Kaddish for a Child Not Born by Imre Kertész

First published:Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért, 1990 (English translation, 1997)

Type of work: Novella

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: Twentieth century

Locale: Hungary

Principal characters

• B., the narrator, a Jewish Hungarian writer
• His Former wife, a Jewish dermatologist, born after the Holocaust
• Dr. Oblath, a philosopher and academic
• The Professor, a concentration-camp inmate

The Story:

The narrator, B., is a Jewish Hungarian writer and a Holocaust survivor. Sometime near the end of the communist period in Hungary, he attends an academic retreat at a mountain resort. Avoiding the social atmosphere of dinner, B. goes for a walk in the woods one night and runs across Dr. Oblath, a philosopher. The two men begin walking together, although B. is not sure if he sought this company or meant to avoid it. They begin an academic discussion of life, philosophy, and survival, and then Dr. Oblath asks B. whether he has a child. He is childless himself, apparently the consequence of lost opportunity, and worries about being alone in his old age. B., by contrast, is childless by choice: He refuses to create another person who might suffer as he has. Even as he reflects on the life he has not inflicted on a child, however, he wonders what the lost child might have been like: A dark-eyed, freckled girl? A stubborn, blue-eyed boy?

B.’s reflections turn to his marriage, its failure, and his former wife, a woman he categorizes as a “beautiful Jewess.” She was born after the war, the child of Auschwitz survivors. She and B. met at a party, when she approached him to discuss one of his books. With nearly every mention of his wife, B. brings back the memory of that first night, her beauty, and the look of her approaching him for the first time.

At the party, a group of Holocaust survivors begin discussing their experiences, each telling the others where he had been taken during the war. B. dreads having to respond, but the conversation ends before it comes around to him when a member of the group mentions Auschwitz. Auschwitz is determined by the other survivors to be unbeatable in a recounting of horrors, the worst of all the death camps, and ultimately inexplicable. The latter attitude upsets B., who argues that Auschwitz must be explained because it existed, that evil is rationally motivated. What he finds difficult to understand is the behavior of those who were able to do good, even in the concentration camps. B. remembers one inmate, the Professor, who protected B.’s food ration and delivered it to B. at the risk of his own life.

Afterward, B. and his wife-to-be continue the conversation, falling first into bed and then into marriage. She finds in B. a chance to understand and embrace her own Jewishness and to redeem her parents’ suffering. She tells B. that she became a doctor because of her mother’s premature and inexplicable death from illnesses contracted in the camps. Now, she tries to rescue B. from his suffering, a project she continues even after their divorce, for she continues to meet with B. and to write him prescriptions.

Prior to his marriage, B. lived without roots and without family. While his peers started families and bought homes, he continued to live in a prefabricated apartment, with everything provided for him. He observes that there is a similarity between his time as an inmate in a concentration camp, the time after liberation when he still lived in the camp, and his life in apartments: In all three cases, he became accustomed to his environment rather than creating it. B’s new wife is younger, unscarred, and wants to create rather than simply adapt.

When the question of children comes up, B’s wife assumes his refusal to father offspring is a problem that she can fix. She sees it as the result of a wound she can heal. B., too, thinks at first that with time and effort he will be able to change his mind. When he sees an unhappy family on a streetcar, however, he realizes that he will never be willing to inflict the unhappiness of childhood, especially a childhood like his, on another person.

B.’s recollections turn further back, to his childhood. He remembers when he—a secular, assimilated Budapest Jew—first encountered the “real” Jews of the countryside, his observant relatives. He describes his fright at seeing his aunt sitting bald before a mirror, learning only later that religious women shave their heads and wear wigs. He notes that he paid little attention to his Jewishness as a child, realizing its importance only after being Jewish became dangerous.

B. revisits the places of his childhood, including his grandparents’ apartment block and his old boarding school. The school, once a grand home, has been turned into apartments, and families live in squalor in the former classrooms. B. remembers his school days, when there was no difference between Christians and Jews; all students recited the same neutral prayers in German. He compares the school director’s weekly ritual of publicly assessing each student’s behavior to the Appel of the camps. He later learns that the school director died in Auschwitz.

In the end, B’s memories destroy his marriage. His wife confronts him late one night and tells him that she has to flee the marriage and that she has found someone else. She is grateful to B. for helping her understand her parents’ experience, and she has tried to save him from his depression, but she has given up. She sees him as poisoning and destructive and has decided to leave him for a man who is not Jewish. B. is outraged that he is expected to be outraged, and he shouts that being a Jew is a blessing, for it sent him to Auschwitz, an experience he will have forever. As B. closes his memoir, he writes that he once saw his former wife with two children, a dark-eyed freckled girl and a stubborn blue-eyed boy. He is alone with his misery and memories.

Bibliography

Adelman, Gary. “Getting Started with Imre Kertész.” New England Review 25, nos. 1/2 (2004): 261-279. Useful introduction to the author’s work and life.

Braham, Randolph L. The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2000. Historical account of the Hungarian experience of the Holocaust and its effects on the nation and its people.

Hoffman, Lawrence A., et al. Tachanun and Concluding Prayers. Vol. 6 in My People’s Prayer Book: Traditional Prayers, Modern Commentaries. Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights, 2002. Includes a discussion of the Kaddish, its liturgical role, and its evolution into a mourner’s prayer.

Kertész, Imre, and Ivan Sanders. “Heureka.” PMLA 118, no. 3 (May, 2003): 601-614. Kertész’s acceptance speech from the Nobel Prize banquet. He addresses the problems of memory of the Holocaust and discusses the presence of the Holocaust in European art.

Vasvári, Louise O., and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, eds. Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2005. Twenty-three chapters about Kertész’s life, his work, and the Holocaust in Hungary.