KADDISH FOR A CHILD NOT BORN (Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért)

Novel by Imre Kertész, 1990

In a sense Imre Kertész's Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért (1990; Kaddish for a Child Not Born, 1997) is a sequel to his first novel. Here the narrator of Fateless, the 14-year-old Holocaust survivor who coolly recounts his experiences in the camps, has turned into a frantic middle-aged man, a writer taking stock of his botched life: his failed marriage, his unyielding obsession with Auschwitz, and his own Jewishness. At first he reminds us of one of Dostoevsky's desperate chatterboxes as he forever corrects and qualifies his words, acutely aware, both as a writer and an Auschwitz survivor, that often "words lose their form, their context, their signification; they simply turn to naught." He also realizes during the fevered, spellbinding monologue that constitutes the novel that "my urge to speak is nothing but noisy silence, articulated silence …"

The novel is an elegy—kaddish is a painfully ironic word from a man alienated from Judaism—not just for an unborn child but for the life of a mid-twentieth century, Middle European assimilated Jew who had been saddled with a fate he could neither evade nor accept. Not only does he mourn his fate but also he rails against it with an outraged sense of humanity that he regards, willy-nilly, as Jewish. His wife, born after Auschwitz, who had tried to save his benighted soul, his "sick and poisoned consciousness," had to give up—she chose life, another man, and children. What our tormented narrator tries to explain to his now ex-wife is that the reason he couldn't see himself bringing a child into this world had to do not only with his refusal to transmit the awful baggage of Auschwitz to another generation but also with the simple and terrible recognition that "I was incapable of assimilating myself to the existing, the real, to life. "

There was yet another reason this middle-aged Holocaust survivor living in communist Hungary didn't want to become a father. Recalling his own father, and the director of the boarding school where he was sent as a child after his parents' divorce, he sees them as stern and tyrannical authority figures. Indeed, he sees the tyrannies of the modern world, authoritarian rules that led to Auschwitz, in terms of forbidding fathers: "[T]he two terms, Auschwitz and father, resonate the same echoes in me, I told my wife. And if the observation is that God is an exalted father, then God, too, is revealed to me in the image of Auschwitz, I told my wife." Earlier in the narrative he puts his own gloss on a Thomas Bernhard quote: "Rule by terror invariably means rule by the father."

The narrator refers repeatedly to another childhood memory. He visited observant relatives in the country. One morning he accidentally opened the bedroom door and saw not his sheitel -wearing aunt but "a bald woman in a red gown in front of a mirror." He was shocked, appalled, and the image stayed with him—in the narrative it becomes a potent, many-layered symbol of Jewish vulnerability and shame. The narrator's life after the war becomes a temporary condition—he remains an inveterate renter rather than owner of things, a transient, a wanderer, and in the new political order he feels even more alienated. The ugliness of the housing project where he lives—the concrete slab of a building protrudes from an old Budapest neighborhood like an "oversized false limb"—not only is emblematic of the ugliness of "existing socialism" but also stands for the bleakness and hopelessness of his existence.

Kaddish is one long howl of negation, but as in Kertész's other novels of despair something strange, almost incomprehensible, happens that negates the negation. The narrator remembers a fellow inmate in Auschwitz, a "skeleton" everybody called Professor, who one day, upon seeing how very weak the narrator was, gave him his ration, though by doing this he lessened his own chance of survival. Under the circumstances, the narrator says, this act made no sense whatsoever. At the end of his recitation, the man without hope wants to be swept away by the "filthy flow of memories," he wants to drown in their "black warmth"—yet he lives on.

—Ivan Sanders