Looking for a home

by Péter Dérczy

While I can’t claim credit for the actual delivery of Forgách András’s book, I won’t deny that I was the first to see its various installments published in the magazine and on several occasions at that.  With each installment the novel underwent certain changes, especially in form.  Looking at it as a whole now, I can say that, while it grew in size, it does not seem to have undergone any radical changes.  Additional punctuation and dates were added (1947-1976) which help divide up the text (purportedly edited down some two hundred pages).  But the surgery performed by both writer and editor didn’t alter the book’s nature but only confirmed what we knew from the start – that this was a unique family saga involving a mother and a daughter (and to some degree their relatives).  The fact that this is a family saga came as no surprise at all.  Some of the longer passages in Forgách András’s previous book, Aki nincs, already showed this tendency, only that its main character was a strange-named young man who bore a striking similarity to the author and who attempted to find himself and his place in the world.  Here, the logical outcome of this search is transferred to the broader yet still very personal sphere of the family: the individual steps aside and the decades and family members so instrumental in his creation are given center stage.  From this perspective, Zehuze is the perfectly natural follow-up to Aki Nincs’s closing piece (,,A seb”, p. 100), which touches on filial love and its “so-called ancestral nest in an old house.”  In Zehuze, detailed accounts of both themes appear in the mother’s letters.  However elementary schoolish the gesture, I am now going to summarize these themes.

      The letters are written by a middle-aged woman (in 1947 she’s “almost 50”), in Palestine (the then evolving nation of Israel) to her daughter in Hungary.  The name of this woman is not given to us, all the letters tell us is that she’s Henrik Apfelbaum’s wife, with whom she left Hungary (then Austria-Hungary) between 1917 and 1918.  Her daughter, also unnamed in the novel (her mother refers to her only as jákiráti –“dear”, “beloved”) was born in 1922.  In search of roots most likely, she moved to (or back to) Hungary in 1947 and was forced to stay there with her husband and four Hungarian-born children.  The mother’s stream of letters to her daughter comes to an abrupt end in 1976 with an unfinished sentence that alludes to death.  Though the time period mentioned so far is in itself considerable, an even larger interval of time finds its way into the novel as we trace this “semi”-intellectual Jewish family’s history as far back as the late 19th Century.  This outline works poetically to highlight certain returning themes such as the “white horse” (used in reference not only to Horthy but to Franz Josef and in some degree to Kádár as well).  This history, it might be added, does bear a strong resemblance to Forgách András’s own family history – a fact which may or may not be of any significance here but which validates the author’s observation regarding the epistolary novel, that: “the other’s life, even when factual, reads like fiction.”  

      The most important element of the novel is, of course, the narrator, the mother/grandmother, through whom Forgách András has created a fantastic and, I believe it can be said, a full-blooded woman, a genuine “yiddishe mama”.  Alongside her erudite writer husband, this lady has an opinion on everything from world politics to dust balls, but most of all about her family -- her daughter and grandchildren, whom she, from a distance of one thousand kilometers, tries to keep together and protect.  Her letters, in other words, refer to everything one could possibly refer to in a letter, and her personality, her way of speaking and thinking, so much dominate everything in the book that they come to define its very form and narrative structure.  And although the latter is an easier thing to pull off, the novel fails to completely solve the problem (being an unsolvable problem) due to the limits of the medium.  What we’re dealing with here is the first person narrative, a lens through we can only see what the narrator gives us to see events (historical, family, etc.) that in many cases the she couldn’t have personally experienced, seen or witnessed; information gathered from her daughter’s letters or some article she happened to have read or heard on the radio.  My point here is that, while the mother-grandmother’s narration does contain personal experiences (and ones we seem to personally experience ourselves), these primarily relate to her family, to historical conflicts (described with an intimacy rare to historical accounts), and Arab-Jewish relations.  But because they are always narrowly focused (and thus full of repetition), despite the originality of the tone, they always somehow manage to become monotone.  This is how the novel’s unique internal structure comes into being: the personal tone of the mother/grandmother’s letters make it seem as if time stands still, that things keep repeating themselves and always with the same outcome; the woman’s relationship with her daughter and grandchildren certainly doesn’t change, being somehow too deep, too visceral for that.  Nevertheless, the dates do suggest the passing of time and seem to bring changes, especially new technological advances, and we recognize politicians, historic turning points – persons and events that may have had a personal influence on our lives.  But all of this works a little kaleidoscopically, or like background scenery, and sometimes even like a Concertina style photo album.   

The use of dates in the text, while having a positive effect on the reader, must still be seen as a novelistic solution, because the narrative still continues for the most part to flow in a stream.  Narrative styles (the personal and historical) run alongside each other and rarely meet, a lack of confluence noticeable simply on account of their simultaneous presence in the text.  The stream of letters, in other words, are really stream-of-consciousness writing (I won’t list the Joycean allusions here), and yet for some reason Forgách András – maybe because he was recounting an actual history – just wasn’t content with the limited possibilities the style offers for historical narrative.  Although this is a hard way to unravel what in my opinion is one of the essential layers of meaning in the work, I think it is obvious enough (surfacing from time to time like an underground stream and with great impact): this lack of cohesion, this language deficiency (the mother’s forgotten a good deal of her Hungarian and the daughter still hasn’t learned the language) and the feeling of uprootedness are what it’s all about.  Writing her daughter from Israel, the land she’s emigrated to, she says: “Autumn doesn’t exist here, and autumn symbolizes home to me,” (p. 350), and the mother, referring to one of her daughter’s letters from Hungary, comments: “In Jerusalem she was happy when she was three years old,” (p. 628). When I read that, I thought it was too bad that the novel was only given to us in monologue form and that I couldn’t read jákiráti’s letters from which I could have learned more about their shared unhappiness and sense of uprootedness.  The material as it stands, though, is still remarkably rich.  Though a little hard-going at first, this is a book you can get lost in: after the first careful reading you want to make the trip back and forth all over again.

Péter Dérczy