Schein’s first novella, The Book of Mordechai, was the story of the destiny of three generations of a Hungarian Jewish family, including one of its descendants, a little boy named P. P. His grandmother has him practise his reading with the Book of Esther; thus the present-day family’s life can be interpreted on the model of the Old Testament story.

            The new short novel draws on another Biblical story, that of the raising of Lazarus from the dead in the Gospel according to John. Péter (P.P., now grown-up) uses the text to set up a memorial to his now dead father (referred to as M.), though in such a way that it restores him to life. Two strands of text alternate: in one the son speaks directly to the dead father (not unlike Franz Kafka in his letter to his dead father), in the second, in a more detached fashion, he speaks about him. The tension and rhythm of the two registers give the text its dramatic strength. On his death bed the father forbade his son to speak about him (“don’t write it down”), but the son disobeys his father entirely and in so doing both affirms and denies the validity of the ban. From examining the father’s background, we discover the story of a petty-bourgeois Jewish family in Hungary during the Kádár era. Nothing much happened to either the father or the mother; but the family failed to talk over the traumas of the disastrous era, with shame and self-hatred serving only to reinforce the silence, the failure to speak.

            The figure that emerges most strikingly from the family is the paternal grandfather, a printer-photographer who at least did something with his life, having written a manual on photo-engraving technology, in which the following is found: “It can happen that a plate has to be made of an original that cannot be suitably photographed but without being allowed to rectify or retouch it.” This sentence bears an important relation to the procedure adopted in the novella, with the son striving to provide a portrait of his father in line with his grandfather’s symbolically intended guidance: he would not be allowed to retouch it. In relating the family’s history, though, Péter falls back on legends, the stories are constantly being broken off, and it is questionable to what extent the obligatory smoothing over of the breaks (likewise a form of retouching, after all) is capable of restoring them.

 

“The story is a single struggle for the Father’s resurrection in order that he may proclaim, in spite of all hostility and opposition, what Rilke did: ‘Hebt den Stein!’ ‘Lift the stone!’”

                                                           -Béla Bacsó, Élet és Irodalom

 

“[This work is] derived from the ideas that Martin Buber expounded in his essay ‘Me and You’, the method of duplication, the sharp contrasting of You and s/he, the object of address and the object of general experience, within the outlines of one and the same personality.”

                                                           - László Márton, Élet és Irodalom

 

“Sons will relate the stories of their Fathers, all protests by the latter notwithstanding. This book deals harrowingly with one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century: the death of love.”

                                                           -Szilárd Borbély, Élet és Irodalom

The songs of complaint from which this volume takes its title occur in four blocks that are interspersed among the other poems, thereby bestowing a regular order on the collection as a whole. There are three lengthy cycles of 17, 19 and 17 poems, and apart from these cycles, there is an opening poem, �first of all�, a preface to the songs and then, after the fourth block of songs appears the closing poem, �inlet�, which responds with its motif of refuge to the flight motif of the opening poem.

The songs of complaint cite humankind�s age-old, collective laments, setting these alongside the dilemmas of individual life. The volume thereby speaks in a voice that is both general and personal. The contents of the day-to-day life of the figures whose voice speaks in these poems (children, wife, family, a dying father) emerge in the same way as the major questions of our shared being that we all come to experience in the course of our individual fates. A poem on the death of a pet fish, �greenish water�, attains almost biblical heights of exemplariness; a mundane walk takes on a philosophical hue in �ramble�. Besides the motif of taking a jaunt, whether strolling in a wood, roaming about the streets, or jogging, a bird motif also develops (hang-gliding, city pigeons, a run-over pheasant, a budgerigar that has escaped captivity). Both of these�being on the move, searching and flight, the soul taking off�come together in �ramble�, where the narrator, having recounted the experience of his ramble, starts a list of the German names of birds for fellow poet Szilárd Borbély.

 

�Strolling aimlessly, tantamount to submitting to a goal that transcends us and precisely by doing so achieving fellowship with the loneliness of others in its sense of loss, Songs of Complaint feels its way toward love; in becoming more relaxed the poet has somehow become more fervent, more lively, in this, the best of his volumes to date.�

                                                           -József Tamás Reményi, Élet és Irodalom