Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe by Andrew Baruch Wachtel (review)

Abstract

716 seer, 86, 4, October 2008 particular, are brought to bear in the pieces by Robert Eaglestone and Amos Friedland, the former stressing the 'nature of the failure of choice and agency as aporia rather than either tragedy or redemption' (p. 48) in the works accessible to him inEnglish, the latter considering the issue of reconciliation through the problematic, nostalgic evocation inFatelessness of the 'beautiful' concentration camp and the hero's 'happiness' therein. A number of attempts are made to provide some literary(-historical) context for the oeuvre, Eniko Molnar Basa limitingherself to theHungarian side,while Paul Varnai is read able about itsplace inHolocaust literaturemore generally; Tamas Scheibner contributes a meticulous analysis ofKertesz's Jegyzokonyv(SwornStatement), with telling cross-cuts to Sorstalansdg. In fact, useful comparative remarks are fre quent throughout the collection and not only in the essayswith specific names in their tide (such as that ofDanilo Kis in the essay byRosana Ratkovcic and Jorge Semprun's in that byMarie Peguy): Julia Karolle looks at Fatelessness as historical fiction, and in an incisive essay that can be recommended to any newcomer one of the co-editors, Louise O. Vasvari, is persuasive about Sorstalansdgs parallels with Camus's Uetranger even as she positions Kertesz's 'daringly innovative text' as 'the ultimate Holocaust novel, which subvert [s] the rhetorical and narrative myths of itspredecessors through defamiliariza tion, irony,humor and elements of self-parody' (p. 268). There are also two pieces, one by the other co-editor, the other by Judy Young, on the depressing metacontext: the storm raised in theHungarian media and more generally amongst Hungarian readers by the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to a Hungarian Jew whose topic appears to be exclusively the Holocaust and who, at least in 2002, was arguably better known and appreciated in Germany and in German translation than in Hungary. That an international award to a Hungarian can still, in the twenty-first century, cause a furore about the Hungarianness of a man who chose to remain in Hungary in order to write in his mother-tongue is a typi cal manifestation of the issues raised by Kertesz's work as a whole, with its claim that 'Auschwitz' stands for twentieth-century totalitarianism of any and every kind. Philip Roth's words, in an interview from the late 1980s, obvi ously bear repeating: 'We are all writing fictitious versions of our lives all the time that, however subdy or grossly qualified, constitute our hold on reality and are the closest thingwe have to the truth' (cited here by Barbara Breysach on p. 295). Department ofSlavic Languages andLiteratures Peter Sherwood Universityof North Carolina at ChapelHill Wachtel, Andrew Baruch. RemainingRelevant afterCommunism:The Role of the Writer inEastern Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL and London, 2006. viii + 233 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.00: ?18.50. Andrew Wachtel's aim in this study is to characterize different strategies adopted by East European writers in an attempt to remain relevant in the new REVIEWS 717 circumstances following the fall of Communism. These include abandoning literature for politics or themedia, becoming nationalist or 'internationalist', writing popular fiction or trying to represent the experience of the transition itself. Wachtel does not attempt an encyclopedic survey, but, after two contextualizing chapters, selects a few paradigms for each category. He hopes thus to provide an 'introduction to a transnational consideration of post communist literature' (p. 11) that will give specialists a framework and inspire interest inEast European writing. Besides his explicit thesis,Wachtel implicitly also explores how East European writers can remain relevant to theWest, perhaps especially Western students. With its straightforward structure and style, relatively friendly price and numerous caveats addressed to specialists, the book seems aimed essentially at the broader market of undergraduate and graduate students and interested non-specialists seeking a way into the subject. Consequently, Wachtel favours breadth over depth, working from the detail of ten country specific reports prepared by researchers to the over-arching conclusions of the final study. Croatian, Czech, Russian and Serbian writers are best represented, with some countries barely mentioned. Wachtel offers close commentaries on certain texts, but rarely lists other comparable pieces, thus requiring the...