“What will I do to ensure life, liberty, and freedom for those being attacked?”

I constantly think about the transmission of racist and hateful thought, specifically the ways that this thought gets passed down from generation to generation. Along with this, I think about the ways that everyday people, who in their hearts know what they see happening around them is wrong, end up becoming part and parcel of the oppression enacted upon others. These two topics have appeared over and over again in recent texts that I have read, notably Magda Szabó’s Katalin Street and Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. I’ve written about this topic countless times before, and when I do, I always think about specific images such as Reginald Marsh’s This is Her First Lynching or the 1992 photgraph of a young child at a Klan rally, dressed in Klan attire, standing in front of a Black Georgia state trooper pointing at his own reflection in the trooper’s riot shield. While Szabó’s and Rezzori’s novels deal with anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and the images I mention deal with Jim Crow and lynching, there are overlaps with the insidious creeping in of racism and xenophobia that perpetuates itself, even when people know its harm.

Three families live next to one another in Szabó’s Katalin Street: the Helds, the Elekeses, and the Bálints. The Helds are Jewish, and the novel opens in 1933, when the Nazis…