Önéletrajzi hamisítvány, avagy csalóka emlékezet (Scharf Móric ön-életírása)
A Fake Autobiography, or the Delusions of Memory. The Memoirs of Móric Scharf

Summary/Abstract: At the end of his life in Amsterdam, Móric Scharf (1868–1929), who was the chief witness in the trial of the Tiszaeszlár Affair held in Nyíregyháza in 1883, handed over a short auto-biography to Lajos Szabolcsi, editor-in-chief of the weekly Egyenlőség [Equality]. The piece told the story of the young Móric's life till May 1882, and in retrospect confessed that he had given false testimony at the trial. Despite the fact that it was the chief witness who made this confession, the source has met with general silence in the literature as historiog-raphy is skeptical about its authenticity: it is believed that it was either co-authored or written by someone else. We have examined three questions biographically relevant to the memoirs: the loss of the mother, the relation to the stepmother and the development of the boy's Jewish iden-tity. Putting the register of births, the shorthand records of the trial and the memoirs side by side, we can conclude that in itself neither can guarantee the discovery of the “truth”. But they do supplement each other when it comes to filtering out the improbabilities and the discovery of questionable circumstances in terms of narrativity.

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