A Fugue of Death
Kaddish for a Child Not Born
by Imre Kertész; translated by Christopher C. and Katharina M.
Wilson
Evanston, Illinois: HydraBooks/Northwestern University Press, 2002
(95 pages; $14.95, paperback)
reviewed by Graeme Hunter
The narrator of this slim, powerful novella, identified only as B, is a writer born into a Jewish family in Budapest and snatched from thence into Auschwitz. There the terrible ovens transform the meaning of his life (and every life) into smoke. Without ever departing from the first person, B nevertheless calls forth a polyphony of other voices in this piecemeal retrospective of a life constructed around a negation of life.
Imre Kertész1, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in literature, begins Kaddish with an assertive “NO,” followed by an explanation of what the narrator is trying to negate. The NOs recur at regular emphatic intervals in a story that resembles (at least in form) the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning and T. S. Eliot, disclosing the inner thoughts of its narrator, often more than he realizes.
In theme and style Kaddish was inspired by one of the most famous and disturbing poems of postwar Germany, Paul Celan’s Fugue of Death. In the book, as in the poem, themes and voices weave together in counterpoint and come apart again to bring home the narrator’s vision of the Holocaust’s hideous tale. There are no breaks in the telling. It must be read at a single sitting. The closest thing to subdivisions are the occasions on which the tired narrator rouses himself to utter yet another NO.
We slowly discover the reason for this strident negativity. B is addressing someone who, though non-existent, nevertheless has a certain claim upon him. The denials are shouted at a child—his own child—who, by the narrator’s choice, will never be born. “Like a malignant sickness a question began to take distinct shape within me: ‘Were you to be a dark-eyed little girl? With pale spots of scattered freckles around your little nose? Or a stubborn boy? With cheerful, hard eyes like blue-gray pebbles?’” These are the possible children that B refuses—B and his ex-wife, who became his ex-wife for desiring to bring these children into being.
The refusal of life, especially new life, encloses B within the meaningless world of his work. He deals in words that never issue in meaning. He describes his writing task, therefore, in a phrase from Celan’s Fugue of Death, as “digging my grave in the air,” evoking those lives that drifted away like smoke from the death-camp chimneys.
There are two reasons why the narrator can never allow such a tragedy as the birth of his child. First, because “one can never recover from Auschwitz, no one can ever recover from the Auschwitz malady.” And this B affirms despite some redemptive factors he has to acknowledge. He admits having seen real goodness at Auschwitz and even having experienced it himself. He recalls how, when he was sick, one of the still ambulatory skeletons in the camp got the chance to get double food rations by stealing B’s. Extra rations often meant the difference between survival and death. Yet instead of taking B’s rations, the other prisoner risked his life to bring them to where B lay. And then there was the indescribable joy of liberation, “the flavour of an unforgettably sweet and cautious experience of a life regained.”
But neither epiphany of goodness could restore what the ovens had consumed. Nothing could return to B the ability to be a Jew. That is his second reason for refusing life to his child. B had not wanted to be a Jew. Indeed, he had barely known he was one until they informed him by taking him for extermination. He comes to associate being Jewish with an event from his childhood, when he had crept undetected into the room of one of his aunts and seen her in a red dressing gown staring into a mirror. He saw with loathing that she was bald. This sight and the feeling of disgust it evokes later comes to define for him his Jewishness: “I was: a bald woman in a red gown in front of a mirror.”
This tale is so frankly autobiographical that there is no danger in stepping out of it for a moment and into the life of the author. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Kertész made it plain that he sees in Auschwitz not just the end of Judaism as an authentic religious existence but also the end of the Christian civilization of the West. He said: “I discovered in the Holocaust the human condition, the last stage of a great adventure at which Europeans have arrived after two thousand years of culture and morality.”
And so there can be no children.
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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