Review Tuesday: Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Plain by Jill Culiner -- #History #Travel #ReviewTuesday

Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Plain by Jill Culiner

Claret Press, 2024

History is comprised not of facts but of stories – stories created to make sense of the inexplicable, to glorify the conventional, to justify the unforgivable. The stories told by different individuals or societies may include common events, but rarely assign a common explanation or a common meaning. This makes the search for historical “truth” an impossible challenge. Nevertheless, some intrepid souls will make an effort to unify these many views of the past and to identify what has been left out of a community’s historical narratives.

Jill Culiner is one of those souls. Photographer, author, philosopher, polyglot and vagabond, she went to Hungary in 1999 seeking information on the fate of Europe’s rural Jews after the Second World War. She intended to spend only a few weeks in the Great Plain, west of Budapest and east of the Romanian border, prowling the sites of former synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, questioning the local people about their memories of Jewish neighbors and sifting through the sparse records from decades earlier. Instead, she found herself drawn into the lives of the locals, gratified by their hospitality and fascinated by their inconsistencies. She ate and drank with them, learned their language (renowned as one of the most difficult in the world), and eventually bought and renovated a traditional house in one of the villages. Over the course of six years, she observed the poverty, the prejudice and the generosity of her Hungarian neighbors, as well as marking the not necessarily positive changes as the country became increasingly integrated in and influenced by the European Union.

Those Absent is Ms. Culiner’s sprawling, kaleidoscopic account of that sojourn. It is simultaneously a fascinating historical inquiry, a brilliant travelogue, and an uncomfortable examination of moral issues many would rather forget.

Never having visited even urban Hungary, I knew nothing about the background or the culture of the Great Plain. Ms. Culiner paints a picture of a place overrun by waves of conquerors, from the Huns to the Communists of the Soviet era. The current inhabitants (aside from the German retirees, who buy up the land but don’t mix with the natives) all consider themselves to be Magyars, though they have a variety of ancestors. The Jews, too, identified themselves as Hungarian as much as Jewish. Ultimately that did not save them from persecution and near-extinction.

Although the locals all deny that there were any post-WWII pogroms, a few shreds of evidence prove the contrary. Meanwhile, given the vicious hostility they show to the Roma who still live among them, which Ms. Culiner vividly documents, one can imagine similar hatred directed toward the Jews. The people of the Great Plain have often led a marginal existence economically. Poverty and envy can combine to have deadly consequences.

I truly enjoyed this book, though I found myself floundering at times due to my lack of knowledge and the volume’s loose structure. In particular, I was deeply impressed by the author’s courage as well as her attitude of universal good will. She went to the Great Plain asking difficult questions, yet she found a welcome almost everywhere. I believe that this reflects her open-minded acceptance of every individual and every occurrence.

There is a deeply humanist strain in Those Absent. While never condoning the violence she discovers, she also seems ready to understand and to forgive. At very least, she does not condemn her friends and acquaintances for hiding or denying the truth. She understands that the concept of truth is very slippery when applied to history.

Those Absent is not an easy book, but provides rich rewards if you persevere in reading it to the end.