Giorgio & Nicola Pressburger: Homage to the Eighth District (1986)

Budapest, District 8

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The date 1986 refers to the original publication in Italian, Storie dell'Ottavo Distretto (Genoa). Gerald Moore's English translation was published by Readers International in 1990. (Lawrence Venuti ought to read his way through the publications of Readers International.)

The authors were twin brothers, Hungarian Jews who emigrated at the time of the 1956 uprising. The book is about the Jewish community in Budapest, which survived the Holocaust (though rather more than 50% died in it), and which has also survived Communism. (It remains to be seen if it survives Orbán.) Specifically, it's about the area around the Teleky Market.

 

After the war  the scene had changed. My relatives still lived near the great market. But they were in better apartments, of two or three rooms, and lying more distant from one another. The population of the quarter was frighteningly reduced by the Holocaust of the Jews, and there was much more space for the survivors. My own family had advanced a step up the scale of human and social dignity.

 

Here's another passage from another story, beginning in the same way but running a different course:

 

After the war life started up again in the Eighth District. First with a petty black market: with a few ounces of flour - mostly mixed with plaster - with flint stones, saccharine and lard. Then Franja and the other survivors re-established contact with the peasants, getting hold of fresh eggs, a little milk, a few chickens, then hens, then geese, and finally the stalls reopened their shutters and the old ice-boxes were once more filled with artificial ice. The blessing of the Lord again showered upon those little wooden stalls, bringing money with it. But how long could it last?

 

And in another story again, the children who have lived for three months in dreadful conditions in the Temple (to escape the Holocaust) are finally let out when the Russian assault on Budapest (January 1945) makes it too dangerous to stay.

 

"We must send them away from here," he said, not to us but to the secretary. "It's both just and advisable". Soon after this exchange, we children were thrust into the overcoats abandoned on our arrival and conducted downstairs. We were taken outside in groups. It was the first time for ages that I saw the light of day. I lifted my eyes. Two planes were fighting in the grey sky overhead. I saw red tracers speeding from one plane towards the other: two battling angels soared in a sky immersed in the thunder of bombardment. Then, in an instant, the two angels disappeared behind the roof of the temple, still exchanging their red arrows of gunfire. And a moment later an unspeakable thunder shook us and all the buildings around. The bomb had fallen quite nearby. The spectacled Maurer and many more of my companions of those months were carried off by the Angel of Death in that terrible explosion. I still ask myself why.

 

It was a poor area, also populated by Gypsies and poor Christians of various kinds, for example Juliet:

 

She had been a servant all her life and knew no other role. Her consolation was her faith. She went to Mass every morning. An hour later, when Rachel's children woke up, she was ready with the coffee and milk. Even in the days when no one would have advised frequenting the church, she remained devoted to Saint Rita, whose chapel was close by. She had no religious problem so far as the Jews were concerned; she called down the blessing of the saints on them too. She was certain that the good Lord heard their prayers also. In the evening she retired to the basement of the block. There she prayed before a sacred image which never lacked the glory of a lighted candle. She never spoke of her past. With the children and the world in general she was always patient, and, unlike Manci [a Gypsy servant], quite free of ambition. Her long years gradually melted away without leaving a trace. Just as if she had never lived. The wheels of a tram tore her body apart one evening when she was wandering distractedly in the road.

 

That sudden violence is one of the book's motifs.  The stories we believe to be true, but they are shaped into fable structures. Franja, for example, with her fiancé,

 

had exchanged a few little kisses. In those brief moments she, with her acute sense of smell, had detected a strange odour, of camphor or of phenol - of the hospital, in short. "I am a fox in these matters," Franja said of herself, "I can smell everything." And so it proved. After an interminable two-year engagement, the young man came one evening to Franja's house, and that very night her destiny was accomplished. Turning up with cakes and candies at the home of his consenting fiancée, he was seized in the midst of a happy conversation about future arrangements by a terrible fit of coughing, until a huge gob of blood burst from his throat onto the table, which was already prepared for supper. The boy, who had kept his consumption hidden throughout the engagement, died within three weeks - may he rest in God - almost on the eve of his intended wedding. At the sight of so much blood and in the proximity of death, Franja said simply: "You see? I suspected it. I'm a fox."

 

The story ends with a real fox bursting from Franja's grave and attacking the author.

 

As the pieces grid on to each other time-wise (e.g. the end of the war) and place-wise (Eighth District), they are also shaped into stories by a grid-like process: Ilona Weiss's seven lovers, Franja the Fox's sequence of cold perceptions, Selma Grün's decalogue of maxims, Rachel's memory-transformations, and Tibor Schreiber's successive encounters with the author who hates him. Each of these stories is entirely successful in giving a meaning to someone's life. We see that it is easy to give meaning; the easier it is, the more doubtful we are of what meaning this someone's life really has; that it must be quite different to what we are being told (e.g. Timor Schreiber), or perhaps does not have one meaning at all.  This evocation of scepticism is characteristic, and is linked to another characteristic effect: a dialectic between light-heartedness and profound desolation.  So much so that, whenever one of these emotions is proposed to us, it tends to evoke the other.   








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The twins were born in 1937. Nicola Pressburger died in 1985. Giorgio Pressburger was a film and theatre director; he also wrote several other books. He died in 2017.