The wanderer’s gaze: Jewish writers in the urban landscape of Budapest at the turn of the 20th century

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article uncovers the voices of secular Jewish writers who wrote about Budapest at the turn of the twentieth century in the same progressive literary journals. Their literary depictions of Budapest illustrate the quest of secular Jews to discover new points of identification in the urban environment. How do Hungarian Jewish writers in Budapest characterize the city, Pest? How do they envision the major tenets of their own ‘urbanness’, of being ‘pesti’? Why do they invent themselves as pesti? I aim to draw a Jewish image of Budapest featuring the central concept of pesti as their place of belonging.