Memory of the Past in Magda Szabó’s “Katalin Street”

Last year, I read Magda Szabó’s Kaitlin Street, and after finishing it, I knew that I wanted to teach because of the ways that the novel explores themes of memory, love, family, and more during turbulent times. As I constructed my syllabus for “The Reverberations of World War II,” I toyed with adding Szabó’s Abigail, a novel about a young girl at a boarding school in Hungary during World War II. However, I returned again to Katalin Street, specifically for its examination of memory and life amongst trauma and violence, adding it to the course.

Rereading Katalin Street for class, I began thinking about it in relation to Anna Seghers’ Transit and Victor Serge’s Last Times, the first two novels we read for the course. I began seeing how Seghers and Szabó each use the narrative style and structure of their novels to create feelings of anxiety and uncertainty within the reader, Seghers through the use of an unnamed, unreliable narrator in Transit and Szabó through the use of a spectral narrator, a first person narration, and third person narration over the course of thirty-four year period. Along with this stylistic connection, Seghers, Serge, and Szabó each deal with themes of memory and history, notably how we think about the past and those who have gone before us.