Jewish Geography
Gyula, near the Romanian bor- der. As a child, he has said, he had no idea his father hailed from a Hungarian Jewish fam- ily. In 1931, as antisemitism was on the rise in Hungary but before the passage of formal anti- Jewish laws in the country, the author’s grandfather had changed their family name. “Our original name was Korin, a Jewish name. With this name, he would never have survived,” Krasznahorkai told a Greek interviewer in 2018. “My grand- father was very wise.” When the author turned elev- en, he learned about his Jewish heritage for the first time. “In the socialist era, it was forbidden to mention it,” Krasznahorkai has said about his Jewish ancestry. “Korin” would later serve as the name of the protagonist, a sui- cidal Hungarian archivist, in Krasznahorkai’s acclaimed 1999 novel, War and War. Many of the author’s books, written in a challenging post- modern style, are concerned with the effects of political tur- moil and national upheaval on everyday citizens, from provin- cial farm workers to intellectu- als. Some, such as Hersch 07769 and Baron Wenckheim’s Home- coming , have plots that deal directly with neo-Nazis. In that 2018 interview, the author, an outspoken oppo- nent of Hungary’s authori- tarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, also addressed his rela- tionship to Judaism in charac- teristically pessimistic fashion. “I am half-Jewish,” he said, “but if things carry on in Hungary as they seem likely to do, I’ll soon be entirely Jewish.” JTA
CULTURE LITERATURE NOBEL PRIZE WINNER’S LITTLE-KNOWN JEWISH PAST by ANDREW LAPIN
Hungarian novelist and screenwriter László Krasznahorkai was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.
yevsky and Gogol. The Swedish Nobel jury called him “a great epic writer in the Central Eu- ropean tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bern- hard, and is characterized by ab- surdism and grotesque excess.” Another prominent champion of Krasznahorkai’s: the Jewish culture critic Susan Sontag, who praised the infamous seven-and- a-half-hour film adaptation of Satantango and deemed him a “master of the apocalypse.” Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in the small town of
THIS YEAR’S NOBEL PRIZE for literature was awarded to a Hun- garian whose work offers bleak visions of existence, and whose father hid his ancestry from him for much of his childhood. László Krasznahorkai, the 71-year-old novelist and screen- writer, achieved internation- al acclaim for formally daring books including Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance , as well as a series of collaborations with the filmmaker Béla Tarr. He is often compared to master Russian novelists like Dosto-
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