SECOND CLASS HISTORY

Abstract

Lajos Kovács, a writer, editor, and teacher worked for about twenty years on a novel which, unfortunately, could only be published posthumously. The manuscript, found after his death, which received the title Hosszúra nőtt árnyékaink [Our long shadows], is at the same time a book of remembrances, a family novel, a coming-of-age novel, and a generation novel. The first-person narrator investigates sometimes from a childlike naive, sometimes from an adult perspective the story of the Czechoslovakian-Hungarian population exchange and its moral consequences on both the personal life and the collective existential sphere. The crucial topic of the novel is the crossing of the border, the quest for language, cultural differences between generations, and the own within one’s own as reflections of otherness within minority identity. Individual chapters of the novel, while traditionally reconstructing the history and the “memory album” of a family on each side of the border, also create the narrator’s coming-of-age history. Childhood, school years, university studies and military service all seem to be defining factors and times in the experimental life journey of a frontier existence.