Kaddish for a Child Not Born (Criticism)

Criticism

Carol Ullmann

Ullmann is a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, Ullmann explores the theme of survival in Kertész's novel.

Imre Kertész's Kaddish for a Child Not Born is a novel about survival after the Holocaust, written by a man who lived through Auschwitz, the worst of the Nazi death camps during World War II. In the novel, the narrator refuses to have children after the war ends, which ruins his short-lived marriage. In contemplating his past, the narrator realizes that he cannot bring a child into a world that could produce an Auschwitz, to do to a child what was done to him.

The survival of children is fundamental to the survival of the species; after all, the human race would not survive if individuals did not reproduce. On a smaller scale, those who live through devastation can be called survivors even if they are too scarred, mentally or physically, to reproduce themselves. These individuals may find other means of leaving a legacy, if only in their stories of struggle. Kertész's narrator survives; he lives through his writing, and his writing — this novel — concerns his survival, his existence. He explains that "if I didn't work I would have to exist, and if I existed, I don't know what I would be forced to do then." The narrator does not want to exist. He writes to escape living.

His survival is not just a matter of emerging from the death camp alive. He feels his unhappy childhood prepared him to face Auschwitz, prepared him for the impulse to survive. "Auschwitz struck me later as simply an elaboration of those virtues in which I have been indoctrinated since childhood." His struggles began as a child when his parents divorced. Their reason for parting ("We didn't understand each other") was completely baffling to their son. Moreover, he had no choice about what happened and had to just accept it. After the parents' divorce, the boy was sent to a strict boarding school which taught him how some institutions operate on fear tactics; this schooling was good preparation for his year in the concentration camps. After boarding school, the boy was taken under his father's tutelage. This education proved more difficult to endure than the boarding school since the narrator had to face his complicated relationship with his father. He quickly lost faith in his father's authority and began to pity the man instead. His father seemed like a stunted god. The experience of the boarding school and his education by his father showed him how slight authority could be as well as how the loss of the presence of authority could leave one feeling lonely. Without his father, he had no protection against the wide world. Both the camp and his image of deity took on paternal characteristics: "Auschwitz appears to [him] in the image of a father." Moreover, if the paternal God is omniscient, then He was also apparent in Auschwitz.

Unlike other Holocaust survivors, the narrator of Kaddish for a Child Not Born does not have a crisis of faith: he is not religious and has no faith to lose. He and his immediate family are secular Jews, completely assimilated into the non-Jewish city life of Budapest. But unlike his ex-wife, the narrator does not detest his Jewishness. He cherishes it because it brought him the experience of Auschwitz. It offers some explanation for what happened to him, "a bald woman in a red gown in front of a mirror."

In part, the narrator owes his physical and psychological survival to a character in the novel referred to as the Professor. Through an accidental meeting, the Professor helped and protected the narrator when he had no one else to rely on. The Professor made sure the narrator got his food portion at a time when food was scarce and the narrator was too sick to fend for himself. The Professor's action was irrational from the narrator's point of view because the Professor himself needed the food just as much as the narrator; however, the Professor's actions express his humanity and his compassion. Then, too, the Professor's action was not carefully planned — his response to the narrator's surprise is disgust — he is surprised that the narrator expected him to behave in any other fashion. The Professor's extraordinary kindness leaves the narrator with an "irrational" concept he cannot fully grasp, although his ex-wife is perfectly comfortable with it and considers the Professor's behavior to be normal.

The narrator's ex-wife, who was born after the Holocaust, has a dramatically different outlook on life. She is driven to become a medical doctor after her mother's early death and thereafter dedicates her life to helping others. At the same time, she rejects her Jewish identity because she does not want to carry the stigma that goes with being a Jew in post-World War II Europe. But she is not afraid to bring a child into this world. She is not troubled that she may be subjecting her progeny to the same pain and prejudice she has experienced. Of course it would be unreasonable to assume that anyone could live without a little anguish. Does survival through suffering make life sweeter? It does not appear so from the narrator's perspective.

The narrator feels no elation, no triumph at having survived the Holocaust. To him, Auschwitz was inevitable, a grotesque expression of human hatred that was a long time in coming. It was a place where god-like powers over life and death were exerted over believer and unbeliever alike. The horrible assault of the Holocaust on the human psyche was such that many people lost their faith, unable to believe in a God who would let such terrible things happen. Kertész has been known to express his gratitude for experiencing Auschwitz. Stefan Theil, interviewing Kertész for Newsweek International, expressed his surprise and Kertész responded:

I experienced my most radical moments of happiness in the concentration camp. You cannot imagine what it's like to be allowed to lie in the camp's hospital, or to have a 10-minute break from indescribable labor. To be very close to death is also a kind of happiness. Just surviving becomes the greatest freedom of all.

A common response to survival of a catastrophe is shame at being the one who lived while others died. There is often no satisfying explanation for why one person was stronger or luckier. The narrator of Kaddish for a Child Not Born expresses this feeling: "I am as much or as little an accomplice to my staying alive as I was to my birth. All right, I admit, there is a tiny bit more shame in staying alive." He strives through his writing to be worthy of life.

What is perhaps most interesting about the narrator's feelings in Kaddish for a Child Not Born concerning his survival of the Holocaust is that those feeling change drastically through the course of Kertész's four novels. In his first novel, Fateless (1975) the teenaged narrator "emerges from the camps with a mental clarity that promises a successful rehabilitation," as Gary Adelman observes in his very readable essay about Kertész's novels published in the New England Review. In the second book Fiasco (1988), the narrator is a little older and embittered by the cold, silent reception of his book about surviving Auschwitz. By the third novel, his bitterness has blossomed into a lifetime of disappointment, isolation, and neuroses. The narrator's clarity and chance for recovery have transformed completely into nihilism. In Kertész's fourth book, Liquidation (2003), the narrator has committed suicide and a friend of his looks back on the man's life while he is finally settling the writer's estate.

A once bright young man, the narrator survives terrible catastrophe only to live a half-life for the remainder of his days. He is a survivor, if only because he has not (yet) succumbed to suicide; he has not done the work for his tormentors. Although he does not choose to live a conventional life with wife and children, grandchildren, houses and furniture, he has dedicated himself to the arduous task of examining the meaning of his life and therefore his survival. He has given generations the gift of his writing, which, like a child, lives beyond its maker. Unlike a child, his writing attests to his survival long after he dies and perhaps help others come to terms with their own endurance in cataclysmic times.

Source: Carol Ullmann, Critical Essay on Kaddish for a Child Not Born, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

What Do I Read Next?

• Fateless (1975) by Imre Kertész tells the story of a teenage boy who survives a year at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is the most accessible of Kertész's novels.
• Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl (1947) by Anne Frank is the true story of a Jewish Dutch girl. She was in hiding with her family in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. She was given a diary for her thirteenth birthday and in it she recorded the events of her life from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944. Her family was eventually betrayed and sent to concentration camps. Her father was the only one to survive, and when he returned to Amsterdam and found her diary, he worked hard to have it published.
• Night (1958) by Elie Wiesel is a semi-autobiographical novel about the author's experiences at Birkenau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. Like Kertész's character in Fateless, Wiesel's narrator is only a teenager; however, unlike Kertész's character, Wiesel's is religious and must struggle to reconcile his faith with the realities of the Holocaust.
• Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Célan (2001) by Paul Célan and translated by John Felstiner offers a selection of this Holocaust survivor's prolific work. Célan was profoundly shaped by his Holocaust experience and the loss of his parents. His poem "Death Fugue" about Auschwitz is quoted at the beginning of Kaddish for an Unborn Child (2004), in the newest translation as well as in the original Hungarian edition.
• "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (2003) by Samantha Power is about the three years, 1993 – 1996, that Power spent in Bosnia and Srebrenica, observing the war and genocide. She learned while she was there that the U.S. leadership has a history of not intervening when genocide is being carried out and she argues for this policy to change in order to save lives.