Pál Száz
IN: Partitúra Irodalomtudományi folyóirat, Volume XVIII. , Issue 1, 2023, p. 65-100 , ISSN 1336-7307
DOI: 10.17846/PA.2023.18.1.65-100
Abstract:
The study deals with two works by two outstanding authors of Hungarian interwar prose. Both Ernő Szép and Rodion Markovits were born into Jewish families, but they performed their work outside the confessional framework. Both authors have written two autobiographical works that can be read more or less as autoethnography, since the autobiographer narrates his own origins, the world of his childhood, in relation to its culture. The articulation of Jewish identity differs between two works of each author. The articulation of Jewish identity in Rodion Markovits’s short prose collection, Reb Áncsli és más avasi zsidókról szóló széphistóriák [Reb Áncsli and other stories about the Jews of Avas] plays key role: the narratives depict a closed Jewish world of which the family is a part. In contrast, in his memoir Anyám kertje [My mother’s garden], he makes no mention of his family being Jewish. There is a similar contradiction in the case of Ernő Szép, who, in his autobiographical novel Dali dali dal [Dali dali song], mentions only once the Jewish identity of the protagonist, his father, at the end of the book. Szép’s Felnőtteknek [For Adults] is an autoethnographic memoir, dealing with themes of family and childhood, so that Jewish ‚traits’ appear as a matter of course. The contradiction between these two works by the two writers points to the example, how the narrative identity is constructed, and the fact, that autobiography is a subject of fabrication.
