Books: Worlds turned upside down

Novelist Joseph Kertes draws from his own life to paint a vivid picture of two young Jewish brothers fleeing Hungary after the failed revolution.

By ELAINE MARGOLIN
A Jewish family on the run in the ’50s heads from Hungary to Vienna, Paris, then finally Canada (photo credit: PIXABAY)
A Jewish family on the run in the ’50s heads from Hungary to Vienna, Paris, then finally Canada
(photo credit: PIXABAY)
THE AFTERLIFE OF STARS
By Joseph Kertes
Little, Brown and Company
265 pages; $26
Joseph Kertes has written an exquisitely moving novel based on his own family’s escape to Canada after Hungary’s failed 1956 revolution, when Russian tanks stormed into Budapest and almost 200,000 people fled.
Kertes said the book almost wrote itself; it flowed directly from his heart and fractured memories. He was only five when he arrived in Canada and began a new life. In his novel, the story focuses on the relationship between two brothers, aged 10 and 14. It is written in the somewhat awkward voice of the younger one, Robert, who is clearly is based on Kertes.
Robert is a sensitive and tender child, completely the reverse of his brother Attila, who is sharp-edged, fast-thinking, and fiercely intelligent. But Attila is also consumed by an angry defiance and aggressiveness towards a world he has already deemed unconscionable. The Beck family are Jewish, but like so many Hungarian Jews in that time and place, they seem accustomed to hiding their heritage from the world at large. Robert follows Attila around like a puppy-dog, feeling powerless to do otherwise even as he senses his brother’s antics might bring them into serious trouble.
Their paternal grandmother lives with them, and the novel begins with her picking Robert up from school and hurrying him home, hoping he does not notice the dead bodies hanging from the lampposts in the town square. But Robert sees them, and watches their bodies wiggling and their tongues hanging out; some of them hanging completely still with the light already dimmed from their eyes. It is an image that would haunt him forever as the family attempts to escape, first to Vienna, and then Paris, and then hopefully to a new home in Canada.
Kertes has a wonderful ear for the euphoric curiosity and morbidity that can overtake two bright Jewish boys whose worlds have been turned upside down. Particularly Attila, who is not hampered by any sort of romantic nostalgia for home or anything else other than the excitement of the moment. While seeking temporary refuge at a convent in Vienna, Attila feels compelled to challenge the priest about how the world was created and what was behind God’s reasoning in organizing things in the strange manner that he has.
He asks the priest to explain, saying impertinently: “And all I mean is that when God was cataloging the various function of things, I wonder how he came up with these groupings, that’s all. The nose smells and sniffs and holds up glasses. I mean, the mouth could just as easily have been used to smell and the feet to reproduce. The brain could have been placed inside the throat, so that each time you’d swallowed you’d have a thought. How did these functions get grouped in the ways that they did?”
The priest attempts to calm Attila down by explaining that his racing thoughts are merely a reaction to the recent trauma he has endured. But Attila continues unabated, claiming, “And then there’s the centipede – the millipede! Surely this is someone’s idea of a joke. All right, eight legs, like a spider, or eight tentacles, like an octopus, or none, like a snake, but a hundred, a thousand? They were created with holy tongue in cheek, were they not? As was the giraffe. Hmmm... let’s give an animal a three-story neck and decorative little body. And the ostrich and the warthog – they’re more in the humor column. And what about the snake? Is that really a finished animal? It’s just a tail attached to a head!”
Robert watches his brother closely; shocked and impressed by his brazenness with the priest, but also saddened by the recognition that behind his brother’s bravado lay a certain despair that he doesn’t quite understand.
By the time the family makes it to Paris, where they will temporarily be staying with their grandmother’s sister Hermina, everything seems to be in disarray. Their parents are fighting and their grandmother is trying to keep everyone afloat.
The boys uncover family secrets that threaten to rip the family apart.
Robert finds out that a little over a decade ago, his parents had been on a transport to the Nazi death camps with their infant son Attila when they were miraculously saved by their cousin Paul, who was then working for Raoul Wallenberg – who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews by issuing them Swedish passports. After the war, Paul lived with their family, but disappeared one night after a fight with Robert’s father that got out of hand.
When Attila hears of this, he explodes into rage at their father and drags Robert with him into the tunnels of the Paris sewer system, where he is convinced Paul is hiding. It is a foolhardy Don Quixote-style adventure, undertaken under severe duress, but has devastating consequences. Robert follows his brother blindly as he always does, listening to him rant and rave about the need to rescue Paul from the fate that has befallen him.
Robert’s head is spinning from all he has seen and heard. His mother’s usually reassuring smile no longer comforts him.
His father’s anger seems to have reached epic proportions. Hermina has told him terrible stories of how she, too, suffered during the Nazi war. He has learned that his mother’s parents and siblings never made it off the transport, and that she lost them all at once. He doesn’t understand why they have been forced to leave their home, a place he now still longs for. He finds himself thinking about school, and his teachers and friends, and a certain new girl that had been in his class who had gotten his attention.
The reader who is unfamiliar with the plight of Jews in Hungary may be confused at times by the narrative which never expands beyond the chaos of the family’s crisis. Jews have lived in Hungary since the ninth century and finally became integrated into Hungarian society in the 19th century.
By 1920, there was a law to reduce the presence of Jewish students in universities. Hungary became Germany’s ally in June 1941, but in 1943 it was seeking a separate armistice with the Allies, even after 60,000 Jews had already been murdered. Eight hundred thousand Jews were still alive until March 1944, when the Germans occupied Hungary and then deported half a million Hungarian Jews from the countryside to Auschwitz. By 1949, the Communists had taken over and after the suppressed revolution of 1956, Jews who had initially been visible in the Communist Party’s leadership declined.
Kertes is a natural storyteller who creates vivid characters that resonate on the page. But his narrative voice falters here. He seems to be struggling to find the right register and hovers somewhere in the middle – recreating for us the immediacy of his childhood experiences and sometimes offering us a voice that sounds somehow far removed from it. It doesn’t quite work. His narrator Robert Beck speaks as a little boy, but at times sounds like a man trying to remember that little boy. It creates an odd sort of dissonance.
Kertes’s novel would have truly soared if he had figured out a way to integrate his adult perceptions with flashbacks of his early life. We yearn to hear his thoughts about the long-term scars of displacement and exile, and wonder what the effect of his parents’ grievous suffering has had on him.
We also want to know his feelings about Jewish identity and belonging, and the inherent dangers of assimilation. But no such thoughts are forthcoming and these omissions feel like gaping holes in an otherwise engaging narrative.


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