Katalin Street

On the Street Where They Live In Magda Szabo's novel, three families brought together are torn apart by World War II. LIKE MANY AMERICAN READERS, Iwas first introduced to Magda Szabo's work when New York Review Books reissued the Hungarian master's profound and haunting novel "The Door." Luckily for us, they have not stopped there. A translation of "Iza's Ballad" followed, and now we have "Katalin Street," originally published in Hungarian in 1969 and elegantly translated into English by Len Rix. When I started to read "Katalin Street," I couldn't help comparing it to "The Door" - so struck was I by the divergent narrative approaches. Distilled and claustrophobic, "The Door" centers on the relationship between the narrator - a writer - and her housekeeper, Emerence. As time wears on, the two women come to be bound by a furious, unpredictable intimacy. "Katalin Street" takes a baggier shape, crisscrossing through time and perspective as the novel tracks the fates of three families - the Elekeses, the Temeses and the Helds, who are Jewish - in a zigzag that covers prewar Budapest, the German occupation and Communist rule; the longer of two sections, "Moments and Episodes," hops along in time and space. The differences in method are visible from the get-go, yet I came to feel that the two novels share a similar heart. In the opening pages of "The Door," the narrator announces: "I killed Emerence. The fact that I was trying to save her rather than destroy her changes nothing." It takes many more pages to uncover what exactly the narrator means by this confession; in the meantime, those lines kept me rigid with dread. In "Katalin Street," the central trauma is the murder of young Henriette Held during the German occupation. Long before the tragic particulars of Henriette's death - the secrets, the fatal blind spots - are uncovered, the aftershocks are powerfully felt. In both novels, Szabo's characters, in their complicated attempts to save one another, are just as likely to destroy. Historical trauma also sits at the center of both works. The hulking and terrible shadows of the past loom over "The Door," but even after Emerence's most potent secrets have been unspooled the enigma of her character is never fully pierced. Through the titular Katalin Street, Szabo locates a more straightforward expression for her characters' tortured relationships to history. The opening finds the central characters, whether by death or flight or expropriation, banished from their former lives. We begin in Communist-era Budapest, where the Elekes family has managed to survive, at least in body, and now live together in a cramped flat: "From its windows they could see their old house. Its facade had been covered in scaffolding for several months now, undergoing redevelopment along with its immediate neighbors. It looked like a childhood friend who, either in anger or a spirit of fun, had put on a mask and forgotten to take it offlong after the party had ended." Katalin Street, where the initial bonds between the Elekes, Held and Temes families were forged, has been transformed into an analog for the past as a place of no return. The Elekeses can glimpse their old home through the window of the present, and yet it might as well be lightyears away. Nor is solace to be found in the barbed warren of memory: "Everything that had happened was still there, right up to the present, but now suddenly different. Time had shrunk to specific moments, important events to single episodes, familiar places to the mere backdrop to individual scenes, so that, in the end, they understood that of everything that had made up their lives thus far only one or two places, and a handful of moments, really mattered." The greatest moments of mattering are tied to the wartime death of Henriette Held, and the subsequent spiritual rot of the central players: Iren Elekes; her fiancé, Balint; and her sister, Blanka. On the day of Balint and Iren's engagement party, word travels that Mr. and Mrs. Held "have been taken away." Henriette is immediately ushered into hiding, in a plan that goes swiftly and fatally awry. Until that point, the presence of the German occupation has been somewhat muted, with the characters making vague references to the Helds' having difficulties, and even the news of the Helds' deportation is not enough to shake Iren from her fog of privilege and ruinous denial. She wonders fleetingly, for example, if Henriette seemed distressed because she'll be missing the festivities. The botched attempt to hide Henriette annihilates that fog, but of course the wake-up call arrives far too late, a moral failing that remains bitterly relevant. On Katalin Street, Iren's marriage to Balint is jettisoned. When they finally wed, years later, she does so without sentiment: "I sometimes wonder if it has ever crossed Balint's mind that he is not my second husband but my third, and that I am in fact his second wife and not his first. The pair who married at the start of the 1960s were not a bachelor and a divorcée but a widow and a widower, the first of whom had been married briefly once before, the other twice: two people who no longer had any illusions about life or any expectations of it, but were simply unwilling to set offdown the road to death, that difficult journey to make, alone." Here Iren, who had been halfheartedly wed to another man before her eventual marriage to Balint, is expressing her belief that the versions of themselves who first fell in love back on Katalin Street died alongside young Henriette. Their initial betrothal has finally been consummated, but they are no longer recognizable to each other. They are in a ghost marriage, a ghost life. There is no recovery. There is only endless aftermath. Meanwhile, Henriette, in literal ghost form, haunts the streets of Budapest. Earthly time passes around her; spectral time stands still. Henriette is able to make herself visible to the living, and at one point she summons the nerve to reveal herself to Balint; nearly two decades have passed since her death, and she is desperate for contact with the life she knew. When Balint invites her up to his flat, she is hopeful for reconnection, not realizing that he has mistaken her for a prostitute. After he attempts to pay her for sex, a horrified Henriette runs sobbing into the street. This scene - Henriette's severing from the familiar world, the unending solitude of the liminal state - is nothing less than shattering. Whether living or dead, these characters are cemented inside private labyrinths built of trauma, silence and shame, doomed to restlessly circle the life they once knew: "They ached with longing for the dead. . . . They hoped that if they clung to one another and held one another's hands, and could hit upon the right words, then perhaps they might find their way out of the labyrinth and somehow make their way home." In "Katalin Street," the past is never dormant, never settled. The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present. In describing Henriette's plight, Szabo writes: "From the moment she arrived she had been leftto work out the rules and the customs of the place entirely by herself." In this extraordinary novel, the same could be said for the living. LAURA VAN DEN BERG is the author of two story collections, most recently "The Isle of Youth," and a novel, "Find Me." Her next novel, "The Third Hotel," will be published next year.

The latest from Szabó (The Door) is a gorgeous elegy for the joy and the life once shared among three neighboring families-the Elekes, the Temes, and the Helds-in prewar Budapest, following the residents through the German invasion in 1944, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and the miserable quiet of the 1960s. At the heart of the story is Iren, the Elekes' older daughter, who in 1944 is a beautiful and hardworking school teacher poised to begin the happy life she feels entitled to lead. But on the day that she and Balint, son of the Temes family next door, announce their engagement, the Helds-who are Jewish-are taken away. Their teenager daughter, Henriette, has remained with Iren's and Balint's families for protection and yet, before the night is over, her presence will be discovered, with catastrophic consequences that will haunt everyone for the rest of their lives. Readers will be impressed by the brilliant texture and forthrightness of Szabó's prose, along with the particular urgency she infuses into the humiliations and irrational longings that comprise her characters' lives, even or especially during the shock of war. All the while, Iren maintains her work ethic, as if by grading papers she can hold fast to some larger sense of order, even though the chaos of the world has murdered her neighbors, ruined her future, and destroyed her country. This is a brilliant and unforgettable novel. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Three families, whose lives are inextricably linked by the street they inhabit, grapple with love and morality amid political upheaval.In English for the first time and impeccably translated by Rix (The Door, 2015), Szab's quietly captivating novel excavates the tangled history of Hungary's capital from the portentous moments before the German occupation to its suffocating postwar regime. In 1934, enveloped by a garden "teeming with roses," we meet Irn and Blanka Elekes, Blint Bir, and Henriette Held, the beloved children of three neighboring families who live on the titular Katalin Street. The four of them are inseparable, like cousins, apart from the fact that each of the girls, at one time or another, has loved Blint, the major's son. "Blint was the sort of person who inspired that response from others without in the least intending to," Irn observes. "You simply had to love him." In Irn's case, her unuttered desires are requited when she and Blint are engaged a decade later. As soon as their celebration begins, though, it's disrupted by a phone call and eclipsed by the reality of war; Henriette's Jewish parents have been caught and deported and their home swiftly commandeered by authorities. But it's the tragic death of 16-year-old Henriette, who's been hidden by the major and the Elekes family, that ultimately tears these families apart. By the time they're eventually married, Blint, who adored Henriette like his own sister, and Irn, who both loved and loathed the girl, are strangers, having long ago buried the happiness they once knew. Beset by a deep malaise from the aftershock of war, the Elekes family, forced from their home and dispossessed in every sense, live as ghosts, the past forever looping in their consciousnesses, "locked in the same hopeless quest to recover [Katalin Street]." And Henriette, a spectral presence hovering throughout the novel, acts as an onlooker, bearing witness to the emotional decay brought on by the relentless forces of age and memory. A visceral, sweeping depiction of life in the shuddering wake of wartime. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.