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BELA ZSOLT, THE HUNGARIAN “SOCIOLOGIST OF JEWRY”
Eszter’s body in It Ends in Marriages is continuously regarded in the text
as hideous and plump. As discussed previously, this novel being one of the
earliest ones, deals with the early manifestations of anti-Jewish ideas, thus here
the motif of the presented body images can be interpreted as the stereotype
of a Jew being hideous and the rich being plump. In Gerson’s case the body
portrayal is mainly discussed through his sanitary issues, next to other
metaphorical depictions. The stereotypical Jewish body of Gerson is directly
displayed and he constantly worries about his “inherited untidiness”™ in the
interval sections of the storyline. The exaggeration of hygienic issues leads to
the point where Gerson, the Hungarian white-collar worker, is compared to a
negro by the narrator, claiming he is as dirty as a black man’s skin. Dr. Hell’s
(The Embarrassing Affair) body issues are to be understood as a metaphor for
his self-identification (evolving around the fact that he is Jewish, without him
seeing its significance). The corporeal issues develop with the progression
of his self-negligence in the plot: starting with a toe fracture, he ends up
coping with sexual incompetence, which then leads to an identity-crisis and
eventually he commits suicide (gets rid of the burden of his body)”. And with
the passage of time, by 1936, not only does the inconvenience of being Jewish
evolve into a strong fear, but the depiction of a Jewish person held to be ugly
evolves into a terrifyingly surrealistic picture. In The Riverside of the Danube,
Viktor, the protagonist-narrator draws hypnagogic pictures not only of Hitler,
but of his nephew’s appearance, the son of a German Nazi painter (an obvious
reference to Hitler again) and a Jewish mother, with the mixed attributes of a
stereotypical Aryan and a Jewess.
Zsolt’s prose, from which I have analyzed four pieces, mirrors the social
problems of the interwar years in Hungary through a biased, but omniscient
narrative voice. I have concentrated on well-established Jewish identification
techniques to find an outcome that is, in my opinion, of greater significance
regarding the era than pure aesthetic values. Allin all, I believe that the chosen
works between 1926 and 1936 are not only important in the portrayal of the
reception and representation of interwar Hungary’s social issues regarding
“the Jewish question”, but they reveal Béla Zsolt’s talent in having an extensive
sociological and documentarian approach throughout his creative process by
depicting the several layers of Hungarian society. Béla Zsolt, referred to as an
undeservedly forgotten writer’®, truly deserves to be reconsidered both as a
writer and as a literary sociologist from a historically significant period.
24 Zsolt: Gerson, 12.
25 Zsolt explores the bodily event of suicide on a whole new level in his book written after the
Holocaust, Nine Suitcases (translated to English by Ladislaus Lob). However, the notion of
Jewish identity and identification after the Shoah are of a different aspect, therefore I am not
discussing it here.
He is called so on almost all of the back-cover copies of his republished novels, as well as by
recent reception.
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