The figure of M.’s father is more enigmatic. A legend persists
– one that later Péter himself readily told and perhaps may even
be true – that his family had come to Hungary from Galicia
some time towards the end of the 19th century, from a certain
region where, according to another legend, bandits, pious
Hasidim, perverse nobles, and untamed Hutzuls arriving from
the Carpathians felt themselves at home; a region where, not
long after his family purportedly set off on their southwards
migration, a certain chief lieutenant, Kiekeritz by name, who
had just executed a prisoner-of-war in a forest, was himself
overtaken by death on the tumbledown steps of a third-rate
Jewish guesthouse in a derelict town; the bullet, however,
ultimately came to rest in the skull of second lieutenant Carl
Joseph von Trotta, who after the shot took one more faltering
step, then fell to the ground, knocking over two overflowing
buckets, while from below, the Ukrainian peasants cried out in
chorus “Hail to thee, Lord Jesus!”.
Lazarus, an unflinching investigation of what it means to be the child of Holocaust survivors in postwar Hungary, is Gábor Schein\'s second novel.
