Street of Life

In pre-war Budapest three families who lived on Katalin street had a blissful beginning and sought a serene continuation. But caught in the misfortune brought by WWII, individual lives are displaced or killed, crumbling the connection and changing it forever. The lives and space around them disintegrated such that nothing could rekindle it back. Their relations were so strong that they couldn't be forgotten, so feeble that they couldn't be preserved and so absurd that it was hard to define. But at least love for each other was what connected them, and now dispossessed from Katalin street, whose shared recollection is rather painful—the guilt of having to lose and being alive alone devoid of former passion—has shadowed their internal spirit, especially of the four younger members belonging to the three families.

The novel opens in an apartment—social rehousing scheme under soviet/communist regime made them leave the house at Katalin Street—where everyday life of Elekes family continues. Their memories of the Katalin Street and the life they spent there, all those joys and mishap buried in the past keeps returning even after all these years. It's the upshot we're seeing in the lives of the Elekes family and Bálint. What follows is the backstory of these characters, and also of those who lived on Katalin Street. Members of the Elekes family have untold longing for the past, and each of them sees the others in that light. They try to maintain that nothing has changed, but time and again those same shared love and values direct their attitudes and behavior. All of them have accepted that something deeply rooted to their lives has been taken away, not merely the residence of Katalin Street but families that they felt like their own.

There came too the realization that advancing age had taken the past, which in childhood and early maturity had seemed to them so firmly rounded off and neatly parceled up, and ripped it open. Everything that had happened was still there, right up to the present, but now suddenly different. Time had shrunk to specific moments, important events to single episodes, familiar places to the mere backdrop to individual scenes, so that, in the end, they understood that of everything that had made up their lives thus far only one or two places, and a handful of moments, really mattered. Everything else was just so much wadding around their fragile existences, wood shavings stuffed into a trunk to protect the contents on the long journey to come. They had discovered too that the difference between the living and the dead is merely qualitative, that it doesn’t count for much. And they had learned that in everyone’s life there is only one person whose name can be cried out in the moment of death.

Irén (Eldest daughter of Mr. Elekes and Mrs. Elekes) and Bálint (Son of Major Biro), who were once passionate lovers and sought to get married, have developed sharp views of life, as if the former selves have been lost forever and they are not to ignore the changes they've gone through. For them the realities have blurred, and no new fascination will ever appear. They want to continue, however awkward they internally feel about each other and everything surrounding them, for the sake of one another. Bálint, once held in captivity by the regime, has trouble separating his experience and existence, and continues to live in and out of one or other of his memories. Blanka (Younger sister of Iren) now married and settled in far off Greek island, in her new life recreates and even alters the version of truth so as to be happy and safe, since all her life she has feared anything that doesn't suit her, and have resisted against them in unusual ways—the same thing that displaced her from the family. Henriette's (Daughter of Jewish family the Helds) ghost moving among them across time and space, watching them, recreates the Katalin Street again, resembling the old days and the unrealities that are real and palpable in her afterlife world. Blanka and the ghost of Henriette share a common trait of creating their own versions of past so that they could happily live with those memories.

Episodes from their childhood and while they were growing up to be become adult conveys how three families lived like one, and personal feelings and values they harbored for each other. Mr. & Mrs. Held and Major Biro are loosely drawn characters, and following their death they become even less significant figures in the story. Henriette's death caused in an unlikely episode is the key event in the lives of Balint, Iren and Blanka. They hadn't expected time will distort things around their lives that they wouldn't be able to nurture love amongst them. Irén, Bálint, Blanka and even dead Henriette relishes on living in and out of their past, keeping memories alive as if they are more important to them than the moments of the present.

Even after many things happened and disconcerted their private life and relation, Irén and Bálint believe they cannot separate themselves from each other, though little has remained of previous romantic fantasies. It's also because they share a common past, and that their moods and sentiments resemble each other. It feels like Iréne is self-boasting in her narrative about her character, especially in the light of her mother and sister, but the slow—chronological or sometimes even not—unfolding fits all things together. Her outspoken story of jealousy, envy, misapprehension, love and hate, providing personal vantage, all concludes to become feeling of guilt and loss in this decades tracing gloomy tragedy—an individual spectra traumatized by war.

Introversion is one of the traits of Elekes family. Whatever Irén says in her personal narrative, the other voice depicts her being the most sensitive and filled with love and pity for all the people she knew. She has always kept moral ideals above all else. She wanted to be happy and possess everything that mattered her most: love for her sister Blanka and the intimacy of Balint. While still living on Katalin Street members of the three families always tried to make things momentous and took care of each other whenever required but after the death of the Helds and Major Biro, those who survived discerned the fragility of things and people surrounding them, nevertheless unable to forget who and what is lost.

Katalin Street has the backdrop of the war ridden Budapest, occupied by Nazi in 1944, bombing and air raids in the background, social set up in threat—It's also the story of people who are stuck in time, and consider that the happiest things are all done, and whatever happens henceforth are mere the continuation of sense of absence and loss. In this regard, the novel has a darker tone that conveys, some people who have suffered loss because of war have turned into shadows living in present while their realities are still left in time. Trivial feelings, that cast an individual is also a character of the novel. There are many occasions when changing moods or behavior of a member in an unlikely situation make others feel awkward and bearing becomes more absurd thing, keeping them away from acting natural—escaping to solitude or coming to tears.

A tragedy filled with intricacies of relation and memory in the backdrop of war is the central theme of the novel, and it captures the sentiments of death and decay. Revisiting the past, trying to live the safe ideal life in the cores of memory and find solace to one's longing and comfort with almost futile attempts marks the lives of characters of Katalin Street.

Author: Magda Szabó

Translator:  Len Rix
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Page Count: 272

Price: $17.21