Fragment


Miklós Radnóti, one of the greatest Hungarian poets of the twentieth century, was called up for forced labor three times.

For the first time he was commanded between 9 September and 18 December 1940 to Transylvania, recently returned to Hungary, to clear away the wire fences of the former Romanian border.

For the second time he worked from 1 July 1942 to April 1943 on earthworks in Transylvania and later in the sugar and machine factories of Hatvan.

For the third time he joined up on 20 May 1944. They were taken from Hungary, at that time already occupied by Nazi Germany, to the German labor camps around Bor in Serbia – Lager Berlin, Lager Heidenau, Lager Brünn – to work in the copper mines and on railway building. At the advance of the Red Army on 17 September they set out on the march on foot towards Hungary.

On 19 May, the day before his last joining up he wrote his Fragment.

Oly korban éltem én e földön,
mikor az ember úgy elaljasult,
hogy önként, kéjjel ölt, nemcsak parancsra,
s míg balhitekben hitt s tajtékzott téveteg,
befonták életét vad kényszerképzetek.

Oly korban éltem én e földön,
mikor besúgni érdem volt, s a gyilkos,
az áruló, a rabló volt a hős, -
s ki néma volt netán s csak lelkesedni rest,
már azt is gyűlölték, akár a pestisest.

Oly korban éltem én e földön,
mikor ki szót emelt, az bújhatott,
s rághatta szégyenében ökleit, -
az ország megvadult, s egy rémes végzeten
vigyorgott vértől és mocsoktól részegen.

Oly korban éltem én e földön,
mikor gyermeknek átok volt az anyja,
s az asszony boldog volt, ha elvetélt,
a élő irigylé a férges síri holtat,
míg habzott asztalán a sűrű méregoldat.

Oly korban éltem én e földön,
mikor a költő is csak hallgatott,
s várta, hogy talán megszólal újra -
mert méltó átkot itt úgysem mondhatna más
– a rettentő szavak tudósa, Ésaiás.
I lived on this earth in an age
when man became so debased
that he killed on his own, with lust, not just on orders,
and while holding false beliefs and foaming raving, lost,
wild obsessions braided, choked off his lot.

I lived on this earth in an age
when in informing lay merit and murderers,
backstabbers and muggers were your heroes –
and the man who kept silent and was loath to applaud,
they hated even him, as if he carried the plague.

I lived on this earth in an age
when the man who spoke up could go into hiding
and could there gnaw on his clenched fists in shame –
the country went wild and at a terrible fate
gloated, reeling drunk from blood and from filth.

I lived on this earth in an age
when a mother was a curse to her child
and the woman was happy to miscarry,
the living envied the worm-eaten dead their prison,
and on the table there foamed a thick drink of poison.

I lived on this earth in an age
when the poet too just kept his silence
and waited, maybe to find his voice again –
for, surely, no one else could utter a worthy curse
but Isaiah, learned master of terrible words.

Translated by Emery George

On the same day someone else wrote for Radnóti, too. Their cleaning woman left a letter on the table.


Dear Mr Dr
I am sorry that I could not personally say goodbye. I wish to Mr Dr all the best, good strength and health to endure this terrible change, and I will also pray so I could see again in good strength and health Mr. Dr.
L.

Radnóti still could read this letter. He filed it together with the manuscript of his poem among his documents. Not for nothing he had studied in a school of commerce: he always kept an accurate order among his papers as well as a precise account of both their daily expenses and the publications of his poems.


This manuscript and this letter came to the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences together with the complete bequest of Miklós Radnóti in 2009 as a donation of his wife Fanni Gyarmati. She was ninety-seven then, while Radnóti would have been exactly a hundred years old. The Library organized a studio exhibition for the centenary from the just arrived, not even cataloged bequest. Both this manuscript and this letter were on display.

The web version of this exhibition has been just completed in collaboration of the Library and Studiolum, both in Hungarian and in English. Its solemn presentation will take place within a week, on 24 February in the Library, and then it will be opened on the net. Our readers will get first-hand information on it.

Miklós Radnóti’s membership card in the Writers’ Economic Association. It was found together with his documents and his last, greatest poems in the mass grave of Abda
where he was shot dead on 4 November 1944.

Breaking news: Whose is this song?


Yesterday evening we posted this news only in the Hungarian version of Río Wang, considering that it can be interesting only to local readers. But as we realize that several readers residing in Hungary prefer reading the English version of the blog, now we also publish it in here. So here you are: Adela Peeva’s fantastic documentary Чия е тази песен? / Whose is this song? will be on Duna TV this evening at 23:10. (Duna TV can be also watched via Internet, but they do not always transmit each film that is actually on screen). This film, which was nominated the best European documentary in 2003 follows the ways in the Balkans of that famous late Ottoman wandering melody about which we have already written in detail. True, there we have inserted the complete film from Google Video, but this evening you will see it in a much better quality (and hopefully  not dubbed, only subtitled in Hungarian). Don’t miss it!

All aboard

The route from Zapala to Villa Pehuenia leads through immense landscapes where the eye gets tired until it can see up the first signs of the chains of the Andes.

Only a few cars are seen from time to time.


A family of choiques (dwarf rheas) runs across the street quickly before the camera could capture them.

However, soon another family surprises us even more.


We gradually catch up with a pretty shabby Ford Falcon which is so overloaded as if the whole family were migrating or setting out to a long vacation in some desolate place.

In the middle of the burden in happy disorder, a peculiar item captivates our attention.


No member of the family can be left behind, even if in the car itself there is no room for the dog any more. Who knows how the poor one can hold himself up there!

And mostly, what he is thinking of such a trip…



Todos a bordo

La ruta que va de la ciudad de Zapala a Villa Pehuenia tiene paisajes inmensos donde la vista se pierde hasta alcanzar las primeras señales de la Cordillera de los Andes.

Pocos autos se ven cada tanto.


Una familia de choiques (ñandúes enanos) pasa antes de que la cámara pueda captarla.

Sin embargo otra familia nos sorprende pronto.


Un Ford Falcon bastante destartalado viene tan cargado que imaginamos una mudanza o unas vacaciones en algún lugar aislado.

Pero más allá del innegable desorden de la carga, hay otras peculiaridades en ese techo abarrotado.


Ningún miembro de la familia debía quedarse atrás, aunque dentro del auto ya no hubiera lugar para el perro. ¡Quién sabe cómo se sostenía el pobre allí arriba!

Y qué estaría pensando de semejante viaje…



Two years in the garden


Kata, as in every year, has again composed a bouquet, eighty-nine pictures from last year’s photos in our garden. Have a look at it. You can randomly click on some tiles in the large mosaic if you want, but if I may suggest, you’d better open the first picture, the one with the small Japanese acer and the red lilies and then let you be guided from picture to picture by the small hand on the right side. So you can live through in a condensed way what we have lived through during a year in the garden.

Winter

Spring



Summer

Autumn

Winter

If you live together with the garden for many years, you see growing from year to year not only the garden but also the number of the year’s seasons. For the first spring is completely different from the magnolias’ blooming at Easter, or the June garden covered with roses from the lazy and hazy August jungle. The two weeks of the trees’ coloring is an independent season, absolutely distinct from the increasingly longer lukewarm late autumn. And you will even understand the reason of the new year’s absurd beginning in the middle of winter, for the snowy calming down at the end of the year cannot be compared to the frosty and icy new year’s winter torturing both people and animals, the longest season of the year.


At the same time of solemnly closing down the past year, we also announce the program of the new year. The most prestigious Hungarian gardening magazine Kertbarát Magazin has found Kata through her garden blog, and invited her to write an article on our garden in every issue of the magazine in 2010. The first edition has already been published. The project of the next ones is to be read in Kata’s garden blog.

May it be bound up

When you set out from Lake Balaton to the south, to the archaic region of Somogy, you will cross long parallel hill ridges that follow each other like the waves of a sea frozen several thousand years ago. The hills are covered by the bedsheets of snow-covered plough-lands to the horizon. Only rarely appears a village with an archaic Hungarian name as if they were drifted here from afar by the sea. This is all that has been left from the rich medieval texture of settlements after the two centuries of Turkish devastation, reconstructed on the map of destroyed medieval churches by Emese Nagy: a handful of villages in the centers of the large estates, with scattered hamlets of the estates’ serfs between them, the “waste ranches”.


This landscape was the scene of one of the most shocking literary sociographies from the 30s, Gyula Illyés’ People of the Waste Ranches (erroneously translated to English by G. F. Cushing as People of the Puszta, as the real “puszta”, the Hungarian steppe lays on the other side of the Danube). Only a few miles from the site of this book, after the village of Nagykónyi standing on a hilltop, the road turns with a sharp bend to the southwest. After leaving the village, the road descends again among the fields, where you will meet a peculiar scene: a lonely stone, apparently a carved one, standing in the fields.


If you get out of the car and go nearer, you will see that it is not one but three stones, just the other two have their upper parts broken. Three Jewish tombstones in the middle of nothing.




According to the survey of Anikó Gazda on the former Hungarian synagogues and Jewish communities, in 1941 in Nagykónyi thirty-two persons declared themselves Israelites. On the net you will also find an unexpectedly detailed source on their fate: a report and collection of interviews on the deportation of the Jewish communities in Tolna and on the return of the survivors, composed in 2005 by the students of the high school of nearby Dombóvár:


“In my native village Nagykónyi there was absolutely no hostility with the Jews. The Jewish families lived among us. In front of our house there lived a tinsmith, Uncle Löwinger with his wife who was a needlewoman and two children of the age of fifteen and seventeen. I was a good friend of the boys, primarily of the younger one. They went together with us to the local elementary school, there was no Jewish school in the village. They were poor, the house was not theirs either, they rented from the inn-keeper those three rooms where they lived. Uncle Löwinger was taken to forced-labor service earlier than the rest of his family, but he never told where. Next to our house there was a pharmacy whose manager and his wife were also Jews, they were called Schönfeld. The wife returned, she lived one or two years in Kónyi, and then she moved to the city of Szekszárd because only there she got a job. The pharmacy was nationalized, a new pharmacist was appointed there. But she often came back also later, because the house that was theirs remained hers, a room, a kitchen and a bathroom were left to her. It was interesting that we were neighbors, she often came over to teach me, but she never told about what had happened to her. Behind our house there lived the Kirschners, husband and wife, they had a grocery store. But I do not know what happened to them. There lived also a Jewish soda-water producer in Nagykónyi, but I do not remember how he was called. Perhaps there were even more Jews in the village, but they did not differ from the rest of the people.

We only observed some difference with the Jews when they put on the yellow star. It was obligatory to them to wear the yellow star. When they came out from the house, they already had to wear it on the left side. Local people did not know anything about anti-Jewish laws, there was no television and radio at that time, and especially we, young people did not really know what was happening, so we were very surprised. I was about 12-13, and my 15-17 years old friend had this yellow star on the chest. We even could not speak with them about this, because they were told not to contact local non-Jewish population any more.

They were taken away in 1944. They were told to collect only the most necessary things. On a prescribed day they were accompanied by gendarmes to the station. They were taken by train to Tamási. There they were crammed into a central ghetto where they lived for one or two months. The ghetto was an isolated group of houses with beds inside, they could not come out of it, it was guarded by soldiers.

The Jewish houses were closed with the keys given over by the owners. They were also sealed up, and the seals were regularly controlled. If anybody went in, the gendarmes would have started to investigate. There was no local gendarme, they came out from Tamási twice a day by bicycle
in summertime and once a day on foot in wintertime. In Kónyi there was no looting of the Jewish houses.

Jenő Löwinger has survived, but his family has perished. After he returned, he became life-companion to a Christian woman, an inn-keeper, Mrs. Acsádi. The two survivors, Uncle Löwinger and Mrs. Schönfeld never spoke about what they had gone through. To me it is a mystery why they did not. I remember that Mrs. Löwinger who was a needlewoman somehow knew in advance when they would be taken away, because a week earlier she gave over to us her sewing-machine, a Csepel sewing-machine. When Uncle Löwinger came home, my parents purchased of him this sewing-machine. It had been taken to our house in the night by Uncle Löwinger and my father. My mother has kept it until her death.”



The few Jewish families of Nagykónyi were unable to maintain a synagogue of their own. The nearest prayer house was four miles away, in the town of Tamási. The ghetto where they were collected before deportation was also here. The deserted synagogue of Tamási was pulled down in 1951. Its photo as well as the picture of the memorial tablet of the local Jewish heroes of WWI have been published in the blog Nem felejtjük, dedicated to the WWI monuments in Hungary.


However, as these photos attest, they seem to have had a cemetery of their own outside of the village, along the path coming from the Catholic cemetery. We do not even know until what time this cemetery was in use, for all the three gravestones left to us are dated to the 19th century.


It has recently snowed, and the sky is already overcast with snow clouds again. On the photo made in the February twilight Gyuri is not able to discern each word:

יחזקאל הלך לדרכו ערירי
ששששויפגעו בו מלאכי שמים
חן וחסד מצא בעיני אנשים ואלהים חיים
זך וישר פעלו בר לבב ונקי כפים
קל כנשר וגבור כארי עשה רצון קונו
א*** *** *** *** מהונו (?) ו
ל*** ליראים (?) ול*** היה
ששששתשוקתו ורצונו
בגן עדן יהי *** *** *** *** ***ב
נשמתו בגנזי מרומים תהיה צרורה
ששששששששבצרור החים
יחזקאל
צדיק כתמר יפרח ********

“The initials of the first seven verses of the poem are larger than the rest. They form an acrostic with the name Yechezqel. Verses 9 and 10 also begin with large initials forming the word Ben (=son of).

Yechezqel halakh ledarkho ariri
vayifgeu bo malakhe shamayim
chen vachesed matsa beeyne anashim
veelohim chayim
zakh veyashar po’olo bar levav uneqi kapayim
qal kanesher vegibor kaari asa retson qono
***** mehono (?)
***** layereim (?) ule-***** haya
teshuqato uretsono
began eden yehi *****
nishmato beginze meromim tihye tserura
bitseror hachayim
Yechezqel
***** tsadiq katamar yifrach
Yechezqel went on his way childless
and the angels of God met him.
He found favor and kindness in the eyes of people and of the Living God,
he was pure and upright in his deed, he had a pure heart and clean hands,
light as the eagle, courageous as the lion, he did the will of his Creator.
(*****) of his goods (?)
(*****) to those fearing God (?) was all his wish and will.
May he be in Paradise (*****)
May his soul be bound up in the boundle of life in the treasurehouses of heaven.
Yechezqel
(*****) The righteous will flourish like the palm tree. (Zsolt 92:12)

In the biblical quotation of the last verse the letters taw-mem-resh are highlighted, and their numerical value gives the date of Yechezqel’s death: (5)640 that corresponds to the civil year of 1879-80. (I mean only if in the first, illegible part of the verse there is not another quotation also with highlighted letters.)

I also send you the biblical and rabbinic sources of the first five verses, just in order you see in what a beautiful and ingenious way they were combined by the epitaph’s author.

1-2. And Abram said: “O Lord God, what wilt Thou give me, since I am childless.” [literally: “I go childless]” (Gen 15:2) — Now as Jacob went on his way, the angels of God met him. (Gen 32:2)
[An important comment to the above two verses: both include the verb “halakh” (go) which is used by the author to inventively bind and reinterpret them.]

3. And the king loved Esther above all the women and she found favor and kindness with him more than all the virgins. (Esther 2:17) — But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. (Gen 6:8)

4. If you are pure and upright, surely now He would rouse Himself for you. (Job 8:6) —  He who has clean hands and a pure heart. (Ps 24:4)

5. Be strong as the leopard and light as the eagle, swift as the deer and courageous as the lion, so that you might do the will of your heavenly father. (Pirke Avot 5:23)

I find it really beautiful. And if I consider it better – no, I lie: after I have checked it up better –, I must say that such epitaphs in rhymes and acrostics are not very frequent. This tombstone is also special in this respect. Because it might be possible that the stone-cutter had some poems on stock that he could use more than one time; but I doubt he had poems with the acrostics of each Jewish name.

By reading this text, I feel it dreadfully beautiful that in the wasteland of Nagykónyi there has been standing for a hundred and thirty years a sophisticated poem carved in stone which has not been read by anybody in the past sixty-five years, because there is nobody there who could read it any more. It is like the well of the Little Prince which is hiding in the desert until somebody finds it again.”

The last Armenian tombstone on the Aghtamar Island of Lake Van in Turkey where until the
genocide of 1915 there stood the seat of the Armenian Catholicos. This photo
was given to us by Andranik, husband of the great Armenian
folk singer Hasmik Harutyunyan with the permission
of publishing it whenever we want to.
This is the best place for it.

Luna Park


“The glittering, bustling, roaring Luna Park extended under them. The music, the noise and the shouting flied up to them at once, all it bombed together their ears. And above the many lights airplanes hanging from a high column were silently revolving in an already more obscure layer of the air which thus seemed more poetical.”
Raymond Queneau: Pierrot mon ami, 1942


“The opening of the huge fair extending as long as the Porte Maillot on 29 May 1909 attracted several thousands of spectators. Those curious of the American wonders could try for the first time the vertical Niagara Fall or the Grand Canyon panoramic railway, long before Gainsbourg and Elsa Triolet.”
Mikaël Hirsch: Omicron, 2007


The Luna Park of Paris was opened a hundred and one years ago for the large public. These photos were taken a hundred years ago, in 1910. They were first published two years ago on a Russian blog, and then I put them aside for the centenary. However, by the time the anniversary arrived, the blog closed down. Therefore now I publish the complete series again.


The fashion of the Luna Parks came from America. The first one was opened in 1903 on Coney Island. Its great attraction was the “airspace” called “Luna Travel” or “Traveling to the Moon” which gave name to the whole amusement park. Beginning with 1905 the Ingersoll company established a world wide network of Luna Parks, called “English Parks” in several places of Europe after their place of origin. But the original name “Luna Park” has also been kept and converted itself to the common equivalent of “amusement park” in several languages.


The Luna Park of Paris stood at the Maillot Gate. Its main attractions included the Niagara Falls, the so-called Russian (or American) mountains, the diabolic wheel, the Enchanted Palace. They were all faithfully copied also in the World Expo of Roubaix in 1911 whose photo documentation was left to us. In 1914 a great dance hall opened here as well under the direction of Duque from Brasil. Duque, a dentist had come to Paris as a traveling agent of medicine, but there he discovered that exotic dances were selling much better. This is how he started to teach “the true Brasilian tango” or „maxixe” which became the most popular dance of pre-war Paris.



“I will not go into details as to the trade, but there are days when we sell a hundred thousand entrance tickets. Twenty attractions keep drawing the visitors, and then I do not even mention the lotteries, the games of manual skills, the shooting galleries which are mainly situated there, between the Alpine Coaster and the Dance Palace, you see, there next to the crossing of Chaillot Avenue and Drop Street. But the main entrance is here, in front of us, at the corner of the External boulevard and Chaillot Avenue.”
Raymond Queneau: Pierrot mon ami, 1942


As a result of the war and of the Great Depression, the traffic of the Luna Park has remarkably decreased. In 1931 they exhibited, as a last great sensation, a hundred living penguins as well as a complete embalmed whale, for the first time in the history of European amusement parks. Although this spectacle could not save the Luna Park, it has created a myth in European literature which has been obstinately embodied again and again from Eduardo Mendoza’s La ballena to László Krasznahorkai’s and then Béla Tarr’s The melancholy of resistance.


The park, after being for thirty years an indispensable spot of Paris, closed its gates in 1937. For ten years it stood empty, almost as its own ghost, inspiring such nostalgic works as Raymond Queneau’s Pierrot mon ami or Maigret’s first post-war novel, Maigret in retirement whose plot takes place in this district and involves some employees of the Luna Park. Finally in 1948 it was pulled down. Today the Palais des Congrès stands on its place.


Small carousel:




Balloon sellers:




Big wheel and airship:



American tower:



Russian swan boats:


Children’s railway:


Shooting gallery:


Little girl with the piggy bank won at shooting:


Seller of paper windmills:


Seller of paper flowers:


Puppet show:


Street scales:


Moving movie ads:


Show in the open-air theatre:






The employees of the Luna Park cooking lunch:


Luna-Park est ma réserve de gaieté
A tous les stands je suis salué
Des patrons et des habitués
Garçons et filles
C' est ma famille
Partout ailleurs je n' suis rien
A Luna Park je suis quelqu' un
Vive Luna Park et vive la joie.
My share of joy is in the Luna Park
where I am greeted at every stand
by the staff and the visitors
the boys and the girls
this is my family
anywhere else I am nobody
only in the Luna Park I am somebody:
long live the Luna Park and long live joy.