OCR
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 +