Despite Scurrying Time - Review

EMIL FACKENHEIM ONCE FELL SILENT IN THE MIDST OF a discussion of his work on the Holocaust. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and in his eyes flashed the dark flame of a startling realization. His lips trembling, he explained: "Now I see what I have been trying to do for the last thirty years. I have been trying to undo it, to make it as if it never happened. But it did happen. There is no changing that." [1] The Holocaust cannot be undone any more than the history of Europe can be undone. Indeed, undoing one would require undoing the other. For the Holocaust happened not as an aberration of that history but in its culmination. To undo it would require undoing not only centuries of Christian antisemitism but also centuries of European philosophy, literature, culture--the sum of a civilization that shunned the Jews, even as so many of them longed to embrace it. The Reich that was supposed to have reigned over all of Europe for a thousand years required a thousand years and all of Europe to bring it into being. Thu s the history of fifty generations was gathered into the generation of the Holocaust. And, in many ways, that generation was gathered into the life of one its most remarkable poets: Miklos Radnoti. The question of how his life embodied his times and how his times embodied this history is brilliantly investigated in In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Life and Times of Miklos Radnoti, by Zsuzsanna Ozsvath (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

With a knowledge of Hungarian history and literature that is no less than encyclopedic, Zsuzsanna Ozsvath brings to her book a rare combination of scholarly analysis and personal insight. Professor of Literature and the History of Ideas at the University of Texas at Dallas, she is co-editor and co-translator (with Frederick Turner) of Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklos Radnoti. Not only has she researched Radnoti's life and work more thoroughly than perhaps any living scholar (her bibliography is exhaustive and her index highly detailed), but in her own life and work Ozsvath has much in common with Radnoti. As a Jewish child in Nazi Hungary, she was forced to hide from the murderers who killed Radnoti. When she left Hungary in 1957, she carried a volume of Radnoti's poetry in the pocket of her winter coat. In the preface to her book she relates, "Fleeing from my fate as a child of the Holocaust, the siege of Budapest, the Communist terror, and the defeated revolution, yet hurting from the loss of those I le ft behind, I treasured Radnoti's voice and listened to it again and again. I lived with his poems" (xi). Having emerged, much like Radnoti, from the world of Hungarian musicians, poets, and artists, Ozsvath was an accomplished concert pianist who went on to become an equally accomplished scholar of Hungarian, European, and Holocaust literature. No one is better equipped to write this important book on one of Hungary's greatest literary figures; to be sure, her book is itself a literary achievement.

Written with a keen sensitivity for words, Ozsvath's work is an important one because it exceeds its subject matter: In the Footsteps of Orpheus is about more than one man's life and literature-it is about a world and a void and how poetry weaves the two together. It is about poetry and history, poetry and identity, poetry and life, poetry and death. For Radnoti, indeed, "the struggle to become a poet" was "a task for which one must sacrifice one's life, if need be" (x). As Radnoti saw it, his life could be justified by poetry alone, and he traces the struggle to justify his life to the very origin of his life. For in his early adolescence Radnoti discovered that his mother and twin brother died when he was born: he came into the world already bearing an infinite debt. Once he realized that a human being lives because others have died, he knew that a human being must live in a way that sanctifies life, even-or especially-if it means the sacrifice of his own life.

Here, in the words of Emmanuel Levinas, the question of life's meaning is not the question raised by Leibnitz and made famous by Heidegger-Why is there something instead of nothing?-but rather the ethical question: Do I not kill by being? [2] Early on, then, Ozsvath explains, Radnoti "turned to the story of Cain and Abel, with its powerful range of emotional and ritualistic elements, which, he felt, fit the pattern of his own dramatic experience. In that ancient story he discovered his own 'crime and punishment'; in its icons, he found reflected his psychic and poetic metaphors" (3-4). Throughout his life Radnoti confronted and collided with history, as he sought both to answer and to make heard the two questions put to Cain: Where is your brother? And what have you done? [3] What these questions have to do with history and poetry Ozsvath powerfully elucidates in her exploration of the consciousness of a man and the myths of an age.

Myth and Consciousness

Ozsvath's book is divided into five chapters, the first of which is titled "Myth and Consciousness." In this chapter she traces Radnoti's development from his birth in 1909 until he entered the Ferenec Josef University in Szeged in 1930. For Hungary, as well as for all of Europe, these were years of massive upheaval. Emerging from the rubble of the First World War, Radnoti and the writers in his literary circle were possessed not only by a longing for a better world but also by a sense of responsibility that they were the ones who had to bring it about. The title of an anthology that Radnoti and his colleagues compiled toward the end of the 1920s is indicative of their concern: it was called Goodness and contained twelve poems by Radnoti, some of which were included in his first volume of poetry, Pagan Invocation (1930).