An Inside Outsider
WOLL, JOSEPHINE
An Inside Outsider Varieties of Fear: Growing Up Jewish under Nazism and Communism By Peter Kenez American University Press. 214 pp. Cloth $58.50/Paper $26.50. Reviewed by Josephine...
...It is tempting," he writes, "to think that my current preference to rigidly observe routines of all kinds might be related to the frequent and abrupt changes I experienced in the past...
...In this case, the decision unwittingly saved them from death in Auschwitz, to which all Jews from their town were deported shortly thereafter and from which only one returned...
...The effect on him of his early years was, he suggests, multiple and complex...
...The 1956 Revolution brought back political pluralism, but it also brought back the language of Hungarian nationalism?no doubt mainly directed against Russia, yet reminiscent enough of the Nazi period to raise hackles on the neck of a boy who lived through those times...
...Given Kenez' experiences, how could anyone believe in causality...
...When he writes about Russia his gaze is exceptionally well-informed, steeped in Russian history and culture and refined by many visits over the years...
...They demanded Imre Nagy's reinstatement and an end to forced collectivization, and asserted the right to freedom of expression...
...Kenez' "decision" to leave Hungary was no less irresolute and haphazard than much else in his life...
...So he was not a hero...
...Kenez describes his life from his earliest memories, at the age of four, until he was almost 20...
...Back in Budapest in 1950, Kenez experienced firsthand the terror of Stalinist denunciation...
...Immediately after Kenez' father disappeared, his mother took her son and went to live with her mother and sister in Budapest...
...In place of the yellow star on other front doors, a magnet for the local Angels of Death, his bore a pink quarantine blazon that scared them off...
...his resounding affirmative trailed off into a far more equivocal "yes but...
...Kenez writes with candor and insight of this "short interlude between two mad Utopias, a time of pathetic attempts by little people to lead normal lives...
...He was 19 and caught up in the excitement...
...When it became clear the Nazis would lose, Hungary's conservative leader, Miklos Horthy, made a last-ditch attempt to curry favor with the Allies by refusing to deport the Jews of Budapest—hence Kenez and his kin survived...
...the seductive fantasies of the movie theater on the ground floor of his Budapest building...
...Kenez' narration allows the reader to understand the extent to which fear of resurgent anti-Semitism drove a fear of any change, even change that looked like it might be for the better...
...And for a fleeting instant—a month or two—the world seemed to be going in the right direction...
...The three months between Horthy's arrest by the Nazis in October 1944 and the entrance of the Red Army into Budapest in January 1945, were the worst period for the Budapest Jews, because the least predictable...
...Reviewed by Josephine Woll Author, "Soviet Dissident Literature: A Critical Guide " THE HUNGARIAN-BORN historian Peter Kenez is known to New Leader readers for his reports on the former Soviet Union and its post-breakup convulsions...
...His sin: The comment—made to a classmate mostly to show off his pseudosophistication—that he preferred Italian and French films because "you can practically smell the dirty feet from the screen" at Soviet films...
...Hungarian Nazis were "in charge," but the order of the day was in fact anarchy...
...Thanks to fate, geography and history, Kenez' experiences are a fascinating conjunction of the ordinary and the extraordinary...
...Spontaneity," he writes of the crowds that overthrew the old regime, "always reminded us of the Nazis...
...Much like the characters in Elsa Morante's novel History, he and his family were real-life pawns, manipulated by people and events that had no fundamental connection with them...
...For six months preceding November 1956, despite his discomfort with crowds, he stood with thousands of others, raptly listening to intellectuals who denounced the rigged Matyas Rakosi-era trials and the persecution of the "good Communists...
...After the War his mother remarried and the family moved to Szekesfehervar, a backwater where Kenez' stepfather tried his hand at various businesses until the Communists put a stop to all private enterprise...
...But when childhood is punctuated by bombs dropping, when boyhood develops in the postwar chaos of semiprivate, semi-SocialistHungary, and when youth contends with first a Sta-linized and then a de-Stalinized nation, culminating in revolution and emigration—well, that's not quite so humdrum...
...It is also tempting to see in his later choice of profession an effort to understand, and therefore in some small way to master, those intractable and mysterious historical forces that pushed him around the bloody chessboard of Europe in those years...
...It was one of the many actions in Kenez' life whose consequences could not be foretold...
...Then the tanks rolled in...
...by 1948 it was over...
...Kenez' response to the Hungarian Revolution was an enthusiastic "yes...
...He learned not to expect much: "Who can tell me now that the world has not been getting better...
...He survived until the camp was closed down, only to be shot by the Nazis—along with other inmates on forced march—before the Allies arrived...
...He learned at a very young age that what people do or fail to do, whether they are "good" or "bad," all too often has no logical bearing on what happens to them...
...Luck—fate?—again helped Kenez...
...Pushing him on were his mother and the fact that most of his friends were leaving...
...His actual departure veers between comic opera and near horror, its eventual success as likely or unlikely as its failure would have been...
...And it is tempting to identify his areas of specialization—Soviet history, Soviet propaganda and Soviet cinema—as responsive to the saviors and nightmares of his childhood: the Red Army soldiers who freed him from fear...
...the slogans, whether Fascist or Stalinist, that were at once ridiculous and terrifying ("A political order that could paste such absurdities on the wall had to be frighteningly and boundlessly powerful...
...For the first and perhaps the last time," he recalls with some regret, "I was able to identify fully with a political, intellectual movement...
...His initial years in a suburb of Budapest were shadowed by the War, then decisively and permanently affected one day after German troops occupied Hungary: His father was pulled off a streetcar, together with all Jews on board, as he was on his way home from work on March 20,1944...
...Holding him back was his girlfriend, who could not make up her mind...
...Random death was common...
...Due to the onset of scarlet fever, he was sequestered in the apartment...
...If he is not Tolstoy, he nevertheless tells his absorbing "story," by turns tender and terrifying, masterfully...
...Of course the world is better—I am alive...
...The family eventually learned that he was deported to Auschwitz a month later...
...Although he avoids overpsychologiz-ing his own life, he offers diffident speculations...
...His girlfriend loved him, both he and she were accepted to a university and began attending law school, and Laszlo Rajk (the most prominent Communist purge victim) was rehabilitated and reburied on the anniversary of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution...
...Varieties of Fear (an inappropriately lurid title for this powerful but understated book) is the memoir that explains the roots of Kenez' "observer" or outsider status: not merely toward Russia, but vis-a-vis all formal identification badges, whether they denote nationality, ethnicity or political affiliation...
...Though he was closer to being a Communist than most of his fellow students, he was branded anti-Communist, anti-Soviet and subversive, was kicked out of the Communist youth organization, and a few years later was denied entry to a university in part because of his political "unreliability...
...Childhood, boyhood, youth—what, one wonders, can anyone short of a Tolstoy tell us of these periods that are so important and meaningful to the person himself, so commonplace for anyone else...
...evil assumed the smiling features of young men eager to humiliate the helpless...
...Very few of us are...
...His unaccustomed sense of belonging gave way to the far more familiar feeling of being an outsider...
...Kenez was born in 1937...
...He learned to be afraid...
...It took less courage to go than to stay, he argues, and his very matter-of-factness is persuasive...
...It is also the gaze, ultimately, of an outside observer...
...They spent the remainder of the War in a once-spacious apartment that became ever more crowded as displaced relatives?2, at one point—crammed into its five rooms...
Vol. 78 • July 1995 • No. 6
