The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Azarel by Károly Pap. Trans. Paul OlchváryMichelle Reale
Károly Pap. Azarel. Trans. Paul Olchváry. Steerforth, 2001. 219 pp. Paper: $14.00
Though Károly Pap, laborer, actor and writer, “disappeared” into Bergen-Belsen sometime in 1944, we can count ourselves fortunate that the novel Azarel survived. Pap never attempted to conceal his Jewish heritage, as was the fashion of artists during the times of rising anti-Semitism in Europe. Rather, he lumbered on with his writing, revealing both his skepticism and consternation with his Jewish identity, though succumbing to depression when he realized the lack of impact the arts seemed to have on such devastating and tumultuous times. In the novel, Gyuri is the third and youngest son of a modern rabbi and his wife. Gyuri’s paternal grandfather, Papa Jeremiah, holds his son and despised daughter-in-law to the promise of giving up one of their sons to him so that he may rear him in the real and true faith of Orthodox Judaism. Papa Jeremiah is fanatically orthodox, contemptuous and hateful of all trends toward progressivism or enlightenment, and considers all seven of his sons to be failures and pagans. Having sacrificed his own desire to immerse himself in the Torah in order to hold a job and support his family, he feels that he is “owed” one of his grandsons. The unfortunate Gyuri is sent to live with Papa Jeremiah in a tent in the yard of the synagogue (thoroughly Old Testament), where he eventually settles into the strange ways of his elder. Eventually, Papa Jeremiah dies and Gyuri is sent back home to live, uneasy in a bourgeois culture he no longer feels at home in. Azarel is an unrepentantly semi-autobiographical novel about family, knowledge of self, and the illusory nature of religious devotion. It is one man’s account of constant and persistent questioning, though without the pat and standard answers we have all come to expect. [Michelle Reale]