Last year, I read Magda Szabó’s Kaitlin Street, and after finishing it, I knew that I wanted to teach because of the ways that the novel explores themes of memory, love, family, and more during turbulent times. As I constructed my syllabus for “The Reverberations of World War II,” I toyed with adding Szabó’s Abigail, a novel about a young girl at a boarding school in Hungary during World War II. However, I returned again to Katalin Street, specifically for its examination of memory and life amongst trauma and violence, adding it to the course.

Rereading Katalin Street for class, I began thinking about it in relation to Anna Seghers’ Transit and Victor Serge’s Last Times, the first two novels we read for the course. I began seeing how Seghers and Szabó each use the narrative style and structure of their novels to create feelings of anxiety and uncertainty within the reader, Seghers through the use of an unnamed, unreliable narrator in Transit and Szabó through the use of a spectral narrator, a first person narration, and third person narration over the course of thirty-four year period. Along with this stylistic connection, Seghers, Serge, and Szabó each deal with themes of memory and history, notably how we think about the past and those who have gone before us.

Katalin Street foregrounds memory and the passage of time at the outset of the novel. The book opens with an unnamed narrator providing context for what will follow over the course of Katalin Street. The narrator says, “The process of growing old bears little resemblance to the way it’s presented, either in novels or in works of medical science.” The novel details the passage of time on Katalin Street, the movement from pre-World War II Katalin Street to Soviet-era Katalin Street, following the paths of three families as they navigate these periods of time. Life, as the narrator points out, doesn’t mirror “novels,” yet as readers of Katalin Street, we are reading a novel that seeks to depict what novels cannot depict.

Katalin Street exists as a text that sits at the core of memory. It works to highlight how even with the passage of time memory remains and the space between life and death shrinks, both in the temporal realm and in the spiritual realm. The first two pages focus on how those who survive on Katlain Street and those who have died remain there, connected to specific memories while the rest of life moves forward. The narrator begins by detailing the ways we age, the ways we move, as the ancient riddle puts it, from four legs to two legs to three legs before we leave this mortal coil.

The narrator, after relaying the process of aging, tells us that “no one had told [individuals on the street] that the most frightening thing of all about the loss of youth is not what is taken away but what is granted instead.” We always think about our lost youth, our lost mobility, our lost cognitive ability, our lost . . . Yet, this is not what really causes us to fear and look backwards. No, what we fear, more than what we lose is what those losses mean for our very existence. The narrator tells us that we become frightened because we come to “the awareness of universal disintegration,” that everything, not just ourselves, will one day pass away. Those we love. The places we remember. The world we knew. Those losses, more than our aging bodies, create fear within us.

When we encounter “universal disintegration,” we begin to latch on to specific moments, zeroing in on hallways, rooms, smells, sights, sounds, and anything that brings back the memory. Age takes away the past. Age takes away the present. But, we reach backwards and we find that “[e]everything that had happened was still there, right up to the rpresent, but now suddenly different.” Instead of remembering every little detail, we remember parts. The narrator says about the characters experiencing their aging, “Time had shrunk to specific moments, important events to single episodes, familiar places to the mere backdrop to individual scenes, so that, in the end, they understood that of everything that had made up their lives thus far only one or two places. and a handful of moments, really mattered.”

When it comes down to it, our lives consist of time. Our lives consist of actions and experiences that we participate in over the course of our existences. Yet, most of those moments become nothing more than “so much wadding” and “wood shavings stuffed into a trunk to protect the contents on the long journey to come.” They become dressing, part of the scenery we don’t focus on intently but that fills out the stage of our lives as the “specific moments” take center stage, calling us back to them as we disintegrate back to the dust from whence we came.

This calling back, this return to memory, is what we do when someone we know and love passing on. Our loved ones die, yet they don’t die. They remain, as I have written about many times. The opening section of Katalin Street concludes with the narrator telling us, “They had discovered too that the difference between the living and the dead is merely qualitative, that it doesn’t count for much.” Death does not separate us from one another. It does not separate us from our existence or our past. It joins us, binding us together on another, intimate level. It provides us with the space to remember one another, to collaborate with one another on our existence. It provides us with memory, with stories, with love.

Death doesn’t stop the characters of Katalin Street from roaming the houses and plots where they lived in life. Even though they have physcially perished, they remain. Henriette looms over the narrative, interacting with other characters who remain alive. She doesn’t act as ghost, but she acts as an individual who the others recognize and acknowledge, even though a Nazi solider shoots her dead in 1944. Henriette straddles the living and the dead, meeting her parents, who perished in an extermination camp, and becoming frustated with them for reverting to memories in the childhood, thus making them revert to children themselves.

In the next post, I will pick up by looking some at Henriett’s presence in the novel and how she epitomizes the “qualitative” space between the living and the dead. Until then, what are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.