On Austrian stages including the famous Burgtheater in Vienna, Liliom by celebrated Hungarian playwright Molnár Ferenc (1878-1952; better known here as Franz Molnár) keeps being one of the most regularly performed plays from the early years of the twentieth century. First put on the stage of the Vígszínház in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (today: Hungary), in December 1909, it left the audience puzzled… and failed. Three years later its German translation by the dramatist’s writer friend Alfred Polgar (1873-1955) paved the way for the lasting and global success that it achieved in the years following the Great War of 1914-18. Already in the 1930s the play was adapted for the screen by Fritz Lang and in the mid-1940s Richard Rogers and Oskar Hammerstein made its English translation from 1921 into the successful musical Carousel, the best of the twentieth century according to TIME magazine.

The story of Liliom is simple. The protagonist from the title is a charming rogue working as a barker for the owner of a merry-go-round in an amusement park on the outskirts of Budapest. As the author makes clear in the first scene, he is a handsome young man who loves to flirt with the servant girls spending their leisure time and their money there. One of them is Julie who is determined not to let herself be bound in the chains of marriage, but she takes fun in flirting with Liliom. His boss, Mrs. Muskat, disapproves of Liliom’s behaviour towards the servant girls and Julie in particular. It doesn’t become quite clear if this is only because his taking liberties with the female clients can get her into trouble with the authorities for being immoral or also because she too has a secret crush on Liliom. Since Liliom is stubborn and refuses to send away Julie, Mrs. Muskat dismisses him from his job. He doesn’t care. He’s a happy-go-lucky and leaves with Julie who knows that she will lose her job too for not returning home in time. In the following scene Liliom and Julie are a married couple living in a shabby hut in the backyard of Julie’s relatives running a photographic studio close to the amusement park. Liliom still is without job and, what is worse, he drinks, he gambles with petty criminals and he beats Julie who turns out to be pregnant. What follows is predictable: one of his criminal friends convinces him to join him in an armed robbery and Julie can do nothing to prevent it. The robbery fails and Liliom is killed, but this is not the end. Liliom is taken to a court room in Heaven and years later back to Earth to meet his daughter…

Adding to the otherwise entirely realistic plot two post-mortem scenes in a Heaven as the protagonist expected it all along, seems to have been quite daring when Liliom was first put on stage. On the other hand, I feel that in a way Franz Molnár just continued and adapted for his purposes a technique used by Austrian authors like Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nepomuk Nestroy in nineteenth-century popular farce. Also in other respects it’s a puzzling and thought-provoking play. It leaves much room for interpretation from very different angles. In other words, it’s just what I like – and it has lost none of its lively topicality.

Liliom a Legend in Seven Scenes and a Prologue - Ferenc Molnár 

Authors writing in English have the edge on those tied to other tongues by their origins. They are more in number, their market is larger, they get more global attention and they are more likely to be translated into other languages. For writers from small language communities, on the other hand, it can be almost impossible to get noticed outside their own countries – it always was. Hungary with her comparatively exotic language is a good example: Dezső Kosztolányi was a writer of certain renown in his country during the Interwar Period and some of his works have even been published abroad, notably in Germany and France, but still he happens to be widely unknown to the world.

Dezső Kosztolányi was above all a journalist, a literary translator and a poet, but the prolific writer also produced several novels and many short stories, particularly from the 1920s until his death in 1936. Up to this day he is considered as one of the great masters of short prose because of the purity and lucidity of his style. In his narratives he mixes humour and melancholy displaying subtle irony as well as tenderness. Moreover, his literary work is marked by a deep insight into the human soul torn between conscious decisions and unconscious urges as well as by a precise analysis of human relations. In a nutshell: it’s high time to bring some attention to his life and his work!

Click here to read my portrait of this Hungarian writer.

Abridged version of my review posted on Edith’s Miscellany on 22 November 2013

The Kaddish is the Jewish prayer for the dead. The narrating protagonist writes his Kaddish for an Unborn Child or to be precise for a son or daughter who could have been, but never even was conceived because he always refused to bring children into a world in which Auschwitz, Buchenwald and concentrations camps like them had been possible. It’s the introspective monologue of a holocaust survivor who feels that he has no right to exist and that his remaining purpose in life is to complete the task which the Nazi bloodhounds began in the concentration camps. So he is constantly “digging his grave in the air” not allowing himself to ever forget and opening ever again the sores. As a natural consequence of his past he is unable to commit to anyone or anything with his entire self, be it his wife, his career, his dwelling – or a child.

Kaddish for an Unborn Child is a slim novel with heavy content. There are no chapters and only few paragraphs; sentences are long and meandering. Form and style are entirely subordinated to the natural flow of the stream of consciousness which also forces a line break whenever the narrator hurls another firm “No!” at his wife and at the world. Also the inner order of the story works like our mind picking up ideas and thoughts on the spur of the moment. So in a certain way it’s a difficult read requiring sometimes to leaf back and to re-read passages to understand properly. The mood of the book is dark and full of grief, but also philosophical and historically instructive.

Highly recommended to everyone who wishes to understand the minds of holocaust survivors and their children.

For the full review please click here to go to my blog Edith’s Miscellany.