Psalm 44

TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

Although the great Danilo Kiš (1935–1989) also wrote poetry and drama, he is certainly best known in Central Europe, the Balkans, and the world of translation for his novels, such as The Attic (1962), Garden, Ashes (1965), and Hourglass (1972), as well as his sets of interlocking stories — themselves considered rather novelistic by some readers — such as A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976) and The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1983). With the publication of this novel, Psalm 44, and the simultaneously published stories of The Lute and the Scars, most of Kiš’s fiction has now seen the light of day in English. Significant quantities of his other work have not yet been translated, and hence they have unfortunately not yet factored into the ways most of us categorize, or interact emotionally with, Kiš and his work. Our interest in Kiš’s already intriguing persona, views, and books (the elegiac, almost lapidary prose; the pointed documentary and narrative experiments; and his evocation of history as marginalization, peril, and loss) seems likely only to deepen and become more nuanced as more of his works become available. Ultimately, to access and take account of Kiš’s humor, paradoxes, disdain for party politics, sense of the “revolutionary” in art, and even his linguistic patriotism or at least his acknowledged South Slavic heritage, is to treat Kiš in a responsible and more comprehensive way. It also gives us more to appreciate than just Kiš the restless and sharp-witted postmodernist, polemicizing about his work in the 1970s, or Kiš the “good Serb,” or the “un-Serb,” whose writings were revived in the West in the 1990s as people strove to understand the madness erupting in the wars of Yugoslav succession.

Psalm 44 is, above all, a story about a young family during the Holocaust. Marija, Jakob, and little Jan are at Auschwitz or its associated camps, and most of Kiš’s narrative about the death camp is devoted to a depiction of the miserable and brutal life in its women’s section. Some of the chapters are presented as stream-of-consciousness narrative; others contain lengthy flashbacks; some passages combine the two techniques, often with abrupt returns to the central narrative set in the camp. A reader gets the impression that the characters, like the author, are trying to make sense of the unprecedented events (prejudice and discrimination and persecution in the eyes of a child in the Vojvodina, at first, moving to the mind-numbing terror of the Final Solution) and to find a mode of expressing the experiences of the Shoah in words. We also find brief historical and philosophical references to the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and comments on the hollow enterprise that was “Nazi science,” on the nature of Holocaust commemoration in the postwar period, and on West German and American reactions to such remembrance.

The plot and chapter structure are relatively simple, even if the texture of the emotional and allusive prose is not. The characterizations are unique because of the unexpected and fitful ways the relationships and personalities are revealed to us. The characters fight, often in small but significant ways, to maintain a sense of human dignity.

Kiš had good reasons for writing about the Holocaust, and an unenviably close vantage point for doing so. He was born in the northern Yugoslav city of Subotica (Hungarian: Szabadka) on February 22, 1935. His home region, technically the Bačka but commonly referred to by the more expansive designation of the Vojvodina, had been part of medieval Hungary before being captured by the Ottomans in early modern times; it then became part of the Habsburg Empire for well over two hundred years before World War I; after the collapse of Austria-Hungary in the Great War, this multi-ethnic, multi-confessional region, which is home to Serbs and other South Slav groups as well as Hungarians, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Germans, Roma, Jews, and others, was included in the new country of Yugoslavia. Kiš’s mother, Milica Dragićević, was an Orthodox Christian from Montenegro, and he spent the immediate postwar years in that Yugoslav republic, following his repatriation from Hungary. Kiš’s father, Eduard, was a Hungarian Jew. A railroad inspector with a difficult and in some ways troubled personality, Kiš’s father also had something of the visionary and philosopher in him; both his obscured personality and his tragic fate dominate the affective world of many of Kiš’s works. The family tried, with mixed results, to escape the rising tide of anti-Semitism on both sides of the shifting Hungarian-Yugoslav border in the late 1930s and early 1940s. When the war finally ended in 1945, Kiš, his mother, and his sister Danica were leading a deliberately low-key but physically and emotionally very difficult life in rural southern Hungary; his father had been rounded up for forced labor and later was deported and then killed by the Nazis. The war years, the Holocaust years, the years of exposure and hatred and invidious otherness, are famously portrayed in Kiš’s magisterial novel Hourglass, but they are also an indispensable constituent element of his poetry, the untranslated short stories, and in his drama Night and Fog.¹

This novel, then, is obviously one that was very important to Kiš peronally. But it was an early novel, written in 1960 and first published in 1962, paired with The Attic, which he had started in 1959 but also completed in 1960. As a work of relative youth, written when the author was in his mid-twenties, the book exhibits certain lapses or excesses, infelicities or imbalances, the correction of which gives us, in his later works, insight into Kiš’s artistic and intellectual evolution. In his interviews, Kiš himself would occasionally wax wry or wistful about the novel, revealing a guarded or even critical attitude toward Psalm 44. Kiš based the novel on a true story reported in the newspapers at the time, and he wrote it as part of a competition held by a Jewish cultural organization in Belgrade. He felt, though, that the novel made its points too directly, without enough lyricism² or “ironic detachment.”³ But he believed that the book addressed a need in postwar Yugoslav literature, with its “latent resistance to Jewish subject matter”⁴ and, one supposes, its Manichean depictions of the war aimed at mobilizing and militarizing Yugoslav society. Kiš also saw the book, and his other Holocaust writings, as the first bookend of what I call his great project of convergence — his unmasking of the twin “totalitarian” leviathans (or ideological dictatorships) of the twentieth century, Nazism and Soviet communism.

Perhaps Kiš was thinking of the prominent role of his deus ex machina, or of the heavy-handed recasting of Mengele as “Dr. Nietzsche,” when he later referred to the book’s plot as “too charged, too overwrought.”⁵ But ultimately the graphic brutality of some of the scenes in Psalm 44, as well as the unexpected and highly evocative details — the interplay of light and wire and walls, or some of the bodily sensations of the protagonist, Marija — help key the reader’s emotions to the pain and gravity of the subject. And Kiš’s portrayal of life in the Vojvodina during the heyday of fascism is a rare (and beautifully written) testimony about this under-studied regional chapter of the one huge Holocaust. Native fascism, local collaboration with the Nazis, myths of ancient ethnic hatreds, the envy and insecurity that lie at the psychological root of anti-Semitism, the violence against women — the presence of these historical themes in the narrative makes Psalm 44 far more important than any hasty characterization of it as “provincial” might vouchsafe. No part of the Holocaust was a sideshow, just as the Shoah itself was not a footnote but rather a necessary condition of and an integral component of the Nazis’ geo-strategic and military aims.

The first things one notices about Psalm 44 are the title and the book’s stream-of-consciousness style. The forty-fourth psalm is one in which an ancient voice laments bitterly the fate of his or her people and offers no little challenge to God for this tremendous time of trial:

Thou hast made us like sheep for slaughter,

and hast scattered us among the nations.

Thou has sold thy people for a trifle,

demanding no high price for them. .

Thou hast made us a byword among the nations,

a laughingstock among the peoples.

All day long my disgrace is before me,

and shame has covered my face.

The interior monologues challenge us to make sense of the same situation that Marija is trying to understand. One might even say that Kiš, as author, is grappling with credibility, credulity, and expression just as we, and his characters, are doing: what is occurring is so brutal, so frightening, so wrong, and so new that simple language would be insufficient for it. The reckless punctuation and changes in tense — reproduced at least in part in this translation — and the flashbacks and occasional double flashbacks, along with the compound nouns, some of which even incorporate proper nouns, such as “doll-sleeper” and “fate-Jakob,” all represent attempts to create an emotional and intellectual space in which we might have a fighting chance of understanding something of what the characters are facing.

There are many unforgettable, carefully crafted scenes in this novel. We have Anijela in her coffin; the almost unspeakable savagery against civilians on the banks of the icy Danube; the approach of Allied artillery “demolishing the concrete parapet of passive waiting and resignation to fate”; the description, full of lyricism and surprise, of Marija’s personal encounter with her own deus ex machina in Chapter 5, and her bold assertion of solidarity by means of the transferred memories and feelings of “heroes or virgins” in the following chapter; the harmonization of the combined power of cinematic experience and religious imagery in a flashback to a small village in the prewar Vojvodina; and Marija’s mesmerizing discussion with her parents about the meaning of a public transportation ban for Jews in their provincial capital, Novi Sad. Then, finally, toward the end of the book, we hear and even see (for Kiš combines the imagery) the cry of the child Jan, at once unifying and splitting the world, its proverbial hopefulness downplayed and only faintly present behind the jagged profusion of what Kiš designates, specifically yet with perfect poetic touch, as a world of rabidity, entrails, ashes, fury, and skulls, skulls evoking the terror of some kind of medieval memento mori or the immeasurable forgotten carnage of mass death. All these images draw us deeper and deeper into the scene, sucking out the oxygen from our heads, plunging us into an emotional vacuum, and they are then followed by a statement so simple and clear in formulation that its erudition and irony create emotion right where we thought no more was possible. Kiš once again evokes war, the advance of foreign forces, artillery — disembodied but Soviet, lethal but promising rescue—“proclaiming the terrible love between nations.”

There are many admirable and emotionally powerful works of Holocaust literature. All kinds of people have written such works: from victims and observers of the events of the 1930s and ’40s, to relatives and loved ones of victims after the fact, to artists with no direct connection to those events who want to engage with the Holocaust’s maelstrom of deep and painful emotions and its microcosm of plots and themes. What, however, makes certain works of Holocaust literature “great”? This historian and translator admits to a preference for literary works in which the challenges of form somehow evoke or parallel the challenge of the content; I am also drawn — in what is probably a peril of the historian’s trade — to works that reflect some of the historiographical richness of the remarkable field of Holocaust studies: for example, such topics such as collaboration; resistance; struggles of memory and representation; non-German anti-Semitism; and murder outside the camps, outside the ghettos, and outside Poland and Germany. In other words, since the popular understanding and media tropes of the Holocaust leave so much of these chapters of history, and the scholarship based on them, unplumbed, books that engage our minds and our ethical faculties in less common ways would seem to be worthy of particular attention. Psalm 44 is this kind of book.

JOHN K. COX, 2012

1. “Night and Fog,” trans. John K. Cox, Absinthe: New European Writing 12 (2009): 94–133.

2. “Seeking a Place under the Sun for Doubt,” in Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995), 186.

3. “Life, Literature,” in Sontag, Homo Poeticus, 249.

4. “Seeking a Place under the Sun for Doubt,” in Sontag, Homo Poeticus, 186.

5. “Life, Literature,” in Sontag, Homo Poeticus, 249.