MAGDA SZEKELY ; Poet of the Holocaust

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More than one Hungarian poet disproved Adorno's famous dictum "no poetry is possible after Auschwitz". First and foremost among them was Jnos Pilinszky whose work, rendered into English by Ted Hughes 30 years ago, expressed Christian anguish and acceptance of guilt for the crime of the Holocaust. Another whose entire poetic universe was formed by the Nazi persecution of Jews and its moral consequences was Magda Szekely.

Born in a Jewish middle-class family in 1936, Szekely probably survived the war either in the Budapest ghetto or in hiding on forged papers. From 1955 to 1959 she studied Hungarian and Bulgarian at Lornd Eotvos University. On graduating, she was employed …