BOOKS DISCOVERING CENTRAL EUROPE
invent a different form for each segment. In each case, a real person represents a selected part of the Yiddish world. For example, an employee of the Synagogue informs the parent of a child, new to the town, about the Jewish educational system, while the architectural values of the wooden synagogues are highlighted by a contemporary art historian, in the form of a written request for monument preservation. This means that my account is not retrospective. Therefore, my work does not contain what subsequently occurred. Had I not treated life, I could not have spoken about the destruction. By depicting the Yiddish world through real people and cultural forms, your work approaches documentation. Yet it remains fiction, given that this request was never actually written, and also your account of the research on starvation in the ghetto is your invention. This genre is usually called documentary fiction. The people, the context, and the forms are real, but the narration is fictitious. There was indeed research conducted in the ghetto on mass starvation, in a situation when isolated masses were exposed to the consequences of the lack of food for a very long time. Of course, I did commit transgressions with regard to historical facts. For example, a guide on the Warsaw ghetto could not have been written in 1939. It was a shameful area, inhabited by poor people. I have the impression that in this way you avoid the dominant form of depicting the past, according to which nothing should be forgotten, and everything must be preserved. Am I right in saying that these artistic decisions made it possible for you to not only preserve but also elaborate on the material in question? Absolutely. Writing is preceded by a much longer process, during which I reflect upon historical material. The final outcome only comprises 5 percent of the material gathered. However, what I do is related to Katzenelson and his poem. To express this in the language of the theater, I would say that I provide an illumination, which opens up the space for the poem. I provide a background text. Katzenelson’s poem does not remain within the confines of literature. Do you think that your work is also somehow political? For me, writing is solving a series of aesthetic problems. For example, I was wondering if I could use eloquent language in the dialogue between the rebels of the Warsaw ghetto. Pathos, this idealistic voice was inherent in the period, but it has been doomed by history. However, it is also true that I write this book against the culture of violence and the romantic vision of history, which is still with us, and according to which the individual owes absolute loyalty to the community, a loyalty that is always defined and manipulated by its leaders. Translated by Balázs Berkovits
Zoltán Halasi, born in 1954 in Budapest, is a poet and translator. He has published three books of poems and one volume of essays. He has translated poetry, prose and drama, including works by Goethe, Kafka, Canetti, Jelinek, Różewicz, Szymborska and Venclova. His poetry was awarded the Attila Jozsef prize, and his translations have been honored with the Hieronymus prize.
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PRIVATISATION AND THE END OF SOLIDARITY. CZECH LITERATURE TRYING TO DEFINE ITS NEW ROLE IN SOCIET Y
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JAN NĚMEC
he two decades of Czech literature that followed the regime change should not be dated mechanically. We can consider the publication of Long Distance Interrogation (Dálkový výslech) – a book in which the journalist Karel Hvížďala interviews Václav Havel – as the meaningful beginning of this period. The book came out in December of 1989, shortly before Havel became President of Czechoslovakia. And we could date its end to November of 2011, when the poet Ivan Martin Jirous, legend of the Czech underground, died. His death marks the end of the rising tide of Czech literature. The early 1990s were defined by the repayment of debts. Literature, which had been divided into three streams – official, exile and samizdat –, once again became a unified body of Czech literature, and was able to re-establish contact with other national literatures by means of translations of previously banned authors. Perhaps symptomatic, the first freely published book was Long Distance Interrogation, whereas the title that was published in the highest quantity (about half a million copies) was the decades-delayed reprint of Talks With T.G. Masaryk (Hovory s TGM), where the writer Karel Čapek conversed with the first President of Czechoslovakia. It’s additionally symptomatic that the book was lying on bookshop shelves for a long time and was later offered at a highly discounted price. Those days could be captured with a single word – chaos. VISEGRAD INSIGHT 1|2012