The writers of the “third generation” unanimously acknowledged that imported Israeli tradition could not bring spiritual inspiration to this region. They agreed that Israel is the place where the others emigrated to, so the possibility doesn’t even arise. “Irreconcilable motivations, customs, memories”, is how Emi Baruh answers when asked what it is the the sabra (Jew born in Israel) “likes” to recall – who would happily strike from his “selective memory” the grandfather who, without a word of complaint, enlisted for the concentration camps, while – as it transpired from the essays – the same memory could be the keystone to a modern Central European Jewish intellectual’s identity. It was once again left to Maxim Biller to express it most succinctly “a young Jew is more scared of his first visit to Israel than of brain-surgery.”
Normality and its Vicissitudes
Their consent to being Jewish does not manifest itself in allusions and hidden signs but in conscious self-reflection, which leads each writer to a unique conclusion. The revival of history put the spark of heterogeneity back into Jewish intellectual life. Nobody writes about a return to tradition – nor to Israel nor to anything else, but then again it wouldn’t be Central and Eastern Europe if the writers – with a few exceptions – couldn’t find a comparatively “golden era” onto which to project their ideals as a kind of “retrospective utopia”. For Victor Neumann the multicultural mix of pre-war Banat, where liberal Jews lived together with other peoples in “multiple liaisons” is one such. Elma Softic -Kaunitz indicates a similar, if today clearly unreachable idyll: a Sarajevo which is not inhabited by Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, Jews and the rest, but by townspeople living “in multiple liaisons”, who – as she writes – “are killed for being from Sarajevo, not because they’re the enemy.” Through the example of her own father, Pinkas, Emi Baruh introduces the tranquil idyll of pre-war Bulgaria, and how Jews were saved in their thousands by a Bulgarian friend and neighbour who they had voted into the pre-war parliament. Làszlу Màrton was probably the first of his generation to start searching for his own place, or the place of the Jews, in the midst of the new societal relations: in 1988 he formulated a theory of the “Hungarian-Jewish community of fate” where he envisaged the sort of process of gradual assimilation, or “assimilation to one another” which had been interrupted by the Hungarians. Here the “golden era” is the beginning of a process, whose task is the completion of the “assimilation of consciousness” of the two peoples, which is undertaken by the writer’s thought-experiment.
“Humanity, human brotherhood, liberalism, democratic spirit, internationalism, the respect of reason, intellectualism, the will to continue human culture” – these are the spiritual imperatives of the Central and Eastern European “Jewish being”, as formulated by Andràs Komor six decades ago and quoted by
Gàbor T. Szàntу in his essay. If anyone were to plea for a return to these traditions today, it would not be considered particularly “Jewish”, but simply an expression of normal human aspirations. In fact normality occupies a central position in almost all of the essays and generally emerges in the same context. They, the representatives of the third generation, are “normal” because their predecessors whom they remember (selectively) and with whom they identify were, as victims, the only moral victors of the holocaust. Normal, because their parents or they themselves stayed in their place in Central and Eastern Europe – they were taken in neither by the ancient myths of tradition (original home, promised land, etc.), nor by the pseudo-traditions of the new-age Israelis – they had only one tradition, which they themselves unearthed, nourished and maintained – the regional tradition of rational, liberal and cosmopolitan Jewishness. Normal because they resolved and untangled the dilemmas and complexes of their parents; because their generation was already immune to the idiocy of communism; because the consciousness of generation – the sense of historical continuity – survived in them; because they – like any normal individual – chose their own identities. And the question obviously arises: what about the rest? Are they all “abnormal” – all those who had no sympathy whatever in those days, who left them and their predecessors to their own devices, who endlessly cajoled them to assimilate – can we judge them differently now than then? In a general sense the answer is no but that doesn’t alter the fact that their place is also here in Central and Eastern Europe, living in the same place, albeit in isolation from one another. “The Hungarian Jews committed treason (in good faith) against their own Jewishness. Later the Hungarian people committed treason (in bad faith) against the Hungarianness of their Hungarian Jews” – so runs Làszlу Màrton’s “assimilationist” argument. Maxim Biller is much more ruthless with the Germans: “We live with them, we work with them, we laugh with them, but we remain parted forever.” In a 1995 interview Konstanty Gebert declared that “two chosen peoples cannot live in the same land” – recognising a situation in which two peoples have lived together for so long that neither one of them can understand themselves without the other, and as long as the notion of being chosen applies on both, reconciliation is forever over the horizon. In the optimism of the intoxication immediately following the “change of system”, Làszlу Màrton conceived his Hungarian-Jewish “community of fate” very differently. He thought that secularism could be resolved by a mutual recognition of co-dependence – that some sudden and unbelievable wave of empathy would inundate each individual and strip them of their centuries old prejudices. Gàbor T. Szàntу is infinitely more down to earth: “The ghetto is us, we live in it and it lives in us. Even if we threw open the gates and integrate with the host society there’s no shame in it: we owe our existence to the ghetto.”