Abstract
Danilo Kiš's little known second novel, Psalm 44 (1962) is his first major prose work about the Holocaust. This novel was published for the first time in Hungarian translation in 1966 and English translation in 2012. The novel is quite different from Kiš's later works on the Holocaust, the autobiographical trilogy comprising Early Sorrows, Garden, Ashes, and Hourglass. The first difference is in setting. In Psalm 44, a number of important flashbacks take place in Újvidék/Novi Sad, the region of northern Serbia (then Yugoslavia) under Hungarian occupation after 1941; much of the rest of the book takes place in Auschwitz and associated camps in Poland. The amount of Hungarian material is significant, but the inclusion of so much material from Auschwitz is not found elsewhere in Kiš 's oeuvre. The second difference is in the author's graphic portrayal of gruesome atrocities. For the literary historian, Psalm 44 is an important milestone in the development of Kiš 's thematic and stylistic inventory. For other historians, the novel functions in part as a microhistory of the Újvidék massacres (the "Cold Days") of early 1942. Kiš 's quest to find his own voice to attempt to convey the tragedy of the Holocaust—as important for the entire human family and the very region of Central Europe as it was for his own family—finds a parallel expression in the confusion, exhaustion, and skepticism of the characters in this novel.
Highlights
Danilo Kiš, born in Szabadka (Serbian: Subotica) in 1935, is an important figure in literary and intellectual history in many respects
Danilo Kiš spoke Hungarian with friends until the end of his life in 1989, and he translated an enormous amount of Hungarian poetry into Serbo-Croatian, the language he learned from his Montenegrin mother, Milica Dragićević, and in which he crafted his own literary works
Most of Kiš's narrative about the death camp is devoted to a depiction of the miserable and brutal life in its women’s section; the lovers have a baby in the camp, Jan, who survives the war, an extremely rare occurrence in the actual history of the camps but one which Kiš, as we know anecdotally, read about in a newspaper
Summary
Danilo Kiš, born in Szabadka (Serbian: Subotica) in 1935, is an important figure in literary and intellectual history in many respects. One of the unique features of this novel is the considerable degree to which the story line is rooted in urban and village life in the largely Hungarianpopulated territories of what became northern Serbia (de jure Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes and by the time of Kiš's birth Yugoslavia) after the Great War. Many of the most unforgettable scenes occur in flashbacks, as when Marija thinks back to her encounter, in the presence of her Aunt Lela in Újvidék (Novi Sad), with the carpenter's family in their workshop for coffins: and she thought back to the heavy aromatic smell of chestnut blossoms and to that cul-de-sac pulling off of Grobljanska Street and going left. The way Ilonka Kutaj can, for instance, this chatterbox stupid louse-ridden ignoramus urchin a D-student at the bottom of the class on whose account she had to flee the village and get into an argument with her mother and she'll have to have one, too, with her father and she'll quarrel with the entire world, too, if necessary, or she'll put on a pouty face even if it makes her uglier than the ugliest toothless crone, she had made her that mad; and still she heard the voice of her father (he had started speaking suddenly after everything she had dumped on him so she knew she had done the right thing in telling him everything even if she had no real reason too, because her father had not been irritated when her mother said that they had returned because they weren't enjoying the village and because she had gotten diarrhea and the measles because she was allergic to the village diet, he only said "It would have been better if you had stayed there and stuck it out, until things here calm down") and she knew that she had done the smart thing in telling her father everything regardless...(Kiš 2012 Psalm, 79-80)
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