Szirtes, George. 2019. The Photographer at Sixteen - The Death and Life of a Fighter. Quercus, London: Maclehose Press. 205 pp.

Abstract

George Szirtes’s memoir The Photographer at Sixteen, winner of the East Anglia Book Award for Biography and Memoir, long-listed for the Wingate Prize and one of the Times Literary Supplement’s Books of the Year, is a moving and absorbing recollection of this poet’s maternal heritage. The book’s undeniable merit is that with the reconstruction of his mother’s figure, Szirtes manages to give meaning to his own Hungarian and Jewish roots, addressing such questions as national and religious identity, displacement, trauma, minority existence and integration in a foreign culture. By doing so, Szirtes powerfully combines historical and autobiographical facts with his artistic imagination, his desire to keep the memory of his mother Magda alive, to recapture her character from fragments of memory, and to ponder about who she was. The figure emerging in this book is of a woman with an iron will and a strong presence, who could be overcome only by her poor health and weak heart. This woman wished to conceal her Jewish identity from her children, and she even made arrangements of a second marriage for her husband once she would be dead. Szirtes’s book is a tender portrait of a mother who survived the most terrible event of the twentieth century, the Holocaust, and who fought for the survival of her family, which could only be achieved at the price of their complete abandonment of their original Jewish identity. After all she had lived through in the Holocaust, at age fifty-one Magda Szirtes took her own life with an overdose of pills. Over four decades after her death, Szirtes ceaselessly attempted to immortalize Magda in his poetry. Nevertheless, it is the form of the memoir that gives the author a better chance to get closer to his parents’ past and thus fill in the blank pages of his family history. This authorial intention is supported by the author's choice of delineating his narrative in a reverse order, meaning by proceeding from the present to the past instead of vice-versa. For Szirtes, going backward in time is “like healing a wound, returning to a perfect unwounded beginning where all is innocence and potential” (5). Like in Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow (1991), or in the movie Memento (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000), reverse chronology is used to highlight the imprint and burden of trauma on the characters and to head toward the time of innocence, the beginning, out of which the trauma later evolves. Photographs, says Szirtes, “make a home in memory and settle in like cuckoos, ousting live images, the tiny mental film clips that appear to constitute all we recall of reality, [...] a frozen moment with life flowing on before and after it” (20). These words bear a striking