Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Zoltán Abádi-Nagy: Conversations with Raymod Federman: Take It or Leave It and The Voice in the Closet

film. Through a friend of mine in Paris who is a film-maker himself, I managed to get Lanzman's phone number. I dialed the number and the phone started ringing, but suddenly I hung up. My wife, who was in the room at the time, asked, "Why did you hang up?" "I've already spoken with Claude Lanzman," I said, "I don't need to talk to him any more ..." I think ABSENCE is the key term in all this. Something was taken away from me, from us

—parents, sisters, brothers, homes, countries, lives

—and we were left with an absence in a state of aloneness and loneliness. I think that is perhaps the most important theme in my fiction: aloneness, which is, of course, a form of suffering of an absence. For the rest of our lives, we as survivors must feel it concretely, almost as a presence, if one can reverse the terms. When 1 sat in the closet alone, when I was a boy, I was not aware then that it was the beginning of my survival but also the beginning of an absence. It is only years later, when I started to write The Voice in the Closet

, that I realized how loaded with meaning that closet was. Yes loaded with meaning, but also with images, symbols, metaphors. All sort of aesthetic possibilities. Yes, perhaps I have exploited my limited experience of the Holocaust for aesthetic reasons. But it also occurred to me, when I sat down to write that book, in the late 1970s, almost forty years after the original events, that a great deal had already been written about the Holocaust, good and bad, a great deal of it plain exploitation, often reducing the drama to mere melodrama, the tragedy to a mere soap opera. If I am to deal with those events I should try to avoid such reduction. Even though I wanted to write about that aspect of my life which can be called the experience of the Holocaust, I decided that I would never use the word "Jew" in the text, never mention the words "German" or "Nazi." I would never write the words "concentration camp" or "Holocaust." In other words, what I wanted to do is capture the essence of the closet experience in its relation to the Holocaust but outside the specifics of history and of my own personal life. I worked very hard on this rather short text (bilingual text, as you know), for many months, but I think I achieved what I set out to do

—not by adding more words, not by melodramatizing, not by expanding with facts and statistics, but on the contrary by reducing, by taking away, by cancelling, by trying to arrive at what is central to the book: absence. 100