‘I want to live by all means!’ Possibilities of Resistance and Cooperation in Two Hungarian Holocaust Narratives Zsolt Ágnes-Heyman Éva A piros bicikli és F. Várkonyi Zsuzsa Férfiidők lányregénye mint női ellen-diszkurzusok

Abstract

The two texts in the focus of analysis commemorate the victims and survivors of the Holocaust by mixing – to different degrees – fictionality and reality in trauma narratives. They are fragmented or unfinished female Bildungsroman narratives. The psychologist Zsuzsa F. Várkonyi’s novel (Férfiidők lányregénye) tells a story about two fatally traumatised human beings, a depressed middle-aged doctor and a rebellious anorexic teenage girl, both of whom lost their families during the war and seek consolation for the unbearable sensation of ‘having been left behind’ in the redeeming powers of a substitute family they invent for themselves. The other text distinguished by a (pseudo)documentary value, alternately published under the titles My daughter Éva (Éva lányom) and later as The Red Bicycle (A piros bicikli) is commonly referred to as the Hungarian Anne Frank’s diary. It records in a diary format the thirteen-years-old Eva Heyman’s experiences of Nazi persecutions in Oradea (Nagyvárad) before her perishing in Auschwitz – in a text edited (and possibly authored) by the girl’s mother, Ágnes Zsolt. The two books both function as works of mourning. Yet one is an admittedly fictional postmemorial product inspired by traumas inherited from previous generations, while the other simulates authentic verisimilitude to textually reconstruct, rescue the lost daughter’s voice. One focuses on the events following, the other on the events succeeding to the unspeakable trauma itself. Both foreground women’s, more specifically girls’ personal perspectives traditionally systematically omitted from history writing, and hence can be regarded as feminine/feminist counter-discourses. The foregrounding of embodied experiences of a difficult or impossible coming-of-age process amidst wartime turmoil invites a corporeal narratological reading. A common denominator in both books is the careful balancing of possibilities of resistance and collaboration, the moral evaluation of strategies for survival, the dilemma of compromises made with the repressive regime or adopting an ethics of care, in Carol Gilligan’s sense of the term, to preserve our sense of individual and collective selves, and to embrace a good-enough, livable life.