By Benjamin Ivry January 5, 2011

Parkinson’s disease has not deterred the octogenarian Hungarian Jewish Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész from literary productivity. Adding to justly-praised books such as “Fatelessness,” “Kaddish for an Unborn Child,” and “Detective Story,” still available from Vintage Books, in October Kertész’s French publisher Les éditions Actes Sud released a new translation of “A Galley Slave’s Diary” (Gályanapló in the original Hungarian, first published in 1992).

Capturing the novelist’s meditations from 1961 to 1991, “A Galley Slave’s Diary” fascinatingly gauges the writer’s emotional and spiritual concerns, as he produces works which earned him 2002’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Born into a Hungarian Jewish family in 1929, he was deported to Auschwitz at age fourteen, and later returned to East Europe. In 1991 Kertész notes that what saved him from imitating Western European authors who were Holocaust survivors and later suicides, such as Paul Celan, Jean Améry, and Primo Levi, is that by living under Eastern bloc tyranny, Kertész essentially “continued [his] prisoner’s life,” with no postwar hopes to disappoint.

Kertész’s dark pessimism has echoes of the Romanian French aphorist Emil Cioran who he quoted in 1990:

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

A book is a postponed suicide

Yet as an Auschwitz survivor, unlike Cioran, Kertész wields unique ironic power. In 1989 he quoted the allegedly anti-Semitic historian Arnold Toynbee saying “Jews should enrich western culture, that should be their role,” to which Kertész adds drily: “A belated revelation, as far as I am concerned.” The same year, Kertész writes self-analytically:

Like Simone Weil, I take any friendliness, including simple politeness, to be a mistake. She learned that by working in a factory, whereas I, as a less sensitive person, needed a more extreme lesson.

In 1983, Kertész had already noted about Weil that during World War II, she insisted on eating no more than the rations allotted to citizens in Occupied France, “without a word about what Jews were given to eat in Auschwitz.” Kertész concludes about Weil: “What an odd spirit; great, but only in extent, in other words deep, but narrow.” Among the many other authors discussed is an admiring 1973 note about Hungarian Jewish writer Antal Szerb, murdered by the Nazis in 1945 after writing about Budapest’s Chain Bridge.

By contrast, the Austrian Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger is likened by Kertész to a “singularly perverse kapo who, not satisfied with torturing others, attacks himself in his free time.” These compellingly insightful private jottings deserve prompt translation into English but until then they can, and should, be perused in Hungarian and French.

Watch Kertész read a Hungarian poem in March 2010.

And watch him, on the same occasion, recalling his deportation to Auschwitz.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

$90 $180

$360

Other amount