Readers Roost: Those Absent Guest Post

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Those Absent Guest Post

Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Plain

by Jill Culiner

In 1999, I was in Budapest, preparing a photographic exhibition about the vanished Jews of Eastern Europe, when I heard about the Kunmadaras pogrom: In May 1946, Holocaust survivors were accused of kidnapping Christian children and using their blood for kosher sausage. Grabbing iron bars, garden tools, any weapon they could find, the town's residents went on a rampage, murdering Jews and pillaging their homes and businesses

How could such an absurd accusation have been levelled after the war? I was determined to discover the answer.

When I arrived in Kunmadaras, I was accepted by a group of friendly locals who hung around the local watering hole run by blowsy Ildikó — Tarzan, the black marketer and corrupt night watchman, Udo, the Austrian who preferred Hungarian women to his wife, Kata, the eternal party girl, hard-drinking Karcsi, and the brutal Ibolya. And although no one seemed to resent my questioning, all denied having any knowledge of the pogrom.

Settling in the neighbouring village of Tiszaörs, I soon discovered that village society was a unique but uneasy mix of former communists, dispossessed nobles, expropriated peasants, German retirees, black marketers, former members of the Hitler Youth Movement, and Hungarians who had returned after communism ended.

I began looking for traces of the vanished local Jewish community. And I discovered that, although Jews had lived here for hundreds of years and had arrived in the country alongside the Magyar tribes in the 9^th century, the villagers denied their existence. Therefore, I became more determined to question, listen, observe, to ferret out the truth about the pogrom and the Jews who were so strikingly absent.

Living on the Hungarian Great Plain was a remarkable experience, and carrying out an investigation, much as an amateur detective would, allowed me to step into the country’s history. Therefore, Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Plain is a blend of history, traditions, local happenings, rumour, love stories, and prejudices. And I hope I have portrayed, with empathy, people who, often caught in political conflicts, are pawns in a global one.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xa1aiVkiT4

Purchase links: https://books2read.com/GreatPlain

Chapters on SoundCloud

https://soundcloud.com/j-arlene-culiner/those-absent-on-the-great-hungarian-plain-the-hungarian-count

https://soundcloud.com/j-arlene-culiner/2-those-absent-on-the-great-hungarian-plain-tarzan-udo-and-the-russians/sets

Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Plain

A Hungarian village on the Great Plain: a microcosm reflecting this country’s history from early tribal invasion, to Soviet subordination, to European Community membership. Here, peasants, herders, party girls, former nazis and lapsed communists share gossip as well as love stories; and unscrupulous leaders, totalitarian or freely elected, decide behaviour. And while fully embracing the new consumer society, there remains one constant: hatred of the long-vanished rural Jew.

Author Bio

Born in New York, raised in Toronto, Jill Culiner, writer, social critical artist, and photographer has spent most of her life in France, England, Germany, Hungary, Turkey, Holland, and North Africa. Her photographic exhibition about the First and Second World Wars, La Mémoire Effacée, toured France, Canada, and Hungary under the auspices of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and UNESCO. Her non-fiction, Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers won the Joseph and Faye Tanenbaum Prize for Canadian Jewish History and was shortlisted for the ForeWord Magazine Award. Her biography of a nineteenth-century rebel Yiddish poet and singer, A Contrary Journey with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard, was published by Claret Press in 2022.