Fatelessness

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Imre Kertész, who was born in 1929 and imprisoned in Buchenwald as a youth, worked as a journalist and playwright before publishing Fatelessness, his first novel, in 1975. He is the author of Looking for a Clue, Detective Story, The Failure, The Union Jack, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and Galley-Slave’s Journal. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002. He lives in Budapest and Berlin.

Born in England in 1947, Tim Wilkinson first began translating from Hungarian after living and working in Budapest during the early 1970s. He has translated a number of works of history, including Éva Balázs’s Hungary and the Habsburgs 1765–1800, Domokos Kosáry’s Hungary and International Politics in 1848–1849, and Viktor Karády’s The Jews of Europe in the Modern Era, as well as literary works by many contemporary Hungarian prose writers.

I didn’t go to school today. Or rather, I did go, but only to ask my class teacher’s permission to take the day off. I also handed him the letter in which, referring to “family reasons,” my father requested that I be excused. He asked what the “family reason” might be. I told him my father had been called up for labor service; after that he didn’t raise a further peep against it.

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