A Nyugat zsidó kérdése
Nyugat’s Jewish Question

Summary/Abstract: János Kőbányai’s introductory essay, explores the validity of the question, “Is it possible, and is it legitimate, to analyze an intellectual school created to fulfill a universalistic mission from a Jewish perspective, no matter how clearly Jewish its background may have been?” In asking this question, he is not deterred by the fact that the only group to accept this suggestion as legitimate throughout the existence of the paper (1908–1944) was the anti-Semites. According to Kőbányai, the reason Nyugat could be read from (among others) a Jewish perspective is because this forum was established a hundred years ago with the specific aim of molding Jewish and Hungarian entities into one. This possibility, however, ceased to exist after 1919, which is also exemplified by the turns the history of the paper took. Having highlighted the problem, Múlt és Jövő would like to devote another issue later this year to Nyugat, with the participation of a possibly larger number of authors, provided that the proposition of the above question is well received in contemporary Hungarian discourse. “Psychoanalysis in the Nyugat”, the first in hopefully a series of essays, is a piece by György Péter Hárs, who incidentally also makes his debut in this issue as a new editor of our periodical. Hárs has read Nyugat from the perspective of the Hungarian psychoanalytical school, which developed in parallel with the periodical. The shortage of original works is balanced by an abundance of short stories and poems rescued from the lost Atlantis of Nyugat, mostly names and works that had unjustly been doomed to oblivion. Among them are Viktor Cholnoky, Endre Kádár, Zoltán Nagy, Piroska Reichardt, László Fenyő and László Bródy as well as works by Anna Lesznai, István Vas, Ernő Szép, Oszkár Gellért, Béla Balázs, Zoltán Zelk waiting to be rediscovered. We also say farewell in this issue to Tom Lantos, one of the best-known Hungarian Jews of our time. His obituary was written by a childhood friend, Norbert Kerényi (Toronto) who evokes a period so formative in the later career of this world famous politician, the decade between 1938 and 1948.

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