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Damaged Dynasty
Lev Raphael
AN EXTRAORDINARY "Trial" took place in Budapest in 1937, where the court had no real jurisdiction and the defendant proudly admitted his guilt.
At issue was "Azarel," a novel by the leftist Hungarian Jewish writer K�roly Pap (1897-1945) who was accused of presenting a profoundly negative portrait of Jews and Judaism. A "tribunal" was set up by the Hungarian Zionist Association, and lawyers presented both sides of the case: Was the book harmful to the Jews or did its independence as a work of art preclude any such questions? An account of its hearing appeared in a 1938 article in a Hungarian Jewish journal, M�lt �s J�v� (Past and Future).
Especially disturbing to some members of the Jewish community was the book�s unflattering portrait of the narrator�s "progressive" rabbi father, as a bully, hypocrite, and atheist.
When it was Pap�s turn to testify, the author gave a blistering, impassioned speech. He argued that the book was indeed "ruthless" because that was the only way "to get all the way down to the depth of the Jewish soul" and wake it from "comfortable mendacious dreams."
In the end the tribunal delivered no verdict, and the book seems to have had more success with literary figures who admired Pap than with a wider audience. Pap was sent to a Hungarian labor camp in May of 1944, deported to Buchenwald in November, and murdered by the Nazis at Bergen-Belsen in 1945.
Now "Azarel" has appeared in English, and we owe the publisher and translator profound thanks, because it�s a remarkable and heartrending novel that has not been widely translated.
The novel is surprisingly contemporary, offering an unforgettable portrait of the victims of religious fundamentalism run amok, though it�s located at the turn of the 20th century in rural Hungary. Like some patriarch in a Greek myth whose actions doom his descendants to lives of terror and confusion, Grandfather Jeremiah Azarel is a man obsessed. Steeped in the Torah, Torah commentaries, and mysticism, this Hungarian Jew has given up his trade in wool and become a virtual hermit, living in a tent behind a synagogue, making his own bread, taking incessant ritual baths.
Though his last name, Azarel, means "God has helped," in his case it�s terribly ironic because his life is so bitter. A complete misanthrope, he dismisses the world as "blind" and Jews trying to adapt to it as worse: foolish or evil. Unhinged by his obsessions, he wants at least one of his many sons to achieve true knowledge of Torah so as to bring Israel�s redemption closer, but they all fail him.
Thundering, abusive, scornful, Jeremiah is a figure of strange majesty, and Pap�s account of his mania is electrifying. "His heart was like a graveyard; a graveyard in which he had buried, along with his children, the larger part of his own life, and which was now haunted by the characters of an ancient world, the prophets of the Holy Writ. With them he awoke, of them he dreamed. He spoke their language, blending his words with all the dismal passion that his troubles had extinguished in him; and which now gushed forth like a volcano from the sea, spewing lava."
Jeremiah�s grandson Gyuri, who narrates the book as an adult, sees him as having acted like the "stern eastern despot of a God" he believes in, but this is no mere assessment from a distance. Jeremiah bullied Gyuri�s father and mother into handing over Gyuri as a toddler to be raised by him. What followed was a nightmarish plunge into an incomprehensible, claustrophobic welter of chanting and prayer and isolation that fills Gyuri with terror of even inanimate objects.
He�s only released after some years when his grandfather dies, but returning to his parents� home and finally going off to first grade bring a new set of emotional prison bars. The years of his strange exile from the family are simply not discussed, and his bizarre fantasy life and his longing for love isolate Gyuri even further from his parents and brother and sister. He wanders his house imploring chairs and tables to come alive as they do in stories; it�s not surprising he�d see one world in terms of another, because for his grandfather, "the entire Bible had a magical, secret meaning."
When Gyuri reveals his fantasies, he is mocked. In fact, he�s mocked for almost everything. The portrait of his constant parental shaming may remind readers of Samuel Butler�s "The Way of All Flesh"; Hungarian writers admired Pap for his ability to express the universal while writing from a Jewish perspective.
Castigated as "evil" and "crazy" for his willfulness and questions about everything, Gyuri repeatedly refers to his own and his family�s shame in one highly charged encounter after another. This boy with a "voracious little heart" is lost in a sea of "helplessness and shame," caught between a dithery, fanatically house-proud mother who can�t figure him out and a parsimonious, puritanical father. Gyuri�s self-centered mother basically ignores him when she�s not scolding him, and his father tries to subdue the imaginative, prickly boy, haunted by "all the deprivation and suffering of his [own] childhood."
Pap masterfully explores Gyuri�s mixture of fear and reverence for his father, most notably in a scene at the synagogue where his father�s role as rabbi turns him into a glorious, almost legendary figure. His father's special status in the Jewish community is another source of isolation. On one hand, Gyuri feels superior to boys whose fathers are ordinary in his eyes, but on the other, he is constantly being scrutinized because everything he does reflects back on his father. The result is a pathetic mix of embarrassment and superiority which makes him ever more lonely, angry, confused and full of self-hatred -- all of which leads to his attempting to run away from home when he�s nine years old, and an unexpected reversal in his family.
Readers may be startled to see Jewish characters, even the deeply observant ones, refer to God as Yahweh rather than "Hashem," but this is a direct translation from the Hungarian Jahve. Though Pap did nothing to hide his Jewishness, the translator notes, he was determined not to alienate his mainly non-Jewish readership. He consistently used Hungarian terms rather than Hebrew ones, even though he applied them in Jewish contexts. Rather than the Hungarian zsinagoga, for instance, he used templom, which could mean church or synagogue.
The writing in "Azarel" is simple but pungent and the powerful story has a mythic, almost surrealistic feel, offering a unique window into Hungarian Jewish life before the Holocaust. One hopes that Pap�s three other novels will be forthcoming in English and that someone is working on a biography of the man who refused attempts to be helped to escape from Buchenwald to write about what he�d seen, but chose instead to die with his people.
Lev Raphael is the book critic for NPR�s "The Todd Mundt Show." His latest novel is "Burning Down the House" (Walker & Co.).
(December 31, 2001)
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