The New Past and Future

Short summary of articles
Miklós Radnóti’s fate, as well as the canonization and mythologization of his oeuvre, have led to ever renewed painful and contradictory questions, far more than about any other author or work, so that in relation to him any assertion is a simplification. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the author’s birth in this issue of our journal we endeavour to address this enormous and what one might be called evangelical life. There is only one fact that we can know for sure: that we have much in common with his fate and his example not only in human terms, but as Hungarians, as Jews, as Hungarian Jews, and, in our case also as a Jewish cultural journal.

It is in relation to this undertaking that the chief editor of Múlt és Jövô wrote an open letter to Miklós Radnóti’s widow - the muse of Hungarian poetry - asking her to change her stand and allow her hus-
band’s verses to appear in the pages of a Jewish journal on this occasion of the special centennial issue in his honor. But why should we lament that ultimately in this issue, which has been put together with so much caring, in place of Miklós Radnóti’s poems, only their titles can appear.

In his prose poem Loyalty’s revolution condemned to death Ferenc Juhász, our living classical poet, locates Rad-
nóti in the canon within a background of the apocalypsis which still continues to threaten humanity.

Ferenc Andai, who resides in Canada, is the last living Bor concentration camp convict who belonged to Miklós Radnóti’s immediate circle. In his Rendezvous in Heidenau he writes down many small details about those circumstance in which Radnóti’s most important poems were born (and in the course of our per-
sistent correspondence he added more information). According to his memories we also learn more about the figure of József Junger, who was not only the poet’s protector, friend, and conversational partner in the Heidenau camp, but, according to Ferenc Andai’s testimony, he was the model for the prophet Nahum in the Eight Eclogue. What we can no longer reconstruct is what Radnóti might have discussed with the scientist Junger, who was the son of a rabbi from Zalaegerszeg and a Zionist leader.

Károly Gárdos (Dos), the world-famous Israeli caricaturist was also among Miklós Radnóti’s compani-
ons in Bor. His memorial testimony, originally written in Hebrew, appears here for the first time in Hun-
garian. Itamar Jaoz-Keszt and Andre Hajdu, two leading Israeli intellectual artists, first met each other in Budapest in the course of planning a literary evening devoted to Radnóti, whose work was to prove for both of them to be their first significant Jewish experience. Andre Hajdu recounts this experience in his Fragments of an autobiography with Radnóti and in his score entitled to the Forced March, which we publish here along with the score by Máté Hollós to the Razglednicas. Itamar Jaoz-Keszt in his interview with János Kôbányai speaks not only about the influence Radnóti had on him, nor only of the history of his Hebrew translation of Radnóti’s poetry, but he, too, attempts to address the puzzle of who is Radnóti and in what way his fate symbolizes the fate of Hungarian Jewry.

Ágnes Huszár writes an essay about Gyôzô Ferencz’s The life and poetry of Miklós Radnóti, which was the first comprehensive Radnóti monograph. The writer György Dalos, now residing in Berlin, recalls his fa-
ther, Andor Ivor who never got to know Radnóti personally but only through stories about him and from his poems, but the poet had read one of the Ivor‘s poems (in Múlt és Jövô). Péter György Hárs, who ear-
lier published an excellent psychoanalytical analysis of Miklós Radnóti (The mother’s embrace, Miklós Radnóti’s christianity) in this journal in his study entitled Radnóti - as you like it, analyzes the poet’s language, humor and canonization with psychoanalytical methods. János Kôbányai in his report on Along the “Forced March” recounts how during the last Balkan war he managed to go to Bor. Vilmos Ágoston writes an essayistic piece on the two Holocaust encyclopedias that Randolph Braham edited, one on the mother country Hun-
gary and one on Transylvania. Rudolf Klein writes an architectural-urbanistic review, laced with personal recollections, of the Budapest monument to the forced labor brigade.