The Jewish Mockery of Suicide: Counterculture in Early Twentieth-Century Hungarian Jewish Literature

Abstract

This article examines secular Hungarian Jewish writing about suicide in the first third of the twentieth century. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hungary, suicide was a culturally respected and prevalent societal occurrence. Hungarian Jewish writers created a countercultural narrative that criticized suicide through mockery, satire, and irony. I argue that in the diverse political climate of the period, Hungarian Jewish literature was in dialogue with Hungarian suicide culture and formed part of a careful negotiation of Jewish presence in Hungarian society. Both Hungarian suicide culture and the Jewish response to it were cultural trends unaffected by political upheavals. Literature allowed Jewish writers to explore their place in society and to engage with Hungarian culture via the diverse dynamics of mockery expressed in their stories of suicide. They chose satire, their modern literary specialty, as a safe way to articulate secular social criticism. It shielded them from both antisemitism and moralizing religious critiques. To this end, they engaged with their surroundings through narratives of death as a joke.