Abstract
Irène Némirovsky (1903–1942) and Károly Pap (1897–1945) belong roughly to the same generation, and shared the same fate, dying at a young age in a Nazi concentration camp. Aside from that terrible similarity, many things separated them. But they were both deeply preoccupied with what I am calling the “Jewish question for Jews,” and produced powerful fictional works depicting the individual malaise and the existential dilemmas that characterized the lives of secular or acculturated Jews in Europe in the early twentieth-century. They can both be called “portrayers of conflicted Jewish identity.” I analyze some of their most characteristic works, showing that they shared a highly pessimistic view about the possibilities of Jewish assimilation.
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Notes
The classic work on this division in the German context is Stephen Aschheim’s Brothers and Strangers.
Lesznai’s response was not included in Hanák’s anthology.
Kafka, Diaries, 1910–1923; quoted in Begley (2008, p. 63).
This was confirmed at the meeting of the Hungarian Comparative Literature Association in October 2018, where I delivered the oral version of this essay as a keynote speech. When I asked the audience, composed mostly of Hungarian literary scholars, who among them had read Pap, very few hands went up.
Writing Journal for “Fraternité.” Archives Némirovsky, IMEC, ALM 2999.13.
There is a long literary tradition that presents hunting as a sign of “Frenchness” we well as of upper-class status. For a Jew to hunt is a sign of assimilation, as in the famous hunting scene in Jean Renoir’s film The Rules of the Game, where the Jewish aristocrat is shown to be an expert marksman. Patrick Modiano has parodied this tradition in his novel Livret de famille, where the young narrator is invited to a weekend of hunting and runs away once he has a gun in his hand.
This is the theme developed in a play that Pap wrote in the late 1920 s but that was never published until 2000: Leviát György. The title character is a young Jewish officer who volunteered for duty in the Hungarian Army and is stationed on the Italian front during World War I (just as Pap himself was, in 1915). Leviát György is everyone’s favorite comrade, handsome and younger than the others, but his situation changes drastically when he confesses to his superior officers that he is Jewish and that he had hidden that fact because he feared their prejudices. Although they declare that nothing has changed for them after this revelation, Leviát is soon suspected (unjustly) of “protecting another Jew,” a fearful Jewish soldier under his command who has tried to bribe his way out of guard duty. In a desperate effort to save his reputation in the eyes of his non-Jewish comrades, Leviát volunteers for a dangerous mission that will probably cost him his life, taking the Jewish soldier with him. This play (never performed in Hungary) was rejected for performance by the Theater Guild of New York in 1931 on the grounds that the public might consider it antisemitic. (See Ilona Petrányi’s Afterword in Pap, Drámàk, p. 283).
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Parts of this essay were adapted from my book (Suleiman 2016) and from the pages I wrote in the introduction to Contemporary Jewish writing in Hungary: An anthology (Suleiman and Forgács 2003). All translations from French and Hungarian are my own.
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Suleiman, S.R. The “Jewish Question” in interwar literature: Irène Némirovsky and Károly Pap. Neohelicon 47, 615–627 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00554-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00554-x