András Forgách
ZEHUZE
(synopsis)
The title is a Hebrew word which means, simply: that’s the way it is, like it or lump it; that’s life, there’s nothing you can do about it. The word appears often throughout the mother’s fascinating, disarming, solicitous, enamored, passionate, inquisitive, and unsolicited letters of advice. The mother’s letters – which are both childish and old-womanish at the same time and are presented as one endless monologue – are written from Tel Aviv to her daughter in Budapest over a period of thirty years. The mother left Hungary in the 1920s, and the daughter, at the beginning of the novel (in 1947) returned to that country on the request of her husband who, like herself, had not even lived there before (he was born and raised in Transylvania before the Nazi invasion and his probable escape to Palestine). Not only is the distance from her beloved child difficult, there’s also the fact that she herself would gladly live in Hungary, a country she feels is (in contrast with her Palestine, the future Israel) in the process of creating the type of society which corresponds to her own Communist ideals. And she maintains this conviction, despite every experience to the contrary, and although she does love her new home (one might say like Catullus loves women: with a love/hate). The daughter invites her parents to follow her to Hungary but the mother feels that she could change homelands again: she spent all her adult years in Palestine, a country with which she has many bones to pick, whose climate disagrees with her, and whose language, Hebrew, she’s still failed to master. Her daughter’s return to the homeland, however, as far as she’s concerned, is strictly out of the question. But her letters, like an umbilical cord, continue to nourish her daughter, to insure her well being; though ousted her from the nest for the sake of learning to fly on her own, her mother continues to sing her comforting words. One of the beautiful aspects of her letters – aside from the letter writer’s unpredictable, self-contradictory, and temperamental personality – is the language employed. It’s an archaic language, late 19th Century Hungarian, which the mother has managed to preserve in a foreign culture and in a foreign language community as in a hermetically sealed jar. And it’s mixed with many influences: the English of the British Mandate, of the Arab inhabitants, of the Yiddish imported from Poland and Russia, and Russian and German words. All this because she writes like she knits: letting the colors scream, letting herself get carried away by the words, by the momentum of the words, never putting a padlock on her mouth, knitting birds into creation and just as freely knitting flowers into creation when talking about former lovers.
When her daughter, after a few months into her visit, informs her parents that if they don’t promptly follow her back to Hungary she’ll return to Palestine, the mother wastes no time in talking her out of it. She tells the girl (pregnant at the time) that the homesickness she’s experiencing will pass and that she must be strong and thank her stars for the great fortune in which she’s about to take part: the building of an egalitarian society. That the language, the climate, the food, the people and the customs are foreign to her is not the point, the main thing is the Cause. But although it seems reasonable enough to believe that the girl’s burning desire, her yearning will be healed with time, it doesn’t. The exact opposite happens: the feeling grows stronger and stronger and more painful, sharper and more tormenting with the years. And the more unlikely the possibility of a return becomes, the truer this becomes. In the meantime she’s given birth to four children but what gladly have twelve, as her children are the only things that help her forget her irreparable mistake, the tragedy of being uprooted. But no matter how much she suffers under the weight of her lot, there’s really nothing anybody can do to help.
Despite a promising beginning, the young couple (the narrator and her husband) soon runs into trouble. Robi, who had been given an ideal job thanks to his Communist party connections, is soon fired (in part, for the very reason that he served in the British army in Palestine for six years), and the mother gives birth and is forced to give up medical school and take a job as a nurse in order to help support her new family. It’s at this point that the real story of Zehuze, which is first and foremost a history of time, begins. The story of how world events break in on the private life, how politics penetrate into the everyday life of a family. Ironically, however, the mother (about to become a grandmother) writes with just as much concern about the most trivial details of family life as she does about the enormous political events taking place at the time. A baby’s backside, the number of beds, the quality of bread and neighborhood gossip are just as important, if not more important to her as Churchill, Tito, Stalin and Eisenhower’s role in the world arena. The developments of the Korean War and how much hot water is available in her daughter’s home and what novel she’s read recently and how to make apple pie are of equal importance. And all this time the girl who’s receiving the flood of letters (and whose replies we can most of the time only guess at) brings one child after the other into the world, lives her life, suffers, pines and struggles – all with an incurable optimism similar to her mother’s.
Zehuze is a novel about time, a perpetual stream that pushes life changes on along with it via the eyes of a remarkable couple. Because the father (now grandfather), Henrik, also enters the picture. The letters tell the story of this literary translator’s extraordinary and passionate life and his family history dating back to the 19th Century. Like a capricious underground stream we’re given glimpses of his extensive, large cast of family members and their lives. Lives in which all these elements and their numerous forms (wanderings, exile, reception, disinheritance, annihilation and escape) come to light in the weave of the narrative which flows from the mother’s pen as from her crochet hook. It flows freely, copiously, unselfconsciously, in one continuous surge of present tense in which she wounds, worships, and fears for her offspring.
And the larger-than-life tableaux unfold before our eyes: the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s rush by one after the other, each decade flashing its different colors, and there is hardly time to catch your before you find yourself in yet another new world. The discourse, like the sound of a distant cannon, refers to so many different things at once: the Holocaust, Korean War, the Rajk trial, Fidel Castro, the 20th Congress, the Eichmann trial, the nationalization of the Suez Canal, the ’56 revolution in Hungary, the Six Day War, Paris and Prague in ‘68, the first trip to the moon, and the trivial and tragic events of a large family: illness, happiness, the gift packages and letters and, of course, the children. The grandchildren are born and day-by-day and year-by-year we get to see them mature, develop, flourish like trees and turn out one way or the other. In any case, they will all carry their heritage with them, the marks of their origin, but each with new opportunities at their disposal and with new and unique destinies. All this is seen through the eyes of this remarkable grandmother, a woman who – in contradiction to her a worldview she defends to the end, who has an independent and unique opinion for everything, who thumbs her nose at the concept of eternal life and the future – wants her daughter to be happy in the here and now because life on earth is a wonderful thing. These are, in fact, her parting words to her daughter, in an unfinished letter composed in 1976, with the snow falling outside.