Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész

language from the social conditions and my personal relationship to those conditions, I said, for as it has been written
judgment does not come suddenly, the proceedings gradually merge into the judgment
, I said. The subject of my “piece” came up as well, the particular piece of writing that she had read and which, as she said, she
absolutely
had to discuss with me. Which means that I too must speak about this particular piece of writing, to give a broad outline of what sort of piece it was. The piece was, in point of fact, an extended short story of the type that is usually described as a “novella,” which had been published around that time deep within the haystack of a bulky anthology of short stories and novellas, by no means without all sorts of denigrating and insulting precursory complications that I shall refrain from describing, because they bore and disgust me, besides which, in itself, it was merely a modest and, one could say, dispensable contribution to Hungarian literary life, that denigrating and insulting, and, above all else, shameless and shameful literary life, resting as it does on its exclusions, privileges, pre-and postdilections, its official and confidential commercial blacklisting systems always casting doubt on quality, always unctuously deferential to aggressive dilettantism as if it were genius, of which I was, and am, a now horrified, now astonished, now indifferent, but always merely external observer, insofar as I am and must be at all—oh, what do I have to do with literature, with your golden hair, Margarethe, for a ballpoint pen is my spade, the sepulchre of your ashen hair, Shulamith; yes, anyway, this short story or novella, so be it, is a monologue by a man, a man still on the youngish side. This man, who had been brought up by his parents in the strictest Christian faith, or bigotry, one might say, now finds out, during the days of the apocalypse, that the unsealed brand has been placed on him too:
in the spirit
of the so-called laws that suddenly come into force, he is classed as a Jew. Now, before they take him away to the ghetto, the cattle wagon, or to who knows (he least of all) where and what sort of death they will condemn him, he writes his story, “the story of decades of cowardice and self-denial,” as he writes (that is to say, I have him write). Now, what is noteworthy about the whole thing is that in his brand-new Jewish existence he finds a release from his Jewish complex, a general liberation, for he has to recognize that merely being debarred from one community does not automatically make one a member of another. “What do I have to do with the Jews?” he asks (that is to say, I make him ask): nothing, he realizes (that is, I make him realize), now that he is one himself. While he had been enjoying the privileges of a non-Jewish existence he had suffered on account of Jews, or Jewish existence or, to be more precise, the whole corrupt, suffocating, deadly and death-dealing suicidal system of privileges and discriminations. He had suffered on account of some of his friends, colleagues at the office, the wider community at large that he believed was his
homeland
; he had suffered from their hatred, their narrow-mindedness, their fanaticism. He had conceived a particular abhorrence for the inescapable debates that went on about anti-Semitism, the excruciating futility of all those debates, as if anti-Semitism, he realizes (that is, I make him realize), were not a matter of conviction but of temperament and character, “the morality of despair, the frenzy of self-haters, the vitality of devastators,” as he says (that is, I have him say). On the other hand, he had also felt a certain awkwardness towards Jews in that, try as he might to like them, he was never sure about the success of the attempt. He had Jewish acquaintances, even friends, whom he either liked or disliked; yet that was different, because he had liked or disliked