What Keeps Bringing Me Back to Magda Szabó’s “Katalin Street”?

As I’m teaching Magda Szabó’s Katalin Street, I keep asking myself, “Why am I drawn to this book?” I’ve only read it twice, once last summer and again this semester in preparation for teaching it. Yet, I keep feeling like Katalin Street is one of those novels, like those of Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, or others, that I will come back to again and again over the course of my life. It is a novel that speaks to our very existence, the ways we remember moments in our lives and the ways we confront death and the passing of those we love. The opening section of the novel concludes with the narrator stating, referencing the main characters, “They had discovered too that the difference between the living and the dead is merely qualitative, that it doesn’t count for much.”

The chasm between the living and the dead is not as far as we’d like to think. We envision that once someone removes this mortal coil they cease to exist, they dissipate or disintegrate back into the earth. Yet, that is not what happens. We are not merely made up of flesh, blood, muscles, nerves, and other components. No, we are made up of our thoughts, our actions, the wadding that fills out our skeletal frames and makes us who we are as individuals. While the casing may cease to exist, disintegrating over time till it can no longer function, the things we have said, done…