Lajos Walder
The native form of this personal name is Walder Lajos. This article uses the Western name order when mentioning individuals.
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Lajos Walder was a Jewish/Hungarian poet and playwright. Walder was born on June 27, 1913. He wrote and published poetry throughout the 1930s under the pseudonym of Lajos Vándor (meaning: wanderer). It has been Lajos Walder’s children’s decision that the English translations of his works appear under his family name of Walder so that the connections to his descendants remain clear. His Hungarian pseudonym of "[Lajos] Vándor" is well documented in the English translations. Walder wrote his plays in the harshest of circumstances and in secret while intermittently serving in a Jewish ‘forced labor’ battalion. He died on the day when the Günschkirhen concentration camp was liberated, on May 4, 1945. In the post-communist era, his works were rediscovered on Radio Budapest. Posthumous publications followed in Hungary, and Walder's poetry and plays were translated into English by his daughter, Agnes Walder.
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A precocious talent, in his poem entitled “I Am a Wanderer,” which concludes with the lines “I am a wanderer – a modern monk / the lone wanderer of the eternal other,” Walder created his poetic identity and his choice of pseudonym. At the age of 19, he arrived at the editorial offices of Anonymous Publishing with the following introduction:
“My name is Lajos Vándor, I am a poet, a law student and a trainee worker at the knitting mills. To the proletarians I am a rotten bourgeois; to the bourgeoisie I am a stinking proletarian; to the petit-bourgeoisie I am an evil anarchist and to the anarchists I am a cowardly petit bourgeois. And everybody is right, whatever they say about me. But I wrote a few masterpieces – these, the poets and “les belles ames” would call prose, and the prose writers and modern aesthetes would call poems. Take them and eat them, read them, and publish them; but first give me a cigarette because I left my cash register at home and I don’t have four cents in my pocket to buy a single fag.”
The following year Anonymous published his first volume of poetry, entitled Fej vagy Irás (Heads or Tails), Anonymous, 1933.
His second volume of poetry entitled Csoportkép (Group Portrait) was published by Cserépfalvi, in early 1938.
The critic, Gábor Thurzó, was to write in the 1930s:
“Lajos Vándor has neither ancestors nor partner in Hungarian literature. He is a poet, without a doubt a lyricist through and through, yet one whose every line and every poetic breath is pure heresy, pure rebellion against accustomed forms of poetry.”
Yet, there were to be no further publications in the poet/playwright’s lifetime. After 1938, works by Jews could no longer be published in Hungary.
After the war, during the forty-year-long communist censorship in Hungary, Walder was largely forgotten. Hungarian literary history did not mention his name, and even the Hungarian Lexicon of Literature mentioned only that “Lajos Vándor (1913-1945) was a poet, that fascism took him away, and that since then all trace of him had disappeared.”
However, in 1987, two years prior to the fall of communism in Hungary, Walder was commemorated in an hour-long tribute on Radio Budapest by Géza Hegedüs, the doyen of Hungarian literature. The program was entitled: “Remembering the memorable Lajos Vándor."
Mr Hegedüs commented on their first meeting (in 1932), at the office of Anonymous thus:
“As I was reading his poems I was gripped with the feeling that I had rarely sensed such a completely accurate expression of our times. This was fright, anxiety and profound indignation mixed with bizarre humor.”
“What a sensation that particular voice was for us,” he continued.
“His outstandingly recitable and highly effective free verse was well known during the 1930s because the most popular presenters of the time were keen to recite it. His uniquely voiced poetry was written with enormous compositional care. He carefully planned what appeared to be careless and polished it until it was exactly as careless as he intended it to be. He lived not quite thirty-two years. He had two volumes of poetry published. Their content is fifty poems, with not a single inferior one among them.”
In conclusion, Mr Hegedüs said, “I feel it is my job to let the reading public know that there was a poet called Lajos Vándor, who was the most credible voice to express the times between the two world wars. Without this artist’s entirely individualistic voice, the overall picture of that period is incomplete.”
At the time of his broadcast, Mr Hegedüs did not realize that Lajos Walder’s output of poetic works was far larger than the fifty poems. He was also unaware of the fact that during the worst years of persecution in Hungary, the poet became a playwright! He wrote his plays in terrible circumstances and in secret in the early 1940s while intermittently serving in a Jewish forced labor battalion. He wrote Tyrtaios, which was published as Türtaiosz (Tyrtaeus), Pompeii Váza (Vase of Pompeii) and Fagypont Alatt (Below Zero) without the slightest chance of having them staged or printed, since by then the works of Jewish artists could, by law, no longer be performed or published in Hungary.
One can only marvel at his talent cum determination to have written his major play Tyrtaeus along with his other two remarkable plays during those terrible times.
- In all Hungarian publications of Walder's works and in the articles written about him, his Hungarian pseudonym, "Vándor Lajos" was used.
Following the commemoration on Radio Budapest, Walder's children, who by then lived in Sydney, Australia -- but were ever alert to a possibility of having their father’s works published in Hungary -- got in touch with Mr. Hegedüs in Budapest.
The result was a larger volume of his poetry entitled Egy Költő Élt Itt Közöttetek (A Poet Lived Here Amongst You) – the title of one of his poems – published by Maecenas, Budapest 1989. The book was published in September and was well received. In the post-communist mood of the time, one of his poems, entitled “Interjú” (“Interview”), in which he interviews God, was chosen as the poem of the month for October.
One year later, two of his plays: Tyrtaios (Tyrtaeus) and Pompeji Váza (Vase of Pompeii) were published in a volume entitled Pompeji by Maecenas, Budapest. In his Foreword to this volume – “Towards the Dramas of Lajos Vándor” – Mr Hegedüs wrote: “In aesthetic value and nuance, the plays differ from the grotesque tartness of Vándor’s tragi-comic poems, but they are comparable to them in being the uniquely beautiful creations of an original mind.”
After 1990, fearing that in the emerging trauma of post-communist Hungary, his works would disappear again, his daughter, Agnes Walder – who is also a poet (writing in English) – decided to attempt to translate her father’s poetry. Hungarian and English are very different languages.
But Walder’s modernity, deliberate break with Hungarian poetic tradition and his use of free verse enabled her to create successful translations. By 2004, forty-four of his translated poems were published in Melbourne, Australia, by Pan Macmillan, Australia, in a volume entitled We, the Twenty-five Letters of the Alphabet – also the title of one of his poems. During the following years, Agnes Walder concentrated on translating his three plays. An early edition of the plays, The Dramas of Lajos Walder was also published by Macmillan, Australia, in 2007. These two publications were only available in Australia. She then continued to translate the rest of his poems.
In 2012, Agnes Walder contacted Dr Michael Eskin, Publisher of Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. in New York City. Dr Eskin immediately recognized the value of Walder’s work.
Become a Message: Poems, a volume containing the English translations of 100 poems by Lajos Walder, was published by Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. in 2015. The book won the 28th Annual IBPA Benjamin Franklin Silver Award for poetry in 2016.
Lajos Walder’s three plays – Tyrtaeus: A Tragedy, Vase of Pompeii: A Play and Below Zero: A Play – were published individually and also as a single-volume Complete Plays edition by Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. in 2017.
- Book covers for the plays
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Tyrtaeus -
Vase of Pompeii
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Below Zero
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The Complete Plays
- Early years
Both of Walder’s parents were Jewish. He was the first child of his mother and the fourth child of his father, who was widowed earlier and left with three small children. These children, his older brother and two sisters, were brought up Catholic in accordance with the wishes of their mother. His younger brother, Imre Walder, was born two years after him. His father, Martin Walder, who served in the Austro-Hungarian Army throughout World War I (‘Jews now had the opportunity to prove their patriotism’), was forcibly retired without pension during an upsurge of anti-semitism in 1919. He died early when the poet/playwright was only 11 years old. His mother was determined to raise all the children together. They led a hand to mouth existence, but they were a close-knit family where everyone fasted on Yom Kippur and also celebrated Christmas.
By the time Walder obtained his baccalaureate, the “Numerus Clausus” severely restricted the entry of Jewish students into university. Since he had completed his examinations with straight distinctions, he was one of a handful of Jewish students able to enter university. From there, he graduated as a J.D. in 1937. In the meantime, he wrote poetry, published and edited the highly respected literary monthly, entitled Cross-section, which appeared on the news-stands for the then record time of two years. He worked as a factory hand in order to earn a living, and also worked as a children’s program presenter on the radio, for which he wrote the fairy tales. In addition, always in the hope of trying to make a living out of writing, he wrote numerous short stories, many of which (along with his fairy tales), appeared in magazines and journals.
He used to meet Miklós Radnóti, the Hungarian Jewish poet [who was to die on an infamous “Death March”].
By the time he obtained his law degree, no firm in Budapest would hire a Jew and in 1938, the first Jewish Law barred Jews from practicing in the professions. Thus he was only able to get a job as a laborer in a stocking factory.
It was then that he had a calling card made with the following writing on it:
FACTORY-HAND AND LYRICAL POET |
Lajos Walder married Eva Lustig in 1939. He wrote a number of poems to her and about her.
In 1940, their son, Peter, was born.
In the same year ‘forced labour’ came into effect, a uniquely Hungarian phenomenon. Jewish males, forbidden to serve in the Hungarian army, were to serve in forced labour battalions. Avoidance was considered treason.
In 1941, Hungary entered the war as a willing ally of Nazi Germany.
- “Tyrtaeus: Of true volition, one can only fight for a just cause.”
- -from the play Tyrtaeus: A Tragedy, Act I, Scene 3
Until the early part of 1942, Walder and his younger brother served in the same forced labour battalion. In May of that year, the battalion had too many men. Because Walder was already a family man, he was one of the few transferred to another battalion in the vicinity of Budapest.
For a while, he was able to live at home. By that stage, holding down even a factory job between call-ups was out of the question. It was during that period that he must have written his three plays.
In 1943, their older daughter, Agnes, was born.
- The death of Lajos Walder
The Germans occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. Systematic deportation of the Jewish population (starting with the provinces) began immediately. In early November 1944, when the Russians had already reached the outskirts of Budapest, all locally stationed forced labour battalions were herded towards Austria on death marches. Walder reached Mauthausen. In the final few weeks of the war he was interned in Günskirchen. U.S. troops liberated Günskirchen on May 4, 1945. Walder along with some of the survivors, (including Mr Hegedüs), walked through the opened gates and accepted a tin of meat from an American soldier. They had had almost nothing to eat for weeks. He must also have been suffering from Typhus. Almost immediately after he ate, he developed terrible stomach cramps. A few hours later he died on a straw mattress in a makeshift hospital.
- His family’s circumstances after the war
In spite of the murderous activities of the Arrow Cross (the Hungarian Nazis), and in spite of the bombing, his mother Ida, his pregnant wife, Eva, their five-year-old son and eighteen months old daughter survived in the locked ghetto of Budapest, and were liberated by the Russians. Walder was never to see his third child, Nina (‘Ninotchka’), who was born a month after he died. A Jewish captain in the Red army aided Nina’s birth. Mercifully, at the time the family had not yet received news of his death.
In the difficult post war years in Budapest, Eva tried repeatedly to have his work published again, or, at least, to have his plays performed. Most of these efforts were heartbreaking and all were unsuccessful because in Hungary, from the early 1950s, no literature was considered relevant unless it had communist themes. Walder’s work, with its profoundly humanistic themes and strong focus on the individual, did not meet those requirements. Even less so, since he had an equal contempt for fascism and communism.
- “Sir, I will die tomorrow,
and with me culture will die,
And the day after tomorrow,
there will not be a human being on earth,
only a Nazi and a communist.”
- - from the poem: “Last Human Being”
After the war, Eva, married Alexander Endrey, who was a most wonderful second father to the three small children. Their sibling, Linda, was born to this marriage.
During the 1956 uprising, one very cold and scary November night, the six of them in just the clothes they were wearing, and one haversack for the greatest essentials between them, walked across ‘no man’s land’ into Austria. Some months later they arrived in Sydney, Australia. Imre Walder, Lajos Walder’s younger brother, who survived forced labor on the Russian front, also emigrated to Sydney, Australia.
In 1961, Mrs Ida Walder, was able to leave Hungary and follow them to Sydney. The things she could take with her were severely restricted and closely scrutinized by the Hungarian authorities. But no one suspected that the bundles of age-old, yellowed, and torn manuscripts she packed in her trunk were anything other than the sentimental memorabilia of an old lady. That is how her son’s unpublished manuscripts reached Sydney!
In Sydney, his three plays, and additional poetry were rescued from those yellowed and torn manuscripts. It was fortunate that he always used a typewriter.
- “In vain I toll
my feelings manufactured
death bell –
that Europe is a sinking ship
and I do not want to drown
in salt water"
- - from the poem “Short Lyrical Oration”
- “…I tried to tie myself to the community
with more and more strings,
And behold, now they still want to bankrupt me
because according to the demands of racial purity
I can’t officially prove
that I am actually descended from Adam.”
- – from the poem “Coming to Terms with the Impossible”
At a time when all of the playwright’s rights were rescinded, Tyrtaeus defines justice as:
- “… a condition in which everyone can do what anyone else can do, and no one has to endure what he himself must not commit.”
- –from the play Tyrtaeus: A Tragedy, Act I, Scene 3
Leading up to mass psychosis, Walder wrote:
- “I renounce this stupid herd,
which entrusts itself to the instinct of others”
- –from the poem “First person Singular”
Walder’s concern as a man, poet and playwright was for the individual and individual conscience.
Original works
- Fej vagy Irás (Heads or Tails), Anonymous, Budapest, 1933.
- Csoportkép (Group Portrait), Cserépfalvi, Budapest, 1938.
Published posthumously in Hungary
English Translations:
- Forty-four translated poems, entitled We, the Twenty-five Letters of the Alphabet, Pan Macmillan, Melbourne, Australia, 2004
- An early edition of The Dramas of Lajos Walder, Pan Macmillan, Melbourne, Australia, 2007 (these two publications were only for Australia)
- Become a Message: Poems, a volume containing Lajos Walder’s complete extant poetry in English translation (100 poems), Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., New York, 2015.
- Tyrtaeus: A Tragedy, Upper West Side Philosophers, NYC, 2017
- Vase of Pompeii: A Play, Upper West Side Philosophers, NYC, 2017
- Below Zero: A Play, Upper West Side Philosophers, NYC, 2017
- The Complete Plays of Lajos Walder, Upper West Side Philosophers, NYC, 2017
- Review of “Become a Message”, entitled: “A tiny light in the terrible night”, by Professor Kevin Brophy, Melbourne University, Australia – in TEXT Journal, Volume 19, No 2, October 2016
- Review of the plays: “Tyrtaeus”, “Vase of Pompeii” and “Below Zero”, entitled “Playing Humanity’s Anthem of Grief”, by Professor Jane Montgomery Griffith, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia – in TEXT Journal, Volume 21, No 2, October 17, 2017
- "Lajos Walder: the Jewish anti-war poet living in 1930s Hungary”, ABC Radio, 30 August 2016
- “Honoring a father’s literary legacy” Arts & Lifestyle, by Danny Gocs, The Australian Jewish News, February 17, 2017
- “Posthumous recognition for a talent taken too soon”, by Alison Croggon, The Australian Jewish News, February 1, 2008
- “Holocaust playwright’s theatrical legacy lives on” by Lexi Landsman, The Australian Jewish News, July 6, 2007
- “Poet’s flights of fancy” by Dr Rachael Kohn, The Australian Jewish News, January 7, 2005.
- “Literary legacy of a Holocaust poet” by Jacqui Gal, The Australian Jewish News, September 17, 2004.
- “A poet’s voice restored” by Susan Buress, The Australian Jewish News, March 30, 1990.
- National Szécshényi Library, Budapest – contains all of his works, in both Hungarian and English, including the original typewritten copy of his third play: “Fagypont Alatt” (“Below Zero”). The library also contains, blogs and information about his life and works.
- Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum (Petőfi Museum of Literature), has copies of two of his Hungarian Language books: “Egy Költő élt itt Közöttetek” (“A Poet Lived Here Amongst You”) and “Pompeji”.
- Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel has Lajos (Vándor) Walder’s original manuscripts in their Hungarian Archives. The English translations of his works are in the Library of Yad Vashem.
- The 2016 IBPA, Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry.
- Two citations for the IBPA’s Benjamin Franklin Book Award.
- Two Poetry readings of the English Translations of his poems at the Sydney Jewish Museum, Australia, in 2015 – after the publication of “Become a Message”, Upper West Side Philosophers, NYC, 2015. Poems recited by the actor, John Grinston.
- In Australia on ABC Breakfast, entitled “Lajos Walder, the Jewish Anti-war Poet living in in 1930s Hungary”, Claire Nichols interviewed Agnes Walder, and John Grinston, recited parts of two poems.
- A Poetry reading entitled: “Saving my father’s literature” from the English Translation of his poems “Become a Message” at the NCJWA, in Sydney, on December 5, 2016 – with Agnes Walder, poems recited by John Grinston.
- In Budapest, Hungary: “Kern András irodalmi felfedező útja Vándor Lajos (Lajos Walder) Világában” (A literary journey of discovery by Kern András through the world of the poems of Lajos Vándor (Lajos Walder) – staged by Mazsike, on January 10, 2018. The title of the invitation was: “Egy Költő Élt itt Közöttetek” ("A poet lived here among you"). Several of his poems were recited by the Hungarian actor, Kern András.
- “Playing with Fire: Theater in Translation as Resistance,” PEN World Voices Festival, April 17, 2018, concerning Tyrtaeus: A Tragedy – with Agnes Walder on the panel.
References
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