[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 15]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 20577]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




TRIBUTE TO HUNGARIAN WRITER IMRE KERTESZ, RECIPIENT OF THE NOBEL PRIZE 
                             IN LITERATURE

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, October 10, 2002

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, it is with great pride that I rise today to 
recognize and commend Mr. Imre Kertesz, on being the first Hungarian to 
win a Nobel Prize for Literature. Although he is the first Hungarian to 
receive the Prize for Literature, Mr. Kertesz joins twelve other 
distinguished Hungarians who have been awarded the Nobel Prize in other 
fields.
  Mr. Kertesz is a celebrated author whose stories have brought to life 
the atrocities of the Holocaust, and have shared with the world the 
difficult choices people were forced to make when their lives were torn 
apart by Nazi occupation.
  Imre Kertesz was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1929. At the age of 14 
the Nazis invaded his country, and he, along with hundreds of thousands 
of other Hungarian Jews were deported to suffer the unspeakable horrors 
of Auschwitz and other camps. After a short time Mr. Kertesz was 
transported to Buchenwald, another camp, from which he was liberated in 
1945.
  Upon his return to Hungary he worked for a Budapest newspaper, but 
was dismissed in 1951, when it was taken over by the Communist Party. 
After two years of military service he supported himself as an 
independent writer and translator of German authors including 
Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Freud, Roth, Wittgenstein and 
Canetti, all of whom have had significance for his own writing.
  Mr. Kertesz's first novel, ``Fateless,'' was completed in 1965, but 
was not published for another ten years. It was this novel that the 
Swedish Academy singled out in awarding Mr. Kertesz the 2002 Nobel 
Prize for Literature. This extraordinary novel is the semi-
autobiographical tale utilizing Kertesz's alter ego Gyorgy Koves, a 15 
year-old Jewish boy who has been arrested and sent to a concentration 
camp. Once there he becomes intimately aware of the horrors of the 
death camp, but he learns to survive.
  ``Fateless,'' was the first part of the trilogy that included the 
outstanding novels ``Fiasco,'' published in 1988, and ``Kaddish for a 
Child Not Born,'' published in 1990. Both books continue to use Gyorgy 
Koves as the voice for Imre Kertesz. In addition, Mr. Kertesz's 
published works include ``Galley Diary,'' ``Chronicle of a 
Metamorphosis,'' ``The Holocaust as Culture,'' ``Moments of Silence 
While the Execution Squad Reloads,'' and ``The Exiled Language,'' as 
well as a collections of lectures and essays.
  Mr. Speaker, despite having been a published author for more than 30 
years, Imre Kertesz was not widely recognized internationally until the 
early 1990's, and his is not even a household name in Hungary today. 
Mr. Kertesz believes that this lack of recognition is a result of a 
lack of awareness about the Holocaust in Hungary. As he told reporters 
after the announcement on October 10, 2002, ``People [in Hungary] have 
not faced up to the Holocaust. I hope that in light of this 
recognition, they will face up to it more than they have until now.''
  Mr. Speaker, I ask all of my colleagues to join me in congratulating 
Imre Kertesz for receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. His writing 
shares the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric 
arbitrariness of history with stirring stories that have drawn in and 
captivated readers around the world.

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