish eastern Europe, linguistic choices were never neutral.’151 And they became
even more charged during this period. Good command of non-Jewish languages
enhanced one’s chances of survival. On the other hand, some intellectuals felt
compelled to return to Jewish languages, calling upon others to follow in their
steps. In the face of death, some were eager to transmit their message to a
broader public and chose a non-Jewish language. Jewish intellectuals kept mov-
ing between languages, which testifies not only to their multilingual skills and
various political agendas, but also to ‘the changing need to [manoeuvre] in the
tongue that mattered most’, to a search for the ‘new constellation of meaning’152
and new forms of expression.
Roskies writes that in Poland, ‘one wrote either in Yiddish, Hebrew, or Pol-
ish’ ‘depending on the future envisaged’. He goes on to evoke the example of
the Hebrew-Yiddish poet Yitskhok Katzenelson, who wrote in Yiddish in the
ghetto, but decided to write ‘his last testament, the Vittel Diary, in the language
of the last remnant, Hebrew’.153 He also mentions Auerbach, who wrote in Pol-
ish but composed her last will in the ghetto in Yiddish.
Indeed, for various reasons, the most important documents Auerbach pre-
pared during the war were written in Polish. This includes her masterpiece, her
ghetto diary (1941–1942), as well as her writings from the so called ‘Aryan’ side:
Oni nazwali to wysiedleniem [They Called it Deportation] and Z ludem pospołu
149 Rachel Auerbach to Moshe Shtarkman, undated [1931], AYIVO, Papers of Moshe Shtark-
man, RG 279, box 1, folder 3.
150 Rachel Auerbach, ‘Dos yidishe Galitsye’, Literarishe Bleter 27 (1932): 422.
151 David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Cul-
ture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 201.
152 Alan Rosen, Introduction to Literature of the Holocaust, ed. Alan Rosen (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2013), 1–11, here 9–10.
153 Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 200–1.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 333
[Together with the People], written at the end of 1943 and the beginning of
1944.154 Among her Yiddish texts, we find: an unfinished monograph on the
soup kitchen she ran in the ghetto, short notes on the Gross-Aktion Warsaw,
accompanied by her last will; and her rendition of the account one of the first
escapees from Treblinka, Abram Krzepicki, with a foreword written by her.155
These texts, both Polish and Yiddish, were commissioned by the clandes-
tine ghetto archive run by Emanuel Ringelblum, himself a Yiddishist. The texts
from the ‘Aryan’ side were commissioned by the Jewish underground and in-
tended for a Polish public. Hence, the language choice here was obvious. The
reasons for composing the ghetto diary in Polish, however, remain complex and
unclear. Interesting are the ways in which Auerbach sought to justify her choice
after the war, bringing it in line with her new views on cultural politics. This
poses a complex problem of language and identity that Auerbach tried to re-
solve after the fact for the needs of her Yiddish-speaking public.
It is significant how Auerbach explained her reasons for writing in Polish in
a Yiddish book that was first published in 1974; the book also included transla-
tions from Polish of her texts from the ‘Aryan’ side. Celebrated in the Yiddish
press, this book was to be Auerbach’s testament and monument to the life and
destruction of Warsaw as a Jewish and Yiddish cultural centre, told through the
individual fates of those who lived there. Auerbach touches briefly upon the is-
sue of language choice, and seems to be puzzled herself by the fact that in the
ghetto she wrote in Polish: which is as a sign of her uneasiness about the fact.
She attributes it to purely technical reasons. She claimed that she started writ-
ing in a diary she had used before the war in which she wrote in Polish, and
explained that when it came to writing her last will, she had already done it in
Yiddish, the language that was dearest to her.156 This explanation seems only
partially plausible. Although it should not be entirely dismissed, it contradicts
some of her pre-war statements about writing in Polish. Similarly, the choice of
Polish to describe the fate of a Jewish individual and the destruction of the Jew-
ish nation went against her ideological convictions. Yet, the realities of life, as I
already argued above, were often distant from cultural convictions and lan-
guage politics.
Why, one might ask, did Auerbach decide to describe the uncanny ghetto
reality, as she herself understood it, in a language that was distant to her? Or
154 This work is discussed in Samuel Kassow, ‘The Warsaw Ghetto in the Writings of Rachel
Auerbach’, in Warsaw: The Jewish Metropolis, 496–514.
155 The text was translated into English without the foreword. See Abraham Krzepicki, ‘Eight-
een Days in Treblinka’, in Donat, The Death Camp Treblinka: A Documentary, ed. Alexander
Donat (New York: Waldon Press, 1979), 77–145.
156 Auerbach, Varshever tsavoes, 192.
334 Karolina Szymaniak
maybe it was precisely because of this dialectics of proximity and distance that
Polish seemed a better tool to grasp it? The language choice might have also
been dictated by the willingness to leave a witness account for the non-Jewish
world. But why then write the last will in Yiddish? If the role and fate of an in-
tellectual was to be with the people, as the title of her wartime essay indicated,
then her witness account should have been written in the language of her peo-
ple.
The choice of Yiddish as a language of her last will might be interpreted as
an answer to this conflict – as a statement of an intellectual coming back to her
native ground, speaking to her own people. Roskies’ interpretation leans in this
direction: ‘Only when she abandoned all hope for personal survival, did she en-
trust her last Yiddish message to the ghetto archive, building on a different
hope – that the Jews of post-war Poland would respond to the call of a native
daughter.’157 But Auerbach was an engaged Yiddishist before the war, and her
choice of Yiddish is less charged than that of other intellectuals in the ghetto.
Thus, Roskies claims she wrote her texts for different audiences. But if this is
true, then why didn’t she admit in the 1970s when her book was published?
There is another possible explanation that relates to the character of the
texts. Drawing upon her university education, which was in Polish, Auerbach
brought insights from psychology and psychoanalysis into her text. As Krze-
picki’s account attests, however, this does not mean that she was not able to
produce an intellectual insight in Yiddish of similar complexity and weigh. It
might have been, however, that some means of expression she was looking for
were available to her in Polish, while others – in Yiddish. In the end, it is not
uncommon for bilingual writers to find it easier to express some things in one
language and some in another, which is confirmed by the author herself. In a
letter to the Polish writer Stanisław Vincenz on her later wartime writings,
which included Yizkor, her most widely acclaimed text today, she admitted that
she was unable to render some of her Polish texts in Yiddish because she had
learned certain Biblical genres and religious modes of expression (in this case,
lamentations) through Polish language and literature and not through Yid-
dish.158 Translating these texts into Hebrew seemed easier for her because it
brought them back to their original language.
I believe that the language choices Auerbach made in the ghetto were deter-
mined by a complex of different reasons. In her Polish diary, she tried to cap-
ture the ‘sound film’ of the ghetto, thus weaving into her text words, phrases
and whole fragments in Yiddish (both in Yiddish characters and in transcrip-
tion) as well as words and phrases in German. But, as Emanuel Ringelblum ob-
served, this reality was more and more Polish-speaking.159 As to her Yiddish
texts, the choice of language was probably more made for ideological and tech-
nical reasons: the soup kitchen monograph was written for a contest, and Auer-
bach’s engagement with Yiddishism made the choice of language rather clear.
The last will she wrote was appended to a Yiddish text of the monograph, and
Krzepicki’s account of his escape from Treblinka was written in Yiddish because
that was his language of choice. However, this should not be read as in any way
undermining Auerbach’s continued devotion to Yiddish language and culture.
By pointing out other plausible explanations, I simply want to emphasize the
complexity of Auerbach’s language choices as juxtaposed with her language
politics.
Only years after the fact did she add the explanation that helped her resolve
these contradictions and the uneasiness she must have felt towards her own
text. After the war, she translated and edited her diary in both Polish and Yid-
dish.160 After her immigration to Israel, it was also published in Hebrew.161
The reception of her ghetto and wartime works after the war so influenced
the perception of her as a Yiddishist that many readers were long convinced
that her famous Yizkor 1943 was originally written in Yiddish, even though it
was actually written in Polish. Paradoxically, the work was first widely received
in Poland in a Polish translation of an English translation of the Yiddish ver-
sion.162 In the 2010 Yael Hersonski film, A Film Unfinished, about a Nazi propa-
ganda film shot in the Warsaw Ghetto, where documents used to expose the
agenda behind the images are quoted in their original language, fragments of
Auerbach’s diary are read in Yiddish translation.
Post-War Reconfigurations
After the war and the Holocaust, Auerbach revised some of her earlier beliefs
and softened the tone of her polemics. A response to the shattering war experi-
ences and the new status of Yiddish language and culture, she tailored her
views to her commitment to cross-party cultural politics. She claimed that the
159 Emanuel Ringelblum, Ksovim fun geto [Ghetto writings], v. 1 (Varshe: Yiddish Bukh), 371.
160 The Yiddish fragments of the diary were published in various newspapers. The early pub-
lications include the Łódź-based Dos Naye Lebn and the New York-based Tsukunft.
161 Rachel Auerbach, Be-khutsot Varshah, trans. by Mordechai Halamish Tel Aviv: Am Oved,
1954, 15–74.
162 Jacek Leociak, Tekst wobec Zagłady. O relacjach z getta warszawskiego (Wrocław: Wydaw-
nictwo Leopoldinum, 1997).
336 Karolina Szymaniak
language war in the realm of culture was analogous to discussions on class, na-
tionalism and territorialism in the realm of party politics. What the Jewish na-
tion really needed after the war, however, was ‘internal peace’. The ideological
differences could be overcome as they were during the Destruction, when un-
necessary ideological fights between Yiddishists and Hebraists were brought to
an end, or at least a truce – as if ‘two brothers made up during a fire or a serious
illness in the family’.163 In the community of survivors, she seems to claim, there
should be no place for such controversies, since ‘all of us were sentenced to
death, all of us are mourners’.164 This stance might also partly explain her pub-
lic support of state’s cultural policies in Poland in the immediate post-war
years,165 which raised concerns among some of her friends. ‘I’m not a politico’,
she wrote to Ravitch, responding to his criticism of one of her papers, while ad-
mitting with resignation that it was impossible to advance the cause of Yiddish
culture effectively outside Jewish party politics, both in Poland and else-
where.166 As before, she thought, politicization was only harmful to the Yiddish-
ist cause.
The change in Auerbach’s language politics is part of a broader phenomen-
on. While Yiddishists before the war sought to (symbolically) exclude modern
Hebrew and Polish from modern national Jewish culture, this position was no
longer tenable after the war. Thus Auerbach’s approach to both, as well as her
politics of Diaspora culture, changed. Writing about Polish-Jewish authors such
as Artur Sandauer or Adolf Rudnicki, Auerbach stated that ‘despite the barrier
of language I consider them Jewish writers’167 whose works should not be un-
available to a Yiddish-speaking audience simply because they were written in
Polish.168 She believed that, given the shortcomings of post-war Yiddish literary
representations of the Destruction, Polish-Jewish literature could be treated as a
sort of temporary supplement to Yiddish literature.169
As for Hebrew, its position in pre-state Palestine and later in Israel grew on-
ly stronger. Yiddish and Yiddish culture was rejected and actively discriminated
163 See Rachel Auerbach, ‘Vegn eynhayntlekhn velt-kongres far yidisher kultur’ [On the
united congress of Yiddish culture], Yidishe Shriftn 10 (1947): 22.
164 See Auerbach, ‘Vegn eynhayntlekhn velt-kongres’, 22.
165 Ibid. See also Rachel Auerbach, ‘Dos yidishe folk darf zayn der avagard in kamf far sho-
lem’ [The Jewish nation has to be the avant-garde of the peace struggle], Yidishe Shriftn 4
(1949): 2.
166 Rachel Auerbach to Melech Ravitch, 14 July 1948, ARC *4 1540 12 35.3.
167 Rachel Auerbach to Avrom Sutzkever, 28 April 1949, SLM, ARC *4 1565 1 36 (emphasis in
the original).
168 Rachel Auerbach, ‘Poylishe shrayber vegn dem yidishn umkum’ [Polish writers on the
extermination of the Jews], Yidishe Shriftn 1–2 (1948): 8.
169 Ibid., 566.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 337
there, treated as both a symbol of the diaspora past and as a serious threat to
the Hebrew revival. Yiddishists responded to this changed situation by advanc-
ing the old idea of Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism that was being revived by some
already in the late 1930s and, as we have seen, during the war period. This can
be interpreted as ‘a response to the situation that seemed to threaten Yiddish
creativity and rob it of its future perspectives’.170 But for immigrant Yiddish writ-
ers in Israel, and Auerbach was soon to became one, it should also be seen as
an attempt to negotiate the transition to a new geographical, political, cultural
and linguistic reality.
This new Yiddish-Hebrew cultural politics found its expression in the first
issue of Di Goldene Keyt [The Golden Chain], the most important post-war Yid-
dish journal, edited by the poet Avrom Sutzkever and published in Israel by the
Histadrut.171 Auerbach greeted the project enthusiastically. While still in Po-
land, Auerbach wrote a letter to the editor in which she revealed that her true
feelings towards the question of Hebrew-Yiddish coexistence had been sup-
pressed by ideological reservations, but that the situation in Israel had caused
her to rethink them. She mentioned a pamphlet she prepared on the subject,
but she feared it might be misunderstood as an attack on Israel rather than a
positive programme for the future.172
In the manuscript of the pamphlet preserved in Auerbach’s archives, she
returns to her pre-war argument that the Zionist movement’s rejection of Yid-
dish never served the Zionist cause, but only fostered accelerated assimilation.
She admits that the question of Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism was ‘always dear
to her’, even though she ‘never came to terms with the harm [the Zionist posi-
tion towards Yiddish] caused and is still causing’. Thus, while retaining her crit-
ical position, she tried to use the language of affection to take a new position
on the Hebrew/Yiddish debate. Finally, she expressed her hope that in the new
Jewish state there would be room for both languages. The ‘dream of us all’, she
wrote in an article published in Di Goldene Keyt, ‘is to abolish the artificial and
harmful wall separating the two children of the same parents: between our liter-
ature in Yiddish and our literature in modern Hebrew.’173 The use of such fami-
170 Dan Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity: Towards a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press), 225.
171 General Organization of Worker’s in Israel, a trade union, one of the most influential and
important organizations in Israeli politics and economics of the period and after.
172 Rachel Auerbach to Avrom Sutzkever, 4 November 1948, SLM, ARC *4 1565 1 36.
173 Auerbach, ‘Der briderishter,’ 110.
338 Karolina Szymaniak
174 See Shmuel Niger, Di tsveyshprakhikayt fun undzer literatur (Detroit: Louis Lamed Founda-
tion for the Advancement of Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, 1941). English translation: Shmuel
Niger, Bilingualism in the History of Jewish Literature (New York: University Press of America,
1990). See my close reading of the text, Szymaniak, ‘Krytyka literacka’.
175 Rachel Auerbach, ‘A naye batsiung tsu yidish in Yisroel?’ [A new attitude towards the
Yiddish in Israel?], Yidishe Shriftn 7–8 (1948): 10, 12.
176 Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics, 37.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 339
No [anti-Semitic] uproar [hetse] is capable of depriving us of our natural human and civil
affection for the land where we live and create, fight and dream about a happy future for
all the peoples who live here … May our exhibition turn into a grand and splendid mani-
festation of humanitarian ideas in Polish literature; may it demonstrate the deep internal
ideological proximity between Yiddish and Polish literatures.180
177 These data should be interpreted more as an accurate representation of the language and
identity politics of the period than as a representation of social reality. See Shmeruk, ‘Hebrew-
Yiddish-Polish’, 288–91.
178 Jeffrey Shandler, ed., Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before
the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Alina Cała, ed., Ostatnie pokolenie:
autobiografie polskiej młodzieży żydowskiej okresu międzywojenneg ze zbiorów YIVO Institute for
Jewish Research w Nowym Jorku (Warsaw: Sic!, 2003); Kijek, Dzieci modernizmu.
179 Karolina Szymaniak, ‘Krytyka literacka’, 124–32, and Szymaniak, ‘Speaking Back’.
180 Shimshen Brotmakher, ‘Vegn der geplanter oysshtelung’ [On the planned exhibition],
Shul-vegn 1 (1938): 8–9.
181 Anna Landau-Czajka, Polska to nie oni. Polska i Polacy w polskojęzycznej prasie żydowskiej
II Rzeczpospolitej [Poland it’s not them: Poland and Poles in the Polish-language Jewish press
in the Second Polish Republic] (Warsaw: ŻIH, 2015).
340 Karolina Szymaniak
present and future intellectual elites. That threat was nowhere as apparent as in
the realm of education. Auerbach acknowledged that Polish literature and cul-
ture had become a shared tradition for Jewish intellectuals in Poland, but she
criticized the fixation on Polish themes and diagnosed a certain provincialism
in the Polish curricula and literary scholarship at both secondary and tertiary
levels (she gave an example of a Jewish student who wrote a dissertation on
hens in Polish literature). Still, she asserted that her critique was not aimed at
ridiculing Polish culture, since ‘it was a source from which we drew, learned to
analyze and understand literary works and processes of creation, and you don’t
spit in the well from which you drink.’182 The problem was that Yiddish litera-
ture garnered little interest among the Jewish public in general and critics and
scholars in particular. Gifted individuals who wanted to pursue their education
at universities had to do so in Polish or other languages, and later promoted the
cultures associated with them. Hence, the intellectuals became all the more es-
tranged from their original culture, which suffered because of this. In the ab-
sence of Yiddish universities and having only a small number of Yiddish high
schools, Auerbach saw the only hope in autodidacts and those ‘who come back
from the other side/far away (di aribergekumene)’.183 For Auerbach, these intel-
lectuals might benefit Yiddish culture, and in turn, might find a feeling of be-
longing within it. Yiddish culture not only offered the promise of a safe home
where one could express oneself freely as a Jew, but was a project in the making
where an estranged intellectual could still feel he/she was needed. Thus, intel-
lectuals could ‘free themselves from the curse of weakening or wasting forces
and energy where nobody needs or wants them by applying them at the same
time in the territory where they are much needed and where every tiny contribu-
tion is truly an urgent vital necessity.’184
Auerbach wrote this article in the late 1930s, but her conviction and advo-
cacy of Yiddish culture in Poland was accompanied by her own struggle with
the question of whether to stay or leave the country. This was not a topic, she
claimed, that could be freely discussed in her own milieu,185 but it recurred in
her private correspondence. In a letter to Moshe Shtarkman, she describes the
tense situation in Poland: ‘The prevailing atmosphere is such that we would
rather pack our belongings and leave. We have had enough of the life here and
if we don’t get down to doing something that could bring about a change, we
182 Rachel Auerbach, ‘Bleterndik di shriftlekhe arbetn fun der sholem-aleykhem oysshtelung’
[Reading the essays from the Sholem-Aleichem exhibition], Shul-vegn 7–8 (1937): 291.
183 The verb ariberkumen means to arrive despite obstacles or distance.
184 Auerbach, ‘Bleterndik’, 295.
185 See Auerbach, ‘Der briderishster’, 106.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 341
have nothing to do here. We’re sick of everything and everybody.’186 Here, Auer-
bach still seems to believe that Jewish intellectuals could at least attempt to
change or influence the social and political situation in Poland.
Rising anti-Semitism in Poland worsened the prospects of Yiddish culture.
In the 1930s, many leading Yiddishist intellectuals left Poland, including Nakh-
men Mayzil, the editor of the most important literary and sociocultural Yiddish
weekly of the time, Literarishe Bleter, Kadya Molodowski, one of the most prom-
inent poets of Auerbach’s generation and her colleague, and Melekh Ravitch,
Auerbach’s mentor and close friend, and a major figure on the Yiddishist intel-
lectual scene.
In mid-March 1936, after the Przytyk pogrom (9 March 1936), when a wave
of anti-Jewish violence was sweeping across Poland,187 Auerbach wrote to Rav-
itch:
You once did a wise thing to … leave Poland. The situation is getting more suffocating
and difficult to live by the day … You can build concrete shelters to protect against gases
but there is no shelter to protect you against the depression that comes from all things
going on here. And after all, that’s only a prelude. I’m having nightmares, long-forgotten
nightmares from the war time; we are all falling into a political psychosis. Personally, I’d
be ready (?)188 to get out of here and go anywhere at all but [Itzik] Manger doesn’t think
about the future, thus we’re missing an opportunity for which it might be too late when
the moment comes. And – in the face of all of this – we publish books.189
In a 1937 article that alludes to the anti-Semitic riots at Polish universities, she
bitterly remarked: ‘I have a hard time understanding how Jewish students are
able to hold on at the Polish universities today and what they are still doing
there.’190 In 1937, the so-called bench ghetto and numerus clausus (Jewish ad-
mission quota) was passed by the Ministry of Religion and Public Enlighten-
ment [Ministerstwo Wyznań Religijnych i Oświecenia Publicznego]. A year later,
reflecting on how these regulations affected the situation of Jewish youth in Po-
land in general, and young female high school graduates in particular, Auer-
bach wrote about their limited perspectives for education and employment: ‘Let
us not fool ourselves. Let us face the ugly truth. The extermination of the Jewish
youth and the distortion of their normal path of educational and professional
191 Rachela Auerbach, ‘Panna po maturze’ [A girl graduating high school], Nowy Głos 169 (19
June 1938): 9. On Jewish students’ experience at Polish universities see Natalia Aleksiun, ‘To-
gether but Apart: University Experience of Jewish Students in the Second Polish Republic’,
Acta Poloniae Historica 109 (2014): 109–37; Szymon Rudnicki, ‘From Numerus Clausus to Nu-
merus Nullus’, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 2 (1987): 246–68; Emanuel Melzer, ‘Ghetto Benches,
Agitation, and Violence in the Universities’, in Melzer, No Way Out, 71–80.
192 Aleksiun, ‘Together’, 116n, 118. Gershon Bacon, ‘The Missing 52 Percent: Research on Jew-
ish Women in Interwar Poland and Its Implications for Holocaust Studies’, in Women in the
Holocaust, eds, Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998),
55–67, here 60–1.
193 Auerbach, ‘Panna po maturze’ (emphasis in the original).
194 See the opinion of Yehoshua Perle, a writer whom Auerbach admired: Stefan Pomer,
‘Obiektywna ocena sytuacji. Ankieta 5-tej Rano wśród najwybitniejszych pisarzy żydowskich.
Wywiad z Jehoszuą Perlem’ [An objective assessment of the situation: the 5-ta Rano survey
among the eminent Jewish writers: an interview with Yehoshua Perle], 5-ta Rano (14 May
1937): 6.
195 Rachel Auerbach, ‘Calea Vacaresti i Dudesti – bukaresztańskie Nalewki’ [Calea Vacaresti
and Dudesti – the Bucharest Nalewkes], Nowy Dziennik (8 January 1938): 6–7.
196 Rachel Auerbach, ‘Żydowskie koneksje Stanisława Vincenza’ [Stanisław Vincenz’s Jewish
connections], Nowiny Kurier (26 March 1971): 8; Dorota Burda-Fischer, Stanisława Vincenza
tematy żydowskie. [Stanisław Vincenz’s Jewish themes] (Wrocław: a lineam, 2015), especially
chap. 1; Dorota Burda-Fischer, ‘A Hasid among the Goyim: Jewish Themes in Stanisław Vin-
cenz’s Na wysokiej połoninie’, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 28 (2015): 261–80.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 343
197 Rachela Auerbach, ‘Duchowe przygody’, Nasz Przegląd 117 (1936): 8. A Yiddish version of
this article appeared in Haynt: Rachel Auerbach, ‘Dr. Stanislav Vintsents – der poylisher for-
sher fun yidishe folks-mayses’ [Dr. Stanisław Vincenz – Polish researcher of Jewish folk tales],
Haynt (6 April 1936): 7, 10. It was followed by a translation of Vincenz’s text into Yiddish in
Haynt (12 April 1936): 5.
198 Rachel Auerbach, ‘Na zgon przyjaciela Polaka’, YVA, *16/54, 6.
199 In the Polish-Jewish context see Anna Landau-Czajka, Polska to nie oni. Polska i Polacy w
polskojęzycznej prasie żydowskiej II Rzeczpospolitej (Warsaw: ŻIH, 2015). Natalia Aleksiun, ‘Sto-
sunki polsko-żydowskie w piśmiennictwie historyków żydowskich w latach trzydziestych XX
wieku’, Studia Judaica 1 (2006): 49.
200 Rachel Auerbach to Melekh Ravitch, 19 July 1939, SLM, ARC *4 1540 12 35.4, 6.
344 Karolina Szymaniak
201 Nathan Cohen, ‘Motives for the Emigration of Yiddish Writers from Poland (1945–1948)’, in
Under the Red Banner: Yiddish Culture in the Communist Countries in the Postwar Era, eds,
Magdalena Ruta and Elvira Groezinger (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008), 159.
202 The name landkentenish is a direct equivalent of Polish krajoznawstwo, which in turn re-
fers to the German Landeskunde, roughly ‘national/regional studies’.
203 Kassow, ‘Travel and Local History’, 172.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 345
204 Speech of Yosef Opatoshu at the World Congress of Yiddish Culture in Paris: Yosef Opa-
toshu, Ershter altveltlekher yiddisher kultur-kongres, Paris 17–21 september 1937. Stenografisher
barikht (Paris, New York, Warsaw: IKUF, 1937), 30.
205 On the use of the term ‘Yiddishland’ during the congress see Gennady Estraikh, ‘The Kul-
tur-Lige in Warsaw: A Stopover in the Yiddishists’ Journey between Kiev and Paris’, in Warsaw:
The Jewish Metropolis: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Professor Antony Polonsky, eds,
Glenn Dynner and François Guesnet (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 323–46, here 344. See also
Kalman Weiser, ‘The Capital of “Yiddishland”?’ in Dynner and Guesnet, Warsaw: The Jewish
Metropolis, 298–322.
206 Balazs Trencsényi, ‘Conceptual History and Political Languages: On Central-European
Adaptation of the Contextualist-Conceptualist Methodologies of Intellectual History’, in Prague
Perspectives: Studies in Central and Eastern Europe, eds, Petr Roubal and Václav Veber (Prague:
Klementinum, 2004), 162.
207 Szymaniak, ‘Krytyka literacka’, 90–100.
208 Auerbach, ‘Der briderishster’, 110.
346 Karolina Szymaniak
Jewry for generations to come.’209 One might argue that this experience also in-
fluenced her decision to stay in Poland and become involved in rebuilding Jew-
ish life after the Holocaust.
The post-war communist Poland seemed to offer favourable conditions for
Jewish life and culture. Jews were the only minority group officially recognized
by the authorities, and enjoyed a relative political and cultural autonomy. At
the same time, Jews were experiencing open and hidden hostility, and anti-Se-
mitic violence both from the society and the state.210
Like many in the immediate post-war period, Auerbach’s personal docu-
ments, activism and writings are characterized by a desire to commemorate and
rebuild and by her growing disillusionment with communist Poland and Polish-
Jewish life. Her perception of her task as an intellectual was aptly summed up
by Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov: ‘In the years immediately following the war, the
survivor writers considered themselves … above all socio-cultural activists who
were responsible for the revival of the Jewish world in Poland and for rescuing
or finding what was left of the cultural heritage of Polish Jews.’211 Auerbach
played an important role in the revival of Yiddish culture in the immediate post-
war years.212 She understood this involvement as an answer to the crisis of Jew-
ish national identity after the Holocaust, threatened existence of Jews as a col-
lective.213 Hence, it was not important to her whether a Yiddish newspaper in
Poland would have a broad or limited public:
Indeed, what is at stake here is the question whether we are a random gathering of survi-
vors [farblibene] who are not united by any common social idea, or a social organism, an
ethnic group [eyde]. A community [kibets] that remembers, that has tradition with its own
meaning. By coming back to its own language, its own national expression, this commun-
209 Kassow, ‘The Warsaw Ghetto in the Writings of Rachel Auerbach’, 505.
210 Audrey Kichelewski, ‘To Stay or to Go? Rebuilding a New Jewish Life in Postwar Poland,
1944–1947’, in Seeking Peace in the Wake of War: The Reconfiguration of Europe, 1943–1947,
eds, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman, Sandrine Kott, Peter Romjin and Olivier Wieviorka (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 184–201; Cohen, ‘Motives for Emigration’; On different as-
pects of post-war Jewish life in Poland see selected articles Feliks Tych and Monika Adamczyk-
Garbowska, eds, Jewish Presence in Absence: The Aftermath of the Holocaust: Poland 1944–2010
(Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014).
211 Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov, Obywatel Jidyszlandu: Rzecz o żydowskich komunistach w
Polsce (Warsaw: Neriton, Instytut Historii PAN, 2009), 179.
212 On Yiddish culture in the post-war period see Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov and Magdalena
Ruta, ‘Yiddish Culture in Poland after the Holocaust’, in Tych and Adamczyk-Garbowska, Jew-
ish Presence in Absence, 353.
213 On these feelings among survivor-historians and their understanding of the mission of
Holocaust research in this context see Cohen, ‘Holocaust Research’, 260–1.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 347
ity shows that from the Destruction it rescued [aroysgetrogn] not only naked life, but also
its humanity, strivings, longings.214
Auerbach saw a clear link between the task of creating a Yiddish press and
more generally, culture in post-war Poland, the national cause, the goals of De-
struction research, and the politics of memory. Setting up a Yiddish newspaper
in Poland was a means of re-establishing the eroded national cohesion and the
role of Poland as a spiritual center for the Jews around the world, and would
give a platform for informing the Jewish and non-Jewish world about the De-
struction.215 ‘We are heirs to a great tradition, and we intend to create a new
tradition’, she wrote. She believed that cultivating memory was a necessary
condition for creating new cultural values and that these new cultural values
would in turn secure the continued existence of Jews as a nation after the trau-
ma of Destruction. These convictions also undergirded her hope for a wave of
linguistic conversions.
Although it became the central part of Auerbach’s work after the war, the
task of remembering and commemorating was not limited to the Destruction pe-
riod, but also encompassed pre-war Yiddish culture. As Anita Norich has
shown, Auerbach’s interpretations of Yiddish cultural heritage in the late 1940s
developed ‘an exceptional and literal architectonics of memory and mourn-
ing’,216 but one that was consciously selective and was meant to contribute to
future cultural creativity.217
Despite her public statements and her sense of duty, and the need to place
Poland back on the map of the post-Holocaust Yiddish culture, Auerbach seems
to have been ready to leave Poland already in the mid-1945: ‘It is really high
time for us to leave, to leave this land and shake off the dust from our shoes’,
she wrote to Basia Berman, her friend and one of the figures instrumental in
organizing Jewish underground resistance on the so-called Aryan side of War-
saw.218 This was her reaction not only to attacks on Mieczysław Jastrun, after
the publication of his Potęga ciemnoty [The Power of Ignorance],219 sharp analy-
214 Rachel Auerbach, ‘Far vemen?’ [For Whom?], Dos Naye Leben 1 (1946): 4. Emphasis in
original.
215 Ibid. See also Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak, ‘Powojenna prasa żydowska w języku polskim
(1944–1950)’ [Post-war Jewish press in Polish, 1944–1950], in Nalewajko-Kulikov, Z dziejów
trójjęzycznej prasy żydowskiej, 211–29.
216 Anita Norich, Discovering Exile: Yiddish And Jewish American Culture During the Holocaust
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 125.
217 Auerbach, ‘Once There Was a King’, 136–7.
218 Rachel Auerbach to Basia Berman, 24 July 1945, Archives of the Diaspora Research Insti-
tute, Tel Aviv, P-70/51, translation quoted after: Cohen, ‘Motives for Emigration’, 159.
219 Mieczysław Jastrun, Potęga ciemnoty [The power of ignorance], Odrodzenie 29 (1945).
348 Karolina Szymaniak
sis of the post-war anti-Semitism, but also the ambiguity on the issue on the
side of Polish intellectuals. The same sentiment is expressed in Auerbach’s
April 1945 analysis of Polish wartime and post-war anti-Semitism. She admits
how she believed that after the Holocaust, in a land where there were almost no
Jews, anti-Semitism would cease to exist, but that she was gravely disap-
pointed. She also seemed less interested in fighting anti-Semitism, viewing it
more as an issue for Polish culture and not Jewish culture:
Does it make sense to look for excuses, to harbour a grudge, to argue with anti-Semites
and to make up with the nation to which the only thing we can do is to say goodbye?
What would be the practical reason? After all, those who are after those poor Jewish peo-
ple won’t withdraw the hand that holds the murder weapon.220
However, it took her the next five years to act on the implications of this state-
ment, a fact partly due to external circumstances. At that time, Polish topics re-
mained an important part of her thought and social and cultural criticism. She
continued to analyze and criticize Polish anti-Semitism and voice her disap-
pointment with Polish society.221 She was among the first to describe the plun-
der of Jewish property by the locals at the sites of death camps and Jewish mass
graves,222 which she had already sarcastically referred to as a ‘Polish Colorado’
in her wartime writings. She was also a member of the special committee estab-
lished to inspect the site of the Treblinka death camp, which she described later
in her powerful report Af di felder fun Treblinke [On the Fields of Treblinka].223
Nevertheless, in some of her writings, she sought to temper her criticism.
Official censorship certainly played a role here, an analysis of Auerbach’s
manuscripts clearly reveals that the writer self-censored her works. Thus, in the
conclusion of her article about Janina Buchholtz, activist for the Żegota, Auer-
bach noted that there were many facts about righteous gentiles whose names
were still unknown, but there might be even more facts ‘of another nature …
more terrible facts. We know of facts that grew out of the Nazi poison of hatred,
out of greed, murderous instincts, and a spiteful fascist-anti-Semitic propagan-
da. But against this background, the deeds of the Polish people who did not let
themselves be poisoned shine all the brighter.’ At the same time, she decided to
220 Rachel Auerbach, Gdy płonęło ghetto. W rocznicę likwidacji zbrojnego oporu Żydów wars-
zawskich. Antysemitom polskim pro memoria [When the Ghetto was burning: on the anniversary
of the Warsaw Jews’ armed resistance: Polish anti-Semites pro memoria], AYS, P.16/56*.
221 This topic requires a thorough analysis and will be the subject of a separate study.
222 Jan Tomasz Gross, with Irena Grudzińska Gross, Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of
the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
223 English translation: Rachel Auerbach, ‘In the Fields of Treblinka’, in The Death Camp Tre-
blinka, 17–74.
In the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach - The life of a Jewish Intellectual 349
delete remarks about the fear prevailing among the survivors and about the
hostile attitude of some parts of Polish society towards the righteous gentiles.
Again, while this might have been due to the expected interference by the cen-
sor, the way Auerbach reworked her texts might also tell us something more.
While still in Poland, Auerbach formulated her message carefully enough to be
able to convey it to a Polish readership and incorporated elements of the official
discourse, some of which were also an expression of her convictions at the time.
She might have still believed in the project of reviving Yiddish culture on Polish
soil, despite all the obstacles it faced. The discourse on the Righteous Poles224
might also have served this cause, just as it served her later in Israel when she
was trying to write a positive history of the diaspora, and the legacy of Polish
Jewry.
In spring 1946, Auerbach prepared a memorandum addressed to Polish so-
ciety on their attitude towards Holocaust survivors on behalf of the Association
of Jewish Writers and Journalists. The text, although discussed during the or-
ganization’s meetings, was never published. The memorandum ended with a
call: ‘Who remains silent appears to give consent. Responsible are not only
those who act but also those who remain silent.’225 But the Association of Yid-
dish Writers never officially condemned anti-Jewish violence, which was a ma-
jor disappointment for her.226 It seemed that with the change in Soviet politics
towards Israel, progressing Stalinization and the liquidation of relative Jewish
political cultural autonomy, she could no longer pursue any of her projects in
Poland, not even in compromised form. Thus, she sought out another culture
that would offer her work and mission favourable conditions.
Conclusions
In the 1950s, Auerbach wrote that Jewish migrants from Poland took with them,
among other things, works of Mickiewicz, Słowacki or Tuwim – ‘the most noble
224 On the attitudes of survivors towards the righteous see Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak, ‘Gratitude
and Oblivion: The Attitude of Poles and Jews towards the Righteous from 1944/45 to 2007’, in
Tych and Adamczyk-Garbowska, Jewish Presence in Absence, 974–90.
225 ‘List otwarty Związku Literatów, Dziennikarzy i Artystów Żydowskich w sprawie mordów
Żydów w Polsce’ [Open letter from the Association of Jewish Writers, Journalists and Artists on
the issue of the murders of Jews in Poland], undated [1946], AYS, P.16/64.
226 Protokol fun der algemeyner farzamlung dem 15 november 1946 [Protocol of the general
assembly, 15 November 1946], Auerbach’s statement, AŻIH, Związek Literatów i Dziennikarzy
Żydowskich w Polsce, 368/1, 34.
350 Karolina Szymaniak
essence of the old fatherland’.227 Auerbach brought her own pre-war and war-
time manuscripts – personal records of the life and destruction of Polish Jewry.
Experiencing constant disappointment, she never abandoned her major cul-
tural projects, but chose to modify and rewrite them to fit the changing realities
of Jewish life. But of her two lifelong engagements as a public intellectual – Yid-
dish language and culture, and the history of the Destruction – it was the latter
that brought her ultimate consolation. Although she continued to see herself
primarily as a Yiddish writer and a Yiddish Jew, as she used to call herself and
her milieu, she became bitterly disillusioned with the present and future of Yid-
dish creativity in Israel and around the world. In 1965, she wrote to Dov Sadan
that the works of Yiddish writers ‘interest nobody before their death, and all the
less so after’.228 It was her work as a historian of the Destruction that would, she
believed, outlive her and serve future generations of both Jewish and non-Jew-
ish writers and academics.229 However, due to the fact that much of her own
work was written mainly in Yiddish in Polish, her legacy remained, until re-
cently, largely unedited and not accessible to the broader public.
List of abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used in the article:
AGAD – Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (Central Archives of Historical Records), Warszawa
ASV – Archiwum Stanisława Vincenza, Biblioteka Zakładu Narodowego im. Ossolińskich,
Wrocław
AYIVO – Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York
AUW – Archives of Uniwersytet Warszawski (Warsaw University), Warsaw
AŻIH – Archives of the Żydowski Instytut Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute), Warsaw
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110559347-014
354 List of Contributors
Ines Koeltzsch, PhD, is a research associate at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the
Czech Academy of Science. Her research focuses on the modern history of Jewish–non-
Jewish relations in Central and Eastern Europe. She is currently working on a project
concerning Jews in the countryside and their intra- and trans-regional migration to the
cities between the 1860s and the 1930s. She has taught Czech, Czechoslovak history and
Jewish history at the Freie Universität zu Berlin, New York University in Prague and the
University of Regensburg. She is the author of the monograph Geteilte Kulturen: Eine
Geschichte der tschechisch-jüdisch-deutschen Beziehungen in Prag (1918–1938)
(München, 2012).
Małgorzata A. Quinkenstein is an art historian, provenance researcher and curator with
special interests in the art of the Jewish diaspora in Europe and America and looted art
during the period from 1933 to 1949. She studied at the Institute of Art History of the
University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań and at the Faculty of Art Conservation of the
Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. She has been employed at the Historical
Research Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin since 2011. She is
currently researching the illegal transfer of works of art from Europe to the United States
in the years 1944 to 1949, as well as the story of Arthur Bryks and the La Porza
Foundation.
Clara Royer, PhD, is an associate professor in Central European cultures at the Sorbonne
University. She is currently the director of the French Research Centre in Social Sciences
in Prague (CEFRES). She is the author of the monograph Le Royaume littéraire: Quêtes
d'identité d'une génération d'écrivains juifs de l'entre-deux-guerres (Paris, 2011). Her
most recent book appeared in January 2017 under the title, Imre Kertész: ‘l’histoire de
mes morts’ (Actes Sud, 2017).
Tamás Scheibner, PhD, is an assistant professor in comparative and Hungarian literature and
cultural studies at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, and a research fellow at the
Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Formerly, he was a postdoc
fellow at Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena in Germany, and a visiting assistant professor at
Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania. His research is concerned with the multiple
ways culture and politics have affected each other in Eastern and Central Europe in the
20th century. He is the author of the monograph A magyar irodalomtudomány szovjeti-
zálása: A szocialista realista kritika és intézményei, 1945–1953 [The Sovietization of
Hungarian literary studies: socialist realist criticism and its institutions] (Budapest,
2014).
Gábor Schein is a poet, writer, critic and translator. He was born on 2 July 1969 in Budapest.
He holds degrees in Hungarian and German and is an associate professor in Hungarian
literature at the Eötvös Lóránd University in Budapest. His publications in literary history
include: Poétikai kísérlet az Újhold körében [On the poetics of the Újhold-circle], 1997; Az
irodalom rövid története I-II [A short story of literature], 2007, co-authored with Tibor
Gintli; Füst Milán művészete 1909–1927 [The art of Milán Füst 1909–1927], 2009; and he
co-edited ‘Zsidó’ identitásképek a 20. századi magyar irodalomban [‘Jewish’ identities in
twentieth-century Hungarian literature]. His recent literary publications include the novels
Egy angyal önéletrajzai [Autobiographies of an angel], 2009, and Svéd [Swedish], 2015; a
collection of short stories titled, Megölni, akit szeretünk [To kill the one we love], 2011,
and a volume of poetry titled Éjszaka, utazás [Night, journey], 2013. His works have been
translated into English, German, French, Bulgarian and other languages.
List of Contributors 355
Karolina Szymaniak, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw
where she heads the Yiddish Culture Unit and at the Department of Jewish Studies of the
University of Wroclaw. Her research interests range from Jewish modernism, Jewish Polish
cultural contact, politics of memory and women's studies. She was consultant for the
POLIN Museum for the History of Polish Jews and the Museum of Art in Łódź. Her recent
publications include the critical edition of Rachel Auerbach’s Warsaw ghetto
writings Pisma z getta warszawskiego (Warsaw, 2015) awarded the Nagroda Historyczna
‘Polityki’ (2016), and ‘Speaking Back: On Some Aspects of Reception of Polish Literature
in Yiddish Literary Criticism’ which appeared in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 28 (2016).
Currently, she is working on Rachel Auerbach's intellectual biography and the history of
Yiddish Polish cultural contact in the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century.
Marija Vulesica, PhD, is a researcher at the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Technische
Universität Berlin. In her dissertation, she dealt with anti-Semitism in Habsburg Croatia.
Her book, Die Formierung des politischen Antisemitismus in den Kronländern Kroatien-
Slawonien 1879–1906 was published in 2012. She is the author of numerous articles
dealing with anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Jewish history in Southeastern Europe.
She is currently working on a DFG-funded project in which she is examining the transna-
tional networks established by the Yugoslav Zionists in interwar Yugoslavia that helped
Central European Jews who were escaping Nazi persecution.
Felicia Waldman, PhD, is associate professor at the Center for Hebrew Studies, Faculty of
Letters, University of Bucharest and editor of the Center’s academic journal Studia
Hebraica. She is a founding member of the Goldstein Goren Center for Israel Studies at
the Faculty of Political Science of the same university and affiliated professor of the
University of Haifa. She is the deputy head of the Romanian Delegation to the Interna-
tional Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Her expertise covers Jewish mysticism,
Holocaust education in Romania and the Romanian Jewish heritage. She has published
four books, over thirty articles and has co-edited three volumes on these topics. She is
the joint winner of the 2014 Safran Book Prize with her two co-editors, Danielle Delmaire
and Lucian Zeev Herscovici, for Romania, Israel, France: Jewish Trails, Volume in Honor of
Professor Carol Iancu (Bucharest, 2014) and Roumanie, Israel, France: parcours juifs:
Hommage au professeur Carol Iancu (Paris, 2014).