Essays and studies
Gábor T. Szántó’s 2022 volume is entitled “The Lawless Guard – Essays and Studies on the Forms of Modern Jewish Literature” (Scolar Publishing, 2022).
To quote the Bookline book review:
Gábor T. Szántó approaches the sensitive issues of modern Jewish literature with the need for understanding and self-understanding, whether he analyses domestic or foreign authors. If his subject calls for it, he traces the works back to the tradition of revelation, rabbinic thought, the experience of exile, the desire for identification, the success and the shattered hopes of integration, to the trauma of the Holocaust and the dictatorship, while drawing on the international literature on the subject, he brings together the European, American and Israeli experiences.
Questions of social history and social psychology are raised in relation to the analysed works, as is psychoanalytic thinking.
Szántó, as in his novels, which have been published in many languages, or in his narrative, essays and studies, which are the basis of the world-famous movie 1945, approaches history, literature and the experience of Diaspora Jewry from a new and unique perspective.
T. Gábor Szántó’s writings concern Eliette Abécassis, S. J. Agnon, Isaac Babel, Milán Füst, Allen Grossman, Ágnes Gergely, Franz Kafka, Imre Kertész, Lev Lunc, Károly Pap, Miklós Radnóti, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, as well as his own works.
On the author
Gábor T. Szántó was born in Budapest in 1966, graduated from the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of ELTE in 1990, and studied Aesthetics and Judaesthetics at the Faculty of Humanities.
He began his literary career with poetry and short prose. His volume of short stories entitled Betrayal was published in 1997, his novel East Station, terminus in 2002, and his collection of short stories entitled Santa Claus of the camp in 2004. Her poetry collection The Taste of Freedom was published in 2010, his novel The Three of Eden in 2012, his novel Kafka’s Cats in 2014, his collection of short stories 1945 and Other Stories in 2017, and his novel Symphony of Europe in Autumn 2019.
His writings have been translated into several languages.
Since 1991, he has been editor-in-chief of the Jewish political and cultural magazine Szombat.
In the 2000s, he translated American Jewish and Yiddish poets into Hungarian and taught modern Jewish literature at universities and free universities.
Ferenc Török, film director, shot the feature film 1945 from the screenplay of his short story Homecoming.