The periodical
of The Federation to Maintain Jewish Culture in Hungary
Péter Krasztev
Generating a Generation
I would like to talk about a generation which is so new that even its existence is doubtful. Or rather, I am quite sure that it exists, my only doubt is if the representatives of this generation are all aware that they belong to the same generation. I am talking about those young writers and intellectuals who, grandchildren of holocaust survivors, awakened to consciousness as artists, as citizens and, of course, as Jews at the time of the Central and Eastern European political changes. At this moment we are witnesses to how this generation's consciousness as a generation is formed.
1. Where have all the generations been in Central and Eastern Europe?
Before coming to the topic of Jewish youth, I would like to clarify a seemingly theoretical question in order to show why this insecure generation is so important. For I think that in this region, until the mid-80s, the generation issue was a physiological rather than a philosophical and sociological question. In a state where the emblematic figure of social mobility is the leader, who is in power until natural extinction, we can hardly talk about generation gaps, sharp conflicts between the generations. Tocqueville's wise remark that "among democratic nations each generation is a new people" - is valid only under normal conditions.
Only if there is history do generations follow one another. In a state which was made for eternity, which presupposed an unshakable system of moral values and which spoke the final word according to its own Cartesian logic in the matter of good and evil, of us and them, of body and soul - in such a state, the possibility for change and the continuity of history was abolished and time stood still. It is not by chance that Central and Eastern European prose written in the 70s and the 80s expresses this complete lack of the sense of time, a kind of total spatiality.
Of course, lack of history does not mean lack of events. The events and the people who participate in them - that is, common experience - are a major factor in the formation of a generation. The other reason why no generations were formed in the region is that even if there were events, they could not become history for lack of the public sphere. Arthur Danto has informed us that "to exist historically is to perceive the events one lives through as part of a story later to be told." Events remained untellable up to the mid-80s, therefore there was no discourse available to talk about them - no discourse, that is, no interpretation of the various groups and generations which would finally constitute history. The best example for such a repression is the Hungarian revolution of 1956: up to the mid-80s one would have thought that there had been such a thing as the generation of 56, and suddenly it turned out that only individual interpretations and experiences have survived, with practically no contact points, after all those years passed in silence. The fate of the 56 generation reached the 68 generation as well, also for lack of public discourse about the events.
The third reason why there were no generations in our part of the world is that ideas, fads and events which generated generations in the West appeared here merely as imprints, rather than as end products of organic processes. The term Ferenc Fehér and Ĺgnes Heller use for this phenomenon is lack of the "dynamism of modernity". In the 60s, the first conflicts between generations erupted in Western Europe - this was the period known as the third stage of modernity or the age of the disintegration of modernity or the beginning of the postmodern era. According to Richard Toulmin, this was the moment when the ideal of stability and unity was replaced by the ideal of diversity and adaptability; now, instead of dominant trends in art and fashion, everything lives side by side, classical politics is losing its meaning as right and left are becoming indistinguishable etc. There was nothing like that in Central and Eastern Europe. Rock and roll, punk, neoavantgarde performers, experimental filmmakers, communities - hippies and hobos - came and went, but all these were secondary products of Western models and had no publicity, since the essence of the regime was to create a homogeneous and well-arranged society, where any group identity meant deviance from the norm. Though there was some diversity between those of the same rank, yet no generations were born, because a relatively tolerant social atmosphere - formed in the West by the internal dynamics of modernity - was missing.
2. Where do the Jews enter the picture?
By mere chance, Pascal Bruckner forgot to omit a sentence of complaint from his excellent essay on cosmopolitism. This sentence said that the disappearance of Jewish communities from Central and Eastern Europe was still an unprecedented spiritual disaster, because with them, the clear sight of outsiders, indispensable in destroying social lies, has disappeared. Pascal Bruckner is of course right in general, except that Jews have not disappeared from the region. A few years ago I visited Cernovic, Ukraine, a former spiritual centre of Central and Eastern European Jewry. It happened to be Rosh Hashanah - the Jewish New Year - and I was shocked to see that several hundred young people participated in the celebration. Ira Boyka, the headmistress of the local Jewish school told me that she wasn't quite sure herself what this all meant, since everybody in town thought that the Jews had all emigrated, but within a few years there were several thousands of them again, as if they were multiplying by cell-division: it is always possible to dig up an "ancestor", or at least a distant uncle - and that much is enough to "revive" somebody's identity.
I find this story emblematic for the Jewry of the whole region. The Jews, who were believed to have disappeared, have not only "reproduced" themselves, they were even compelled to preserve their generational consciousness. The first argument why there was no generational awareness in Central and Eastern Europe was that there is no generation without the sense of historical continuity. The historical consciousness of the Jewry of the region is not identical with the consciousness of the majority, because no Jew could say that they had lost or that they had won the war. Even though the topic of the holocaust was usually ignored officially in national historiography, the memory of the Shoah - even if in a latent form - determined the attitude and the thinking of the survivors. In his autobiographical novel, Mihály Korniss describes how, as a kid, his parents took him to the inauguration ceremony of the Wall of Martyrs in the 50s. "At that time, I was not quite sure who the Jews were, and as a matter of fact, I am not quite sure even now, but I have meditated about this issue much more than anybody believes or believed then. (...) 'Cause I was not a Jew, only my parents. Like the guy in the joke. 'Cause I was not circumcised, ha ha, and no rabbi had seen me, and I had no Jewish name, and I was not written in the community records, in other words, I belong to no denomination, to quote my parents. (...) You guys are also Jewish, aren't you? It doesn't matter, the kid will surely grow out of it. What do you want anyway, you are lucky, but let's stop looking at each other, they're watching us!"
Besides the unintentional preservance of historical continuity, the attitude described by Korniss has kept the memory of the common experience of the Shoah alive. Whereas the events after the war could not produce a discourse that a generation could have regarded as its own for a long time, there was no diversity in the narrations about the Shoah. Even at that time, a decent state could not allow itself to alter the story of the Shoah as it did alter, for example, the story of the 56 or the 68 revolution. But there was another, unofficial discourse, that of antisemitism, which has helped to keep the sense of a common experience alive in the Jews. And this is not a kind of mystical "popular mind" as those psychoanalysts testify who have examined and treated offsprings of holocaust survivors of the region. In one of her papers Judith Kestenberg distinguished three generations: the survivors, their children and the third generation. The conclusion of the research is that the children of survivors usually act as if the secret of the Shoah was theirs and they had to hide it from their own children, yet unwittingly, they bequeath the secret to the third generation - this is what psychologists call acting out.
What I said about the missing dynamics of modernity is true about Jews only to a very limited extent. In spite of all the state propaganda, it would have been very hard to make all these people - who bear the memory of the common experience within - believe that their sense of belonging together is mere deviance. This propaganda could not work because everybody knew that the "Jewish consciousness" provided the dynamics for modernization in an internationally recognized Jewish state. It is again a different problem that the image of Israel then alive in people's imagination was obviously an idealized one, a sort of vision of Canaan, since hardly anybody knew how it was really like over there.
3. The third generation and tradition
The third generation, which gained consciousness in the mid-80s, in other words, at the time of the "restarting of history", immediately started to search for a tradition for its own peculiar, fragmented Jewishness, a Jewishness which was patched up from "acted-out" gestures. The return to tradition has always proved a secure "modernization strategy" during periods overloaded with history, or, as Mircea Eliade writes in the Myth of Eternal Return: the return to tradition is elicited by the instinctive opposition to history. But this generation had to replace their "instinctive" Judaism with "conscious" Judaism within a short time, because they got scared of the uncertainty that accompanied the changes. The "importation of tradition" seemed like the most effective solution, here also: the - to use Eric Hobsbawn`s term - "national-innovative" tradition of Israel was immediately available. In 1989, Israel sent several hundred young people - me, among them - to the Jewish state, showed us the promised land, the ancient and the four-decade-old traditions, the ideology, the kibbutzim etc. This was where the majority of Central and Eastern European young people saw Jews doing physical labour for the first time - but then this was the first time Israelis saw Jews who were not enthusiastic about the ideology of the national state. Ever since, the missionary zeal of the Jewish Agency has significantly subsided, though I met an orthodox guy in the above mentioned Cernovic, Ukraine, who made kids dance to Israeli mock folk songs, and in Prague I saw young people in kipot, who booed at the freshly elected rightest prime minister, Netanyahu with neophytes' zeal, because in his speech he uttered half a sentence about the continuation of the peace process.
4. The third generation and the spiritual product
It did not take much time to realize that the mechanically imported Israeli tradition would not make the modernization process any more dynamic than the Communist modernization strategy, or rather, that it suited social purposes, but did not give any spiritual inspiration to anybody. But what remains then for Central and Eastern European Jewish intellectuals, what have they discovered out for themselves in the latest period?
That was the question we were trying to answer at a conference organized for young Jewish intellectuals at the Central European University. Ever since than, we have been receiving essays from those who could not come to the conference, and an anthology has been put together from their works. Obviously, nobody talks about a return to tradition - neither Israeli, nor other -, yet a thorough reading will reveal signs of this. The third generation goes back to the diversity of Central and Eastern European Jewry, to the tradition of radical, but completely free thinking. From now on, Jewishness will not be manifested in allusions and hidden gestures, but in conscious self-reflexivity, which brings the individual writers to reach various conclusions. Neither before, nor after the war did Jews constitute a homogeneous mass - neither in places where they were mostly assimilated, nor in ghettoes. The restart of history revived this heterogeneity in Jewish spiritual life. Yet there is one significant difference: there exists one absolute common point of reference, a common experience, which reached all of them through the same channel. 40-45 years after the holocaust the question comes up: how can we live together now with those who left us alone, to ourselves than? can we judge them differently today? do they deserve it at all? And the answer is usually no - however, we belong here, in Central and Eastern Europe, where it is we, outsiders and insiders at the same time, who can keep - as Pascal Bruckner says - "the lies of closed societies" under control. Like it or not, this third generation youth exercises moral control over the mental/spiritual progress of the others. In this light, it is not hard to interpret the remark of the Polish Konstanty Gebert that "two chosen peoples cannot live in the same land". The same idea lies in the compelling sentence of Maxim Biller (who is of Russian origin, born in Prague and living in Germany): "We live with them, we work with them, we laugh with them, but we remain parted forever." Even Elma Softic, the writer from Sarayevo, whose situation is quite exceptional, and who, after all she has gone through, does not exclude the possibility of another holocaust, finishes a piece of writing by saying that in spite of all the terror, she has given birth to a child and she will have another one there, in Bosnia. The Hungarian Gábor T. Szántó, whose prose often suggests the impossibility of reconciliation, meditates upon the writer's dilemma of how to exist together and separately at the same time. Like it or not, the third generation youth exercises moral control over the mental/spiritual progress of the others.
Today, as before, the attitude of radical assimilation also exists, described by László Márton in an essay written in 1988, but valid even now. He regards the assimilation of the Jews as an organic part of Hungarian history, and he sees what I have been calling the "restart of history" as a great opportunity to complete the mental assimilation of Hungarians and Jews. The Bulgarian Emi Baruh is in a better situation to talk about the community of fate of the Bulgarians and the Jews, since there never was a historical conflict between the two nations.
I started this lecture by saying that I was going to talk about a generation the existence of which is doubtful. Yet the existence of a new generation of Central and Eastern European writers has by now become obvious for me. They are those who no longer want to go or to stay, to forgive or to take revenge, to repress or to sublimate, but to put minds and souls in order, and to complete what the second generation deferred or shifted onto them. And just as it is correct to say that traditions are created, a generation is also something that can be created: at a conference, or by publishing an anthology together, or even at a lecture. And when such a generation really awakens to consciousness, then perhaps it will be their accomplishment after all to write the most competent papers about the later generations of Central and Eastern European Jews, instead of psychologists.
