Popular music in Socialist and Post-socialist Eastern Europe was one of the important cultural spheres where ideological and political dissent could be embraced by millions of young people. Before 1989 underground rock music, blues, and other Western music genres were largely disseminated through underground channels. At the same time, local bands also developed their own versions of these genres by adapting them to the specific musical and political traditions in the region. Besides the dissemination of Western styles, folk music and folk dance movements also served as crucial tools for political resistance. Starting in the early 1990s, new music genres found their way into Eastern Europe and since then local music industries have continued to play a key role in the region’s cultural arena. The political nature of Eastern European music is the focus of several monographs and collections such as Rocking The State: Rock Music And Politics In Eastern Europe And Russia by Sabrina Petra Ramet (1994), Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe by Maria Cizmic (2012), and Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc: Youth Cultures, Music, and the State in Russia and Eastern Europe by William Jay Risch (2015). However, the intersection between music and cinema has so far been largely overlooked, if not altogether neglected. The articles in the volume Popular Music and the Moving Image in Eastern Europe, edited by Ewa Mazierska and Zsolt Győri, offer a long overdue correction to this imbalance. The present collection is a testimony to both Eastern Europeans’ long-standing fascination with British and American music and to the ways in which this music has continuously been appropriated and infused with an Eastern European “flair.” Exactly what the word “flare” means is the subject of the studies carefully curated by Ewa Mazierska and Zsolt Győri. The editors describe three identifiable themes in the collection. The first group of studies examines Eastern European musicals or “films approximating to this genre” (18). The second part of the book deals with films that “document specific music or music traditions” (19). Short experimental films are at the center of the book’s third and last part. Interestingly, neither the Table of
在社会主义和后社会主义东欧，流行音乐是重要的文化领域之一，数百万年轻人可以接受意识形态和政治异见。在1989年之前，地下摇滚音乐、蓝调音乐和其他西方音乐类型主要通过地下渠道传播。与此同时，当地乐队也根据当地特定的音乐和政治传统，发展了这些流派的自己版本。除了西方风格的传播，民间音乐和民间舞蹈运动也成为政治抵抗的重要工具。从20世纪90年代初开始，新的音乐流派进入东欧，从那时起，当地音乐产业继续在该地区的文化舞台上发挥关键作用。东欧音乐的政治本质是几本专著和文集的重点，如Sabrina Petra Ramet的《摇摆国家:东欧和俄罗斯的摇滚乐和政治》(1994)，Maria Cizmic的《表演痛苦:东欧的音乐和创伤》(2012)，以及William Jay Risch的《苏联集团的青年和摇滚:俄罗斯和东欧的青年文化，音乐和国家》(2015)。然而，到目前为止，音乐和电影之间的交集在很大程度上被忽视了，如果不是完全被忽视的话。由Ewa Mazierska和Zsolt Győri编辑的《流行音乐和东欧的动态图像》一书中的文章为这种不平衡提供了一个迟来的纠正。目前的收藏证明了东欧人对英美音乐的长期迷恋，以及这种音乐不断被挪用和注入东欧“天赋”的方式。“耀斑”这个词的确切含义是Ewa Mazierska和Zsolt Győri精心策划的研究主题。编辑们在文集中描述了三个可识别的主题。第一组研究考察了东欧的音乐剧或“接近这一类型的电影”(18)。本书的第二部分涉及“记录特定音乐或音乐传统”的电影(19)。实验短片是本书第三部分，也是最后一部分的中心。有趣的是，无论是表
{"title":"Mazierska, Ewa and Zsolt Győri, ed. 2019. Popular Music and the Moving Image in Eastern Europe. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 250 pp.","authors":"Lilla Tőke","doi":"10.5195/ahea.2020.413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2020.413","url":null,"abstract":"Popular music in Socialist and Post-socialist Eastern Europe was one of the important cultural spheres where ideological and political dissent could be embraced by millions of young people. Before 1989 underground rock music, blues, and other Western music genres were largely disseminated through underground channels. At the same time, local bands also developed their own versions of these genres by adapting them to the specific musical and political traditions in the region. Besides the dissemination of Western styles, folk music and folk dance movements also served as crucial tools for political resistance. Starting in the early 1990s, new music genres found their way into Eastern Europe and since then local music industries have continued to play a key role in the region’s cultural arena. The political nature of Eastern European music is the focus of several monographs and collections such as Rocking The State: Rock Music And Politics In Eastern Europe And Russia by Sabrina Petra Ramet (1994), Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe by Maria Cizmic (2012), and Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc: Youth Cultures, Music, and the State in Russia and Eastern Europe by William Jay Risch (2015). However, the intersection between music and cinema has so far been largely overlooked, if not altogether neglected. The articles in the volume Popular Music and the Moving Image in Eastern Europe, edited by Ewa Mazierska and Zsolt Győri, offer a long overdue correction to this imbalance. The present collection is a testimony to both Eastern Europeans’ long-standing fascination with British and American music and to the ways in which this music has continuously been appropriated and infused with an Eastern European “flair.” Exactly what the word “flare” means is the subject of the studies carefully curated by Ewa Mazierska and Zsolt Győri. The editors describe three identifiable themes in the collection. The first group of studies examines Eastern European musicals or “films approximating to this genre” (18). The second part of the book deals with films that “document specific music or music traditions” (19). Short experimental films are at the center of the book’s third and last part. Interestingly, neither the Table of","PeriodicalId":40442,"journal":{"name":"Hungarian Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41432039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores borders, border crossings and the geography of separation in two recent Hungarian films. In The Maiden Danced to Death (2011) and The Notebook (2013), two films produced within a few years of one another and just before the recent re-erection of a border between Hungary and its neighbors, escape provides the vehicle for the brothers’ separation. Of particular interest is the frequent portrayal of brothers separated during communism, often with one brother staying and one leaving. In these films, regimes and ideology tear brothers apart; whether viewed on screen or only alluded to, the crossing of a border becomes a physical symbol of this separation and loss. The fraternal pairs’ personal lives interact with history, especially the repressive state as manifested in Hungary’s border. Geocriticism, border and trauma studies perspectives will help understand the anguish of this separation. In these films, political realities fray the bonds between brothers and lead to their separation through the border, or to its trace, as identities are subjected to traumatic reconfigurations.
{"title":"Borders and Identity in A halálba táncoltatott leány ['The Maiden Danced to Death'] and A nagy füzet ['The Notebook']","authors":"C. Orban","doi":"10.5195/ahea.2020.382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2020.382","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores borders, border crossings and the geography of separation in two recent Hungarian films. In The Maiden Danced to Death (2011) and The Notebook (2013), two films produced within a few years of one another and just before the recent re-erection of a border between Hungary and its neighbors, escape provides the vehicle for the brothers’ separation. Of particular interest is the frequent portrayal of brothers separated during communism, often with one brother staying and one leaving. In these films, regimes and ideology tear brothers apart; whether viewed on screen or only alluded to, the crossing of a border becomes a physical symbol of this separation and loss. The fraternal pairs’ personal lives interact with history, especially the repressive state as manifested in Hungary’s border. Geocriticism, border and trauma studies perspectives will help understand the anguish of this separation. In these films, political realities fray the bonds between brothers and lead to their separation through the border, or to its trace, as identities are subjected to traumatic reconfigurations.","PeriodicalId":40442,"journal":{"name":"Hungarian Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45879191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stenge, Csaba B. 2019. Forgotten Heroes: Aces of the Royal Hungarian Air Force in the Second World War. London: Helion & Company. 438 pp.","authors":"E. Szentkirályi","doi":"10.5195/ahea.2020.411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2020.411","url":null,"abstract":"<jats:p>-</jats:p>","PeriodicalId":40442,"journal":{"name":"Hungarian Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41297591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How long and how strong is Diasporic memory? How many generations can it encompass? How deeply can generations that never lived in the old country relate to its landscape, language, colors and tastes? In the case of Israelis of Hungarian origin, these questions inevitably have to do with the history of Hungarian Jews in the late nineteenth- and early-to-mid twentieth-century, with a focus placed more acutely upon World War II and the Holocaust. Written by a female Israeli researcher of folk and documentary culture who belongs to the second-generation of Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivors, the present article strives to deal with the foregoing and other relevant questions through a comparative literary-cultural analysis of the only two presently existing Hebrew-language Hungarian cookbooks. These two cookbooks were published in Israel in 1987 and 2009, respectively, by two male cultural celebrities, the first by a Hungarian-born journalist, author and politician and the second by an Israeli-born gastronomer and grandson of Hungarian-Israelis.
{"title":"Hungarian Cookbooks for Israeli Readers: A Comparative Literary-Cultural Analysis","authors":"Ilana Rosen","doi":"10.5195/ahea.2020.392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2020.392","url":null,"abstract":"How long and how strong is Diasporic memory? How many generations can it encompass? How deeply can generations that never lived in the old country relate to its landscape, language, colors and tastes? In the case of Israelis of Hungarian origin, these questions inevitably have to do with the history of Hungarian Jews in the late nineteenth- and early-to-mid twentieth-century, with a focus placed more acutely upon World War II and the Holocaust. Written by a female Israeli researcher of folk and documentary culture who belongs to the second-generation of Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivors, the present article strives to deal with the foregoing and other relevant questions through a comparative literary-cultural analysis of the only two presently existing Hebrew-language Hungarian cookbooks. These two cookbooks were published in Israel in 1987 and 2009, respectively, by two male cultural celebrities, the first by a Hungarian-born journalist, author and politician and the second by an Israeli-born gastronomer and grandson of Hungarian-Israelis.","PeriodicalId":40442,"journal":{"name":"Hungarian Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45688533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Charting the dramatic rise of the far right in Hungary since the late 1990s, this comprehensive study by Péter Krekó and Attila Juhász draws on an extensive body of original research to explain both the popular appeal and electoral successes of two key Hungarian parties: the radical right Jobbik (Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom [‘Movement for a Better Hungary’]), and the populist right Fidesz (Fiatal Demokraták Szövetség [‘Alliance of Young Democrats’]). As the authors note at the very beginning of the book, the consolidation of illiberal politics in Hungary has over the last decade garnered a great deal of attention from Hungarian and foreign scholars, as well as from international media, and for good reason. The “meteoric rise” of Jobbik since 2006, coupled with the growing extremism of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, demand explanation, especially in light of the fact that together the two parties captured, in both the 2010 and the 2014 general elections, roughly seventy percent of the popular vote. Focusing in particular on Jobbik and its supporters, and taking the broader European context into consideration, Krekó and Juhász argue that the dramatic shift in contemporary Hungarian politics needs to be examined from two critical points of view: social demand and political supply. Although Jobbik’s popularity had already begun to wane by the time they published their study in 2017, the authors contend that a detailed analysis of Jobbik’s appeal and relative political competencies opens up new perspectives on the specific nature of the far right in Hungary, and this, in turn, helps us to better understand Fidesz’s decision to adopt, in the wake of their electoral victories in 2010 and 2014, increasingly populist, nativist, and authoritarian approaches. Stressing the need to gauge and understand the social demand behind the popularity of the far right in Hungary, Krekó and Juhász employ an evaluation criterion called the Demand for Right-Wing Extremism index (DEREX), a measurement tool developed by analysts at the Political Capital Institute (a policy research and consulting institute founded in Budapest in 2001, of which Krekó is executive director and Juhász is deputy director). A percent-based indicator, DEREX provides a quantitative overview of responses to opinion-poll surveys that gauge the attitudes and dispositions of respondents in four main categories: prejudices and welfare chauvinism; right-wing value orientation; antiestablishment sentiment; and fear, distrust, and pessimism (40). Though they do not ignore social and economic factors entirely, Krekó and Juhász contend that ideological and psychological elements, as well as emotional factors, need to
Péter Krekó和Attila Juhász的这项综合研究描绘了自20世纪90年代末以来极右翼在匈牙利的急剧崛起，利用了大量的原始研究来解释匈牙利两个关键政党的民意吸引力和选举成功：激进右翼政党Jobbik，以及民粹主义右翼青民盟（Fiatal Demokraták Szövetség[青年民主党联盟]）。正如作者在本书一开始就指出的那样，在过去十年中，匈牙利非自由政治的巩固引起了匈牙利和外国学者以及国际媒体的极大关注，这是有充分理由的。自2006年以来，Jobbik的“迅速崛起”，加上匈牙利执政党青民盟日益增长的极端主义，需要做出解释，特别是考虑到两党在2010年和2014年大选中总共获得了大约70%的选票。Krekó和Juhász特别关注Jobbik及其支持者，并考虑到更广泛的欧洲背景，认为当代匈牙利政治的戏剧性转变需要从两个关键的角度来审视：社会需求和政治供给。尽管在2017年发表研究报告时，Jobbik的受欢迎程度已经开始下降，但作者认为，对Jobbik吸引力和相对政治能力的详细分析为匈牙利极右翼的具体性质开辟了新的视角，这反过来又有助于我们更好地理解青民盟的决定，在2010年和2014年的选举胜利之后，他们采取了越来越民粹主义、本土主义和威权主义的做法。Krekó和Juhász强调需要衡量和了解匈牙利极右翼受欢迎背后的社会需求，他们采用了一种称为右翼极端主义需求指数的评估标准，政治资本研究所（Political Capital Institute，2001年成立于布达佩斯的一家政策研究和咨询机构，Krekó担任执行主任，Juhász担任副主任）分析师开发的一种衡量工具。DEREX是一个基于百分比的指标，它对民意调查的反应进行了定量概述，该调查衡量了四大类受访者的态度和倾向：偏见和福利沙文主义；右翼价值取向；反建制情绪；以及恐惧、不信任和悲观（40）。尽管他们并没有完全忽视社会和经济因素，但Krekó和Juhász认为，意识形态和心理因素以及情感因素需要
{"title":"Krekó, Péter and Attila Juhász. 2017. The Hungarian Far Right: Social Demand, Political Supply, and International Context. Stuttgart: ibidem Press. 267 pp.","authors":"Steven Jobbitt","doi":"10.5195/ahea.2020.400","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2020.400","url":null,"abstract":"Charting the dramatic rise of the far right in Hungary since the late 1990s, this comprehensive study by Péter Krekó and Attila Juhász draws on an extensive body of original research to explain both the popular appeal and electoral successes of two key Hungarian parties: the radical right Jobbik (Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom [‘Movement for a Better Hungary’]), and the populist right Fidesz (Fiatal Demokraták Szövetség [‘Alliance of Young Democrats’]). As the authors note at the very beginning of the book, the consolidation of illiberal politics in Hungary has over the last decade garnered a great deal of attention from Hungarian and foreign scholars, as well as from international media, and for good reason. The “meteoric rise” of Jobbik since 2006, coupled with the growing extremism of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, demand explanation, especially in light of the fact that together the two parties captured, in both the 2010 and the 2014 general elections, roughly seventy percent of the popular vote. Focusing in particular on Jobbik and its supporters, and taking the broader European context into consideration, Krekó and Juhász argue that the dramatic shift in contemporary Hungarian politics needs to be examined from two critical points of view: social demand and political supply. Although Jobbik’s popularity had already begun to wane by the time they published their study in 2017, the authors contend that a detailed analysis of Jobbik’s appeal and relative political competencies opens up new perspectives on the specific nature of the far right in Hungary, and this, in turn, helps us to better understand Fidesz’s decision to adopt, in the wake of their electoral victories in 2010 and 2014, increasingly populist, nativist, and authoritarian approaches. Stressing the need to gauge and understand the social demand behind the popularity of the far right in Hungary, Krekó and Juhász employ an evaluation criterion called the Demand for Right-Wing Extremism index (DEREX), a measurement tool developed by analysts at the Political Capital Institute (a policy research and consulting institute founded in Budapest in 2001, of which Krekó is executive director and Juhász is deputy director). A percent-based indicator, DEREX provides a quantitative overview of responses to opinion-poll surveys that gauge the attitudes and dispositions of respondents in four main categories: prejudices and welfare chauvinism; right-wing value orientation; antiestablishment sentiment; and fear, distrust, and pessimism (40). Though they do not ignore social and economic factors entirely, Krekó and Juhász contend that ideological and psychological elements, as well as emotional factors, need to","PeriodicalId":40442,"journal":{"name":"Hungarian Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48828612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper presents Gergely Peterfy’s Stuffed Barbarian [ Kitomott Barbar , 2014] in the context of eighteenth-century, pre-Revolutionary debates on slavery and the related question of the “human.” It investigates the ethical and political stakes of Peterfy’s narrative technique and argues that the improbably omniscient, third person character narration used throughout the novel performs the universalist and exclusive ideology Bildung of the European Enlightenment, which Peterfy mourns.
{"title":"Gergely Péterfy’s Stuffed Barbarian [‘Kitömött Barbár’], the Ethics of Narration and the Politics of the Human: A British Context","authors":"Andrea Timár","doi":"10.5195/ahea.2020.393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2020.393","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents Gergely Peterfy’s Stuffed Barbarian [ Kitomott Barbar , 2014] in the context of eighteenth-century, pre-Revolutionary debates on slavery and the related question of the “human.” It investigates the ethical and political stakes of Peterfy’s narrative technique and argues that the improbably omniscient, third person character narration used throughout the novel performs the universalist and exclusive ideology Bildung of the European Enlightenment, which Peterfy mourns.","PeriodicalId":40442,"journal":{"name":"Hungarian Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46889745","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Koerner, András. 2018. Jewish Cuisine in Hungary – A Cultural History with 83 Authentic Recipes. Budapest: Corvina and Central European University CEU Press. 420 pp. Illus.","authors":"Ilana Rosen","doi":"10.5195/ahea.2020.407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2020.407","url":null,"abstract":"<jats:p>-</jats:p>","PeriodicalId":40442,"journal":{"name":"Hungarian Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46297026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Faced with communist Czechoslovakia and Hungary’s 1977 scheme to construct a diversion canal and hydroelectric dam system on the Danube, a movement gradually arose in Hungary to fight the plan. This national dissident campaign, which started with discussion groups and technical articles, not only brought in an extraordinary cross-section of opinion and background—united around the preservation of natural heritage—but played a key part in the rebirth of a lively civic society within a long repressed political and intellectual culture. The story of this movement’s arguments, strategies, and ultimate success is both a key story in the decay and collapse of communist rule in Hungary, but a case study in how a non-western European/American approach to the politics of preservation can rally support and achieve consensus.
{"title":"Let the River Flow: Fighting a Dam in Communist Hungary","authors":"D. Reynolds","doi":"10.5195/ahea.2020.391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2020.391","url":null,"abstract":"Faced with communist Czechoslovakia and Hungary’s 1977 scheme to construct a diversion canal and hydroelectric dam system on the Danube, a movement gradually arose in Hungary to fight the plan. This national dissident campaign, which started with discussion groups and technical articles, not only brought in an extraordinary cross-section of opinion and background—united around the preservation of natural heritage—but played a key part in the rebirth of a lively civic society within a long repressed political and intellectual culture. The story of this movement’s arguments, strategies, and ultimate success is both a key story in the decay and collapse of communist rule in Hungary, but a case study in how a non-western European/American approach to the politics of preservation can rally support and achieve consensus.","PeriodicalId":40442,"journal":{"name":"Hungarian Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47070797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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
{"title":"Szirtes, George. 2019. The Photographer at Sixteen - The Death and Life of a Fighter. Quercus, London: Maclehose Press. 205 pp.","authors":"D. Szőke","doi":"10.5195/ahea.2020.412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2020.412","url":null,"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","PeriodicalId":40442,"journal":{"name":"Hungarian Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44326380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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