Imre Kertesz

This interview of Imre Kertesz, which is taken from Imre Kertesz, The Art of Fiction No. 220, Paris Review, features in B.Ed. 1^st Year’s General English book (Tribhuvan University). Here follow the key takeaways from the text:

1. An interview of Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian writer and Holocaust survivor, taken by Luisa Zielinski.

2. Imre Kertesz (1929-2016):

• i) Born in 1929, in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family; deported to Auschwitz in 1944, and then to Buchenwald; survived the Holocaust
• ii) The Holocaust and its aftermath are the central subjects of his best-known novels – Fatelessness (1975), Fiasco (1988), Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990), and Liquidation (2003)
• iii) Was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002
• iv) Suffered from Parkinson’s disease for several years before his death

3. Some important points that Kertesz makes in his interview:

• i) “Writing wasn’t my profession. It took a long time for me to learn even the basics of writing. I think a man turns into a writer by editing his own texts. I suddenly realized I had, in fact, become a writer, when I was twenty-four. It was a moment of profound awakening.”
• ii) “My financial circumstances weren’t such that I could afford to be a writer. I didn’t even have a pen.”
• iii) Kertesz made his living by writing operettas in the beginning days of his writing career.
• iv) “Anyone in a dictatorship is kept in a childlike state of ignorance and helplessness.”
• v) “In Stalinism, you simply had to keep going, if you could. The Nazi regime, on the other hand, was a mechanism that worked with such brutal speed that “going on” meant bare survival. The Nazi system swallowed everything. It was a machine working so efficiently that most people did not even have the chance to understand the events they lived through.”
• vi) “To me, there were three phases, in a literary sense”: (i) before the Holocaust. (ii) during the Holocaust, (iii) after the Holocaust
• vii) “I retained enough strength to finish a work that reaches out to people in a language that is humane. The purpose of literature is for people to become educated, to be entertained, so we can’t ask them to deal with such gruesome visions. I created a work representing the Holocaust as such, but without this being an ugly literature of horrors. I managed to describe them, in a way that is bearable, acceptable.”
• viii) “Whenever I sat down to write, it felt like a tragic fate I had to endure. There is pleasure only in retrospect.”
• ix) “I can no longer use a computer. Nor am I able to write by hand. But I’ve got all this material I’ve collected over the course of my life – my diaries, my reports, Liquidation. With all of that done, I no longer have to write anything new. I’ve finished my work.”
• x) “She [one of the characters of his last novel Liquidation] decides to have children, and thus commits herself to life. That was the secret, the gesture – bearing children is the gesture that creates the possibility of continued life. Faced with choosing between life and death, she opts for life.”
• xi) “That [this interview] was my last interview of my life.”

The word “Liquidation” carries a dual meaning here. On one hand, it signifies termination – the end of something. For Imre Kertesz, it marks the conclusion of his literary journey; he has nothing more to write, and his ability to do so is further hindered by the numbness in his fingers caused by Parkinson’s disease. On the other hand, liquidation also implies the opposite of freezing or stagnation – it suggests release and the possibility of movement. It symbolizes the continuation of life and the emergence of new hope following the horrors of the Holocaust, as hinted at through the characters of his final novel, Liquidation.