The Dybbuk Speaks with the Mouth of the Living: Wartime Trauma and Strategiesof Holocaust Remembrance in Hungarian Literature Between 1949 and 1953
The Dybbuk Speaks with the Mouth of the Living: Wartime Trauma and Strategiesof Holocaust Remembrance in Hungarian Literature Between 1949 and 1953

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the subject of the Holocaust in Hungarian literature between 1949 and 1953, and in particular with the writing strategies used by the authors to describe a phenomenon that was silenced and removed from public debate. During the post-war period, when the Communists were in power in Hungary, it was forbidden to write about the war and especially about the Holocaust of the Jews; moreover, all literary texts had to be approved by the censors. Despite the strict restrictions, Hungarian writers managed to smuggle the forbidden topic into their novels. In this article, I discuss the prose of József Debreczeni, István Kamjén, and Ferenc Karinthy against the background of social and historical phenomena in Hungary.

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