Page 465 [465]
ALEXANDRA M. SZABO
Béla Zsolt wrote several best-sellers during the interwar period, I will be
analyzing four of his novels which best represent the sinuosity of this interval.
The first novel in chronological order is It Ends in Marriage from 1926, which
was translated into English by Louis Rittenberg and published in 1931. The
second chosen work is Gerson and his Wife from 1930, the following An
Embarassing Affair from 1935, and the last, The Woman from the Riverside
of the Danube from 1936."° I believe that these novels represent, through a
period of ten years, Zsolt’s discernment of the common issues in Hungarian
society. His fight against anti-Semitism in the years right before World War
II was, in my opinion, the trickiest and the most effective when using the
media of literary entertainment. He did so with very specific techniques in his
novels through which Zsolt paints a precise picture of an anti-Semitic society,
while he also exploits the medium of books to reach that same Hungarian
society, mostly by making fun of its superficial anti-Semitic values. In order
to make this issue more definitive, thus highlighting its importance, in his
creative process he used specific Jewish identification techniques. I will be
discussing three of these techniques: the positioning of the narrators, with
an emancipatory aim, depicting the inconvenience of Jewish identity, and the
representation of the Jewish body.
(JEWISH?) NARRATORS
The narrative positions are significant in all of the novels because focalization
takes place from the perspective of contemporary society and all of the plots
are more or less set in the time of their writing. Each narrator gives the
impression of a public storyteller — no wonder Zsolt’s style was compared
to Kalman Mikszath’s anecdotic storytelling''W-, who even if he is clearly
omniscient, seems biased by society and behaves like a “smooth operator”.
Due to the narrators’ behavior and choice of words, it is apparent that they
represent a focalization that is the eye of Hungarian society, which is either
not Jewish, the fashionable anti-Semite of the time, or the silent Jew seeking
to assimilate. All the narrators strongly want to connect to their audiences
and separate themselves from the traditional Jewish identity, while behaving
in the characters’ manner (who are all Jewish, in some cases tradition-hiding,
assimilated Jews). On a lexical level, the rhetorical attitudes of the narrators
show that they are only discussing their protagonists’ Jewish identity in
10 Due to the lack of translations, I have translated the sections quoted with impunity; I will be
quoting the original Hungarian sections in the accompanying footnotes.
Nagy: A zsidóság szociográfusa, 368.
* 464 +