Susan Gerstein's Blog - Posts Tagged "in-the-darkroom"
In the Darkroom
Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist whose books are mainly about the changing roles of men and women in society, the toll it takes on them, and feminism and its changing character over the last several decades. She is someone whose books had been known to me only through reviews. Her writings sounded a bit tendentious; some reviews by my favorite critics were negative, so I always gave them a pass. Her latest work, “In the Darkroom”, published earlier this year, is about her reconnection with her estranged father, a Hungarian man who, at age 76, went through a sex change operation and became a woman. Or so the reviews indicated; they were mostly positive, but, once again, I felt that the subject matter, transgenderism in general and that of a 76 year old person in particular, was somewhat outside my range of interests. I had no plans to read it. However, several weeks ago, during an evening spent with an old friend, he handed me the book he had just read and assured me that I, as a Hungarian, would be interested in many aspects of it that went way beyond those described in the reviews.
Indeed, he was right. Faludi, the American born daughter of an American woman and the Hungarian Jewish father who came to the US in 1953 (four years before I did), tells the story of growing up with this volatile, fascinating but unpredictable, occasionally violent presence who disappeared from her life while she was still a teenager, only to reappear in it decades later, living on a different continent and transformed beyond recognition. She responds to his unexpected overtures and travels to Hungary where he now lives. She finds, instead of the father she remembers, a woman who contains fragments of that person in an entirely new packaging. Amazingly, they do form a bond; and the book we are reading is the result of an agreement between them: she will write his story if he will talk – preferably honestly – about his life. She begins to spend periods of time with him in Hungary; over ten years of conversations, some “snooping” into documents unwillingly supplied by him, some further research into scattered family members’ versions of events, and a lot of research into the annals of Hungarian history, produce a most interesting double story of the personal and the public events that shaped the last 80 or so years of Hungary. The personal culminates in the death of Faludi’s father toward the end of the book; she had fulfilled her promise to him and had written the memoir. But she did more than that. In the course of the alternating chapters of the book, she intersperses the personal story of this difficult, tortured man, his estrangement from not only his family but from his very identity, who feels compelled at a late age to undergo a drastic change of his most fundamental persona, with the background behind this personal saga. Her research into the whole transgender phenomenon, the nuances of the spectrum transgender people seek and/or feel comfortable with, the description of the operating facilities, in this instance in Thailand, were most informative – I learned a lot.
However, I felt that the best part of “In the Darkroom” were those interspersed chapters: her superb, concise description of Hungary’s past history and its consequential present political condition. She paints an unflattering picture of a people whose victimization by larger forces that dominated it throughout history, sometimes from the East (Tartars, Turks, Russians) and sometimes from the West (Habsburg Empire), left it with a giant chip on its shoulders which, in turn, resulted in the victimization of its own minorities, most particularly its Jews. Faludi is unerring in her description of the origins of Hungarian anti-semitism; the brief glory-period of the decades around the turn of the last century when, under the protection of the Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef Jews prospered, assimilated, and became more Hungarian than the Hungarians, only to face the virulent hatred that had always been there, hidden for a while but bursting forth in the 1930s. The rest is history, as the saying goes: the extermination of the vast majority of the Jewish population was achieved with the enthusiastic participation of Hungarians. Faludi’s father was the young son of an assimilated, wealthy Jewish family; they, like most everyone of their kind had been either killed or scattered: some of the survivors ended up in Israel, some in Europe, the US, or elsewhere. Faludi's story follows the history right to the present, when, after the many decades of Soviet Communist domination was lifted (together with the very demise of Communism itself), the country, after a brief promising period, fell right back to where its natural heart seems to belong: under the thumb of a right wing dictator.
And yet, one of the most puzzling aspects of the tale of Istvan/Stephan/Stephanie, Faludi, Susan’s father, is the fact that this Jewish man who lost everything as a child to the Holocaust, who fled Communist Hungary in the early 1950s to come to the US, did return in 1989 to the very place he escaped from and lived there professing to be an enthusiastic follower of the current right wing, anti-Semitic regime. And, to top it off, lived there, in a most intolerant environment, as an aging transgender person. This is where I need the novelist’s vision, since the explanation of the memoirist/journalist is opaque – by necessity, I guess.
Indeed, he was right. Faludi, the American born daughter of an American woman and the Hungarian Jewish father who came to the US in 1953 (four years before I did), tells the story of growing up with this volatile, fascinating but unpredictable, occasionally violent presence who disappeared from her life while she was still a teenager, only to reappear in it decades later, living on a different continent and transformed beyond recognition. She responds to his unexpected overtures and travels to Hungary where he now lives. She finds, instead of the father she remembers, a woman who contains fragments of that person in an entirely new packaging. Amazingly, they do form a bond; and the book we are reading is the result of an agreement between them: she will write his story if he will talk – preferably honestly – about his life. She begins to spend periods of time with him in Hungary; over ten years of conversations, some “snooping” into documents unwillingly supplied by him, some further research into scattered family members’ versions of events, and a lot of research into the annals of Hungarian history, produce a most interesting double story of the personal and the public events that shaped the last 80 or so years of Hungary. The personal culminates in the death of Faludi’s father toward the end of the book; she had fulfilled her promise to him and had written the memoir. But she did more than that. In the course of the alternating chapters of the book, she intersperses the personal story of this difficult, tortured man, his estrangement from not only his family but from his very identity, who feels compelled at a late age to undergo a drastic change of his most fundamental persona, with the background behind this personal saga. Her research into the whole transgender phenomenon, the nuances of the spectrum transgender people seek and/or feel comfortable with, the description of the operating facilities, in this instance in Thailand, were most informative – I learned a lot.
However, I felt that the best part of “In the Darkroom” were those interspersed chapters: her superb, concise description of Hungary’s past history and its consequential present political condition. She paints an unflattering picture of a people whose victimization by larger forces that dominated it throughout history, sometimes from the East (Tartars, Turks, Russians) and sometimes from the West (Habsburg Empire), left it with a giant chip on its shoulders which, in turn, resulted in the victimization of its own minorities, most particularly its Jews. Faludi is unerring in her description of the origins of Hungarian anti-semitism; the brief glory-period of the decades around the turn of the last century when, under the protection of the Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef Jews prospered, assimilated, and became more Hungarian than the Hungarians, only to face the virulent hatred that had always been there, hidden for a while but bursting forth in the 1930s. The rest is history, as the saying goes: the extermination of the vast majority of the Jewish population was achieved with the enthusiastic participation of Hungarians. Faludi’s father was the young son of an assimilated, wealthy Jewish family; they, like most everyone of their kind had been either killed or scattered: some of the survivors ended up in Israel, some in Europe, the US, or elsewhere. Faludi's story follows the history right to the present, when, after the many decades of Soviet Communist domination was lifted (together with the very demise of Communism itself), the country, after a brief promising period, fell right back to where its natural heart seems to belong: under the thumb of a right wing dictator.
And yet, one of the most puzzling aspects of the tale of Istvan/Stephan/Stephanie, Faludi, Susan’s father, is the fact that this Jewish man who lost everything as a child to the Holocaust, who fled Communist Hungary in the early 1950s to come to the US, did return in 1989 to the very place he escaped from and lived there professing to be an enthusiastic follower of the current right wing, anti-Semitic regime. And, to top it off, lived there, in a most intolerant environment, as an aging transgender person. This is where I need the novelist’s vision, since the explanation of the memoirist/journalist is opaque – by necessity, I guess.
