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ALEXANDRA M. SZABO
But such a panic had never in my life captured me when I realized that I am
Jewish...a helpless Jewish citizen in Central Europe.”
The fear of being Jewish in Central Europe at the time is not only emphasized
through this declaration, but also by the plot consisting of a storyline of a
German fascist being married to a Hungarian Jewish woman, through whom
the Nazi ideology is presented to the reader with all its nightmares. (Literally
nightmares because Viktor, the main character, talks in detail about his
surrealistic dreams about Hitler.)
THE JEWISH BODY
The representation of the Jewish body is a significant and also a modern
identification technique Béla Zsolt uses throughout his oeuvre. As mentioned
above, in the The Woman from the Riverside of the Danube, the first instance
and statement of the narrator-protagonist being a Jew is in a corporeal
lamentation about himself:
Many times I even had the courage to think that maybe I am not uglier than the
usual Jewish-type of my age, which after a long struggle of nomadism finally settled
down and is just about to mature the even bodily evolving effects of the Asian,
North African, Spanish, Slavic environment, climate, soil, nutrition, lifestyle and
culture.??
This depiction of a Jew as being nothing but ugly is one of the many typical
stereotypes born out of anti-Semitism. As Jay Geller, professor of Modern
Jewish Culture, points out: at the emergence of anti-Semitism and during
the interwar period, the interpretation of the Jewish body image came to be
of significance and with modernism there was a growing desire to depict the
Jewish body in all forms of art”, which, due to an anti-Semitic atmosphere,
led to the birth and the empowerment of stereotypes. The development of
stereotypes discussed in professional literature can be traceable in Zsolt’s
novels accordingly.
2 “De hasonló pánik még sohasem fogott el, mint amikor ráeszméltem, hogy zsidó vagyok...
védtelen zsidó polgár, Közép-Európában." In Béla Zsolt: A dunaparti nő, Budapest, Nova
Irodalmi Intézet, 1936, 39.
2 "Sokszor már arra is mertem gondolni, hogy talán nemis vagyok csúnyább, mint a korombeli
átlagos zsidótípus, amely hosszú nomádság, kecmergés után végre letelepedett és az ázsiai,
észak-afrikai, spanyol, szláv környezet, klima, talaj, táplálkozás, életmód és kultúra testet is
formáló hatásait éppen most forrja ki." Ibid., 25.
3 Jay Geller: The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jews and Making Sense of Modernity,
New York, Fordham University Press, 2011, 2-3.
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