Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary: An Anthology

by Susan Rubin Suleiman (Editor), Éva Forgács (Editor)

Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary features works by twenty-four of Hungary’s best writers who have written about what it means to be Jewish in post-Holocaust Eastern Europe. This volume includes work by Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész and other internationally known writers such as György Konrád and Péter Nádas, but most of the authors appear here in English for the first time. This anthology features poetry, long and short stories, and excerpts from memoirs and novels by postwar writers. Some of these authors were well known in Hungary before World War II, some were children or adolescents during the war and began publishing in the 1970s, some were born to survivors in the years immediately following the war and grew up during the decades of Communist rule, while others started publishing chiefly after the fall of Communism in 1989.

 

Unique among Eastern European countries, Hungary still has a large and visible Jewish population, many of them writers and intellectuals living in Budapest. This anthology introduces English-speaking readers to outstanding works of literature that show the wide range of responses to Jewish identity in contemporary Hungary. The editors’ introduction provides a historical and critical context for these works and discusses the important role of Jews in Hungarian culture from the late nineteenth century to the present.

437 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

Susan Rubin Suleiman is the C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and Research Professor of Comparative Literature

She was born in Budapest and emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She obtained her B.A. from Barnard College and her Ph.D. from Harvard University, and has been on the Harvard faculty since 1981, where she is currently the C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and Research Professor of Comparative Literature. She retired from full-time teaching in 2015.

Suleiman is the author or editor of numerous books and more than 100 articles on contemporary literature and culture, published in the U.S. and abroad. Her latest book, The Némirovsky Question, to be published by Yale University Press in fall 2016, is about the Russian-French novelist Irène Némirovsky and issues of “foreignness” in 20th-century France. Her other books include Crises of Memory and the Second World War; Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre; Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde, and Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature. She has edited and co-edited influential collective volumes, including French Global: A New Approach to Literary History and Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances.

In addition to her scholarly work, Suleiman is the author of Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, a memoir about Hungary. Her book reviews and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The American Scholar, Moment Magazine and other newspapers and magazines.

Suleiman has won many honors, including a decoration by the French Government as Officer of the Order of Academic Palms (Palmes Académiques). She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, and several NEH Fellowships. She has been an invited Fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest and at the Center for Advanced Study of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo, as well as the Texas A&M Institute for Advanced Study. During the 2009-2010 academic year, she was the invited Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2015-16 she was a Faculty Fellow at the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study in College Station, Texas, and in the fall of 2017 a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of the Central European University in Budapest. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.