Worlds Apart

If cultures resemble people--they’re born, they grow, they thrive or fail to thrive, and eventually they die--there can be intense visionary episodes in their lives that resemble fevers. Early 20th century Eastern European Jewish culture must have had such a fever to produce literary works like I.B. Singer’s “Satan in Goray,” I.J. Singer’s “Yoshe Kalb” and Chaim Grade’s magisterial “The Yeshiva” as well as the better-known exotic blooms of Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz. Now we can add Hungary’s Karoly Pap to this luminous list. His novel, “Azarel,” which appeared in 1937, has recently been published for the first time in English.

Like the Singer brothers’ and Grade’s books, Pap’s novel is set against a rabbinical background at a time when religious verities are starting to crumble beneath the onslaught of modernity. Whether that culture would have survived is moot because it was murdered during the Holocaust, as was Pap, whom literary historians believe died in Bergen-Belsen in 1944.

Azarel is the family name of Pap’s protagonist, a young boy whose grandfather is a fervent old-school rabbi and whose father, also a rabbi, is a Neolog (similar to a so-called modern Orthodox Jew). Grandfather Jeremiah, full of “grim passion,” loathes his son’s generation. He believes it “value[s] progress more than ... the Torah” and demands that he be given keeping of Gyuri, the baby, in an ill-conceived attempt to compel redemption. He reads mystical texts and waits for angels to carry him to Jerusalem. Obviously, he fails in this endeavor and finally dies with the traumatized toddler attached to his body by a frayed strand of prayer shawl.

Gyuri returns to his mother and father but, no surprise after this upbringing, he has become an ineffably strange child. “[R]acked by incomprehensible desire,” he genuinely expects furniture to sing and dance and play for him and is devastated when they remain silent. Sadly, he notes that “[e]verything was utterly manifest, motionless.” The connection is never made explicit, but Gyuri has clearly incorporated enough of his grandfather’s mania to make the accommodations of his parents’ household untenable. To him, it seems materialistic and hypocritical.

Domestic tensions rise over the next few years, exacerbated by Gyuri’s older siblings’ normalcy. His brother, Ernusko, is the good student, and his sister, Oluska, the pretty girl. He feels as if he can’t possibly measure up to them and gets more and more nervous until he climbs atop a piece of silent furniture next to a window, contemplating a jump.

But what really sends Gyuri’s parents over the edge is that this boy with “a voracious little heart” starts to question the existence of God in his Hebrew school. Father and mother are mortified: What would the community think if the rabbi’s son is showing agnostic tendencies? They shut him in his room, but he escapes. He begs on the streets, eats frankfurters and cream puffs with the proceeds of his shameful alms-gathering and ultimately returns to the synagogue intending to denounce his father in public. Instead, he faints and is revived days later. His parents claim that his insanity was temporary, and the story ends with a relatively happy family and a simmeringly unhappy child, who will probably erupt again come maturity.

On the one hand, “Azarel” is a traditional 19th century-style Bildungsroman, with a particular Jewish savor, filled with the pain of parents and offspring locked in mutually incomprehensible worlds. Yet what separates Pap’s novel from established forms is precisely the sense of modernity that also threatens the elderly Jeremiah’s way of life.

This reveals itself in two ways. The first is linguistic. A schoolteacher, for example, “resembles an old hieroglyph, flat and planar with birdlike legs, a trapezoidal skirt; rectangular and bosomless above; then a corncob neck ornamented with a bow as big on each side as a mule’s ear; and finally, a birdlike head, and a birdlike hand with which she writes her name on the blackboard.” We move from archeological to mathematical to zoological imagery in a sentence.

Beyond that, the scenes in which Gyuri yearns for objects to sing have a hallucinatory quality that blurs the difference between reality and fantasy. So potent is the child’s imagination that readers may expect the furniture to make music and God himself to answer the boy’s questions. The anthropomorphic manner of composition implies no less. A sewing table drawer “invite[s]” Gyuri to open it, tombstones “grin” and honeysuckle is “menacing.” Style emerges from content. What Gyuri craves, Pap delivers by creating one of the most utterly animistic universes I’ve ever encountered.

One more thing: We learn in a fascinating end note that Pap and his novel were called before a “literary tribunal” by the Hungarian Zionist Assn. The dubious 1937 proceeding attempted to balance proper respect for community institutions with improper art that delights in washing dirty linens in public. The trial ended inconclusively, but it’s most likely that less than a decade later, both prosecution and defense met a more conclusive fate, along with the author whose work they contended over. Ironically, the trial took place in an age when literature mattered, but life did not.