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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. * 468 "
