Memories To Take Along

Before I read “Nine Suitcases” (Schocken, 336 pages, $25), I am embarrassed to admit, I had never heard of Bela Zsolt. I tried to remedy my ignorance with Google, the lazy man’s research tool. So when I came across a troubling article on Zsolt’s book from the Scotsman, I got what I deserved.The first sentence of the piece asks, “With all that is going on now it is hard to understand those who continue to regale us with stories from the Second World War” – a question, I thought, which should help to disabuse Americans of the notion that British people are smarter. Another question was just as irritating: “Why read another book about the Holocaust?”The reviewer did go on to praise “Nine Suitcases,” but he had already shown that he held a commonplace view – namely, that too much is made of the Holocaust. For this we can thank Norman Finkelstein, author of a book length harangue called “The Holocaust Industry,” which suggests that academics have been using the death of millions merely to further their own careers.Lazy-minded intellectuals now feel they have license to question the existence of any book about the Holocaust, as if there were dump trucks filled with material making daily deliveries to reviewers.I would like to state categorically that I am sick of people who are sick of the Holocaust. Call it “Holocaust backlash backlash,” or “Holocaust industry fatigue fatigue.” A few years ago, it was bracing to read a critique of certain commonplace pieties, however wrongheaded the author. Now I’m disgusted by the cliche that suggests that it is cliched to show an interest in the Holocaust.I’m especially disgusted that this idea was connected to the writing of Bela Zsolt, who was blessed – or cursed – with a life of astonishing breadth. According to the brief biography supplied by his translator, Ladislaus Lob, Zsolt was born in 1895 in a provincial Hungarian town and served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. While recovering from a wound, Zsolt started writing; over the next 20 years, he produced 10 novels, four plays, and copious amounts of journalism.Zsolt was a leftist radical and an assimilated Hungarian Jew when much of Europe was turning to fascism and crackpot ideas of racial purity. His outspoken criticism of the Hungarian extreme right wing – and of petit-bourgeois Jews – brought him fame in his own country. He was also renowned, bless him, for spending a lot of time in cafes, “smoking and drinking to excess.”“Nine Suitcases” touches upon some of this, but it mostly describes Zsolt’s wartime experiences. The rough outline: He fled to Paris with his wife but made the tragic error of returning to Budapest. Then he was “reduced to a hysterical skeleton” by 18 months with a forced labor unit. When he returned to Hungary for the second time, he had barely recovered before being put into a ghetto alongside his fellow Jews.Zsolt witnessed and endured unimaginable acts of brutality, and these acts are duly recorded in “Nine Suitcases.” This alone would make the book worthwhile, but it is also highly absorbing, the work of an accomplished writer. The structure is loose but engaging, looping from a filthy mattress in the ghetto to Paris, Poland, and back again. The reader is carried along on the strength of Zsolt’s voice: Mr. Lob seems to have artfully reproduced its every register, from resignation and detachment to fury and blistering moral outrage.But it is his clear-mindedness, his inability to overlook the pettiness or vanity of anyone – Hungarian, German, or Jew – that elevates “Nine Suitcases” to the level of Primo Levi’s “If This Be a Man” or Tadeusz Borosowicz’s “This Way to the Gas Chambers, Ladies and Gentlemen.” All three books can be seen as the best examples of literature about the Holocaust, but also simply as literature, valuable and necessary books for those who like to read and think.I’m reluctant to quote from the text to bolster this assertion, for fear of diluting the reader’s own pleasure (if such a word is appropriate) at discovering them himself. Suffice it to say, I read “Nine Suitcases” twice, and then I was back online – this time to search for more books by Bela Zsolt.Mr. Haber last wrote for these pages on the poet August Kleinzhaler.

Memories To Take Along

Memories To Take Along

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