The Photographer at Sixteen

The Photographer at Sixteen, by George Szirtes. London: Quercus, Maclehose Press, 2019. 205 pp. 14.99 GBP (hardback)

The Hungarian Revolution, one of the events that shook Cold War Europe, broke out on October 23, 1956, a Tuesday. By Thursday the gunfire got closer to a flat in Budapest where two school boys were recovering from scarlet fever, their mother tending to them while waiting for her husband who was late from work. A bullet crashed through the window, hit the ceiling, and landed on the toy watch one of the boys was wearing. This is how the poet George Szirtes, the boy with the toy watch, remembers the Uprising.

Szirtes, who has lived in England since 1956, has earned international critical praise for a poetry that listens, keens, celebrates, memorializes and uplifts as it witnesses Europe’s recent turbulent past. He writes in English and has won the T. S. Eliot Prize among many others for his poems. He has also translated widely from his native Hungarian, receiving a Man Booker International Prize for his translations and establishing a powerful presence in his native country as well. Szirtes is best known for his poetry, but his most recent memoir, The Photographer at Sixteen, where he remembers his parents Magda and László Szirtes, demands particular attention as an extraordinary piece of writing.

Communism is one of the historical nightmares that menaced Szirtes’s family, who escaped Hungary along with many others who either feared persecution or could no longer find stability in their own country. When he arrived in England in November 1956, as an eight-year-old-boy, the poet remembers wearing only one shoe: the family left in such a rush, and the journey was so harrowing, no one noticed he had forgotten to put on the other shoe. A few days earlier he had walked on the unfolded map of Hungary and its neighboring countries, spread on the floor of the family home, as if rehearsing. “One only had to walk, after all,” (p. 82) he recalls in The Photographer at Sixteen, as he recounts looking at the map with his parents.

Earlier, the Holocaust had taken its toll on both sides of his family. This was true in Cluj, Romania, named in three languages each time it is mentioned—"Cluj or Kolozsvar, also known as Klausenburg"—each language representing a different and painful relationship to the place. But it would also become true later in England, where László and Magda gained an apparently safe existence, enjoying job security, buying their first television, a car, and an apartment, putting their children through school, and even managing to have family vacations. There, Magda received medical care for her heart condition brought on by rheumatic fever in childhood and exacerbated by a tumultuous life in which she fought and worked for the future of her children. But there, too, Magda, a survivor of two labor camps and a woman whose dreams were repeatedly shattered, ended her own life.

In The Photographer at Sixteen Szirtes looks for evidence of hope, for memories, and for a coherent story in countries, languages, and places that feel like half opened doors, allowing only glimpses into his mother's life. She was a photographer and, according to him, the best photographs she took were of her children. But at times she would fly into a rage and would scratch out the faces of her children, or her own face, from the photographs. He writes, “The sheer fury of her effacement was shocking.” He connects his mother’s violence towards the photographs with the violence of history, which renders people unrecognizable: “We work our way back through history through a forest of wiped faces. […] Bones in mass graves.”(p. 44) History in Szirtes’s narrative is particular and personal, the emerging details giving us an understanding of the losses his family endured in order to survive. Cluj is a place where the Hungarian people were forbidden by the Romanian communist government to speak their language and Szirtes remembers the oppressive atmosphere of the city during a visit to see his mother’s family. On that occasion his uncle remained silent on the taxi ride home from the train station, out of fear of being arrested and jailed if he spoke Hungarian. He writes about how this hostility towards the Hungarian Jews affected his mother’s sense of belonging to place, language, and people.

The language of Szirtes’s memoir brings place and detail, faces and cityscapes to life, recovers and puts them before the reader. At the train station in Cluj the lady at the ticket office advises passengers seeking information about schedules to “Come down when your train is due and see whether it comes or not.” (p. 162) Buda and Pest are separate in their respective opulence and despondence, and disparate events in both parts of the city begin falling into place as pieces of a puzzle. The family names change to cover up Jewish roots, and Szirtes remarks, “The clutter and confusion of names is like a constant noise in the head.” (p. 111) This effort to reconstruct the past, to understand it, is a direct confrontation with oblivion.

Szirtes finds photographs and he looks at them with the eye of an archivist, a poet, an artist, and a son who yearns for his mother and searches for her so far back in time, he reaches her tender childhood. He looks at and describes family photographs, but then he goes further: in one of the most beautiful and profound passages in the book, he meditates on a photograph of his mother as a child:

But her childhood gaze goes beyond vulnerability. There is, I am beginning to think, something mystical about it, as if she were rapt by a vision, a miracle beyond the conjurer’s art. Maybe she has been vouchsafed a vision of her own incomprehensible future. I know the photographs are still, but time tumbles about them chaotically, future and past indistinguishable, simultaneous, like voices in a storm. The storm seems to freeze for a moment but will not settle and starts up again. (p. 195)

Of course, Szirtes gazes into these pictures from the future, with the knowledge of what will become of her, as he himself tumbles through time and tries to make sense of her suicide. She will never know how he searches for her. He realizes painfully that he could not have been truly available to her in his early childhood even though she often told him that he provided comfort for her, and he regrets being away from her when he was older. He admits he often imagines her and in movingly direct language, he says:

I want to report her presence and register it as it moved through life by moving back into her own past with her. I want to puzzle over it and admire it while being aghast at it. I don’t want to be certain of anything. I don’t want to come to conclusions. (p. 71)

In broader terms, this book offers a clear understanding of how historical upheaval tears through the individual’s relationship with life itself. Szirtes traces his mother’s lack of trust in people to the neighbors turning against each other, first during the mass deportation of Jewish people, then on the return home of the survivors, and later yet during the communist horror when everyone was either an informer or the one informed on, where some were being hanged from the lampposts of Budapest while others were running through muddy woods to what they imagined would be freedom. It is a catalogue of human deception and yet his mother showed a heroic will to survive it all, and even thrive. At one point his mother becomes Budapest itself:

I am reading this into her. The bullet holes and shell marks on Budapest buildings were her wounds. The blasted statuary that projected from wall after wall was her. She was a piece of broken statuary. I understood this process as I understood her, in other words, hardly at all. (p. 148)

The narrative brings us face to face with the consequences of political decisions that are beyond the power or even the comprehension of an individual, and yet somehow they become part of the collective burden. The violence on the streets enters violently within us. Generations are left grieving and searching for answers. And yet there are no hard feelings, no self-righteousness, no preaching coming from Szirtes; just the sense that the poet is “aghast” at history, itself an inescapable presence. Bullet holes and marks as wounds, mother as broken statuary: this could be a poem where one image enters into another to combust in the mind. Only a poet could have written these words. In another place Madga is imagined as a speaker in a poem, young, on the train to the labor camp:

They put me on a train, east, west, or south
As we rode off in different directions,
Myself, my body and my heart. My eyes
Were saying something to my open mouth
Which had remained open in surprise, (p.125)

The poem makes it possible for the mother to speak through the words of her son, for the painful history of one country to rise in the language of another: this is a remarkable victory over silence and oblivion. If the violence of history can undermine our will to live, there is still the possibility of measured, generous, and gentle words that while unable to forestall violence can still bear witness to it. The beautiful English in this memoir, written by a Hungarian refugee, has the piercing power of a child’s call for his absent mother. It is for this reason that The Photographer at Sixteen must be required reading.

—Reviewer Carmen Bugan was born in Romania and emigrated to the United States in 1989. She is the author of the highly praised memoir Burying the Typewriter (2015) as well as several books of poetry, most recently Lilies from America, New and Selected Poems (2019). [A review of that poetry collection by Lem Coley appears on this site.]