Ivan Sanders

Bittersweet Home

In the Land of Hagar. The Jews of Hungary: History, Society and Culture. Edited by Anna Szalai. Tel Aviv, Beth Hatefutsoth, The Nahum Goldman Museum of the Jewish Diaspora and the Israeli Ministry of Defence Publishing House, 304 pp., illustrated.

 

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One of the more intriguing aspects of this book (and others on the subject) is that a number of contributors who deal with Hungarian Jewish culture endeavor to isolate and identify Jewish elements and characteristics even in the works of completely secularised Hungarian artists of Jewish descent who never treated Jewish subjects in their art. A related issue, raised again and again in the literature on Hungarian Jews, has to do with the reasons why certain professions and art forms attracted so many assimilated Hungarian Jews. Essays on secular Jewish musicians, architects, photographers reach the conclusion that the art of these people speaks of their deep commitment to progress and modernity. Eschewing their own musical tradition lest they were seen as fostering ethnic separatism, "these modern-minded Jews," writes musicologist Judit Frigyesi, "escaped to a world of spirituality, so to speak, where existence could be explained through emotions and the symbols of art. They were reluctant to expose this world to the threat of ethnic hatred." In his essay on Hungarian Jews and modern architecture, Rudolf Klein points out that by 1900 the "Hungarian Style" became Jewish even though it no longer employed biblical motifs. "Ödön Lechner's Jewish followers placed Hungarian decoration in a new context that reflects the 'Jewish structural principle': free association, intentionally unstructured constitution, paraphrasing of original themes, combinations resembling language-play." And István Nemeskürty, writing about the role of Jews in the film industry, contends that the "strong participation" of Hungarian Jews in this area may be explained by the fact that "Hungarians have a highly developed visual imagination. The rich visual imagery of Hungarian folk carvings, folk tales and poetry bear witness to this fact. Jewish filmmakers, whose mother tongue was Hungarian, also enjoyed this mastery."
As fascinating as this kind of theorising may be, it entails certain risks. For one thing, it is very difficult (though not impossible) to define a quality that it is at best fluid and elusive. However, some of the formulations about Jewish "essence" and Jewish "genius" come perilously close to those hazy and simplistic notions of Jewishness used often by anti-Semites to label and dismiss certain types of music, art, literature, etc. as subliminally, subconsciously, yet quintessentially, "Jewish".

It would seem that further research into the Hungarian Jewish past and present would yield more tangible results than fanciful hypotheses about what makes a non-Jewish work Jewish. Writer after writer in this volume laments that many areas of Hungarian Jewish history and culture remain unexplored. Kinga Frojimovics in her brief but illuminating overview of Hassidism in Hungary comments that "the history of the movement in Hungary is still uncharted territory". And Judit Frigyesi notes that while Hungary has a rich cantorial tradition reaching back to the nineteenth century, and many in Budapest still remember the outstanding cantors of recent decades, "besides a few accidentally preserved records, we have almost no information about these people."2 Where we do get a great deal of information and insight, is in the longer, more thoroughgoing articles: in Rudolf Klein's survey of the synagogues of Hungary, for instance, or Kinga Frojimovics's examination of the historic split within the Hungarian Jewish community in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Yet, when all is said and done, we may still conclude that In the Land of Hagar is more than a book of scholarship; it is an Israeli tribute to Hungary's Jewry and, indirectly, an homage to Hungarian Jewish contributions to Israeli culture. Published by Tel Aviv's Museum of the Jewish Diaspora and the Ministry of Defence Publishing House, the book is also, in a sense, a memorial, the fourth in a series of volumes on historical Jewish communities around the world. It is also noteworthy that In the Land of Hagar is a beautifully and expensively produced, lavishly illustrated, oversize book. Indeed, the reproductions and photographs - of synagogues, religious articles, artifacts, portraits, as well as documents, caricatures, advertisements, Hungarian Jewish greeting cards and other ephemera from public and private collections - are often more memorable than the texts themselves, whose purpose in many cases is to make the illustrations more meaningful. Some of the reproductions are well known and have been published before, but all of them have been selected with an eye for the significant and the revealing. There is one photograph, accompanying the essay on the Holocaust in Hungary (p. 272), which - to this reviewer, at least - expresses eloquently the ironies of the Hungarian Jewish experience. The picture shows a group of passengers on the "Kasztner train". (In a highly controversial deal worked out by Rezső Kasztner, a Hungarian Zionist, the lives of 1700 wealthy or well-connected Hungarian Jews were traded for money and equipment demanded by the Germans in the spring of 1944.) So the people we see are not ordinary refugees. Well-heeled, stylishly dressed men, women and youngsters pose casually for the camera. They could be vacationers going off to the mountains. (Actually, they were given safe conduct to Switzerland.) There will undoubtedly be some who will leaf through In the Land of Hagar for the pictures. And though this is certainly more than a coffee- table book, some people will no doubt display it as such because of its attractiveness.

Ivan Sanders
is Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's East Central European Center. He is currently at work on a book on Central European Jewish writers and literature.