Pray a restful prayer for the child who has not yet been born

Author: Imre
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2005-10-01
Features: This book was first published in Hungary in 1990, followed by its publication in Germany two years later, and in 1997, an English translation by Wilson was released. In the book, the author narrates the gray impressions his childhood experiences left on his life, which include philosophical reflections. The narrator in the book is a survivor of a concentration camp, a middle-aged writer and literary translator (matching Kertész's identity). He says in the book, "Let us no longer seek the meaning that does not exist: in this century, the frequent execution squads are preparing to stage another 'ten kill one' tragedy, and it is destined that the tenth person's fate will also fall upon me—so be it." For him, life is nothing more than the process of digging his own grave, and he uses his pen to bring death closer. Kertész's novel is a fairy tale of identity and memory—a middle-aged person who survived the massacre in the concentration camp, looking back at those past events, calmly extracting writing resources from them. This reflective, poetic, yet emotionally detached novel tells us how a person made his own choice about life in a world where he could neither choose nor control. Even if, this choice was powerless. Nevertheless, it is still a cry of a suffering soul. The protagonist appears as a narrator, whose identity can be considered a continuation of the protagonist in Fateless, and even overlaps with Kertész himself—the "survivor," "writer," and "translator" of the Holocaust. He escaped the "final solution" of the Holocaust against the Jews, but he could not escape its shadow. The protagonist tries to explain to his friend why he cannot bring a child into this world, refusing to have children "in a world where the Auschwitz concentration camp exists," because the Holocaust has happened, and the Holocaust will happen again. Through this intricate narration, we see the narrator's accumulated frustration: his unsuccessful literary career, his failed marriage, his ex-wife's family and children—who he once could have had. He defends himself, saying that Jews could not live normally, that the deep-rooted distrust of the world and the fear of another genocide were inescapable fate in life. Through the protagonist's voice, Kertész expresses his condensed philosophy of life: Listen, these unreasonable, unexplainable things are not the bad ones, on the contrary: they are the good ones. We still see that he is still fighting, in his unique way, with his unique reasons, and in his unique language. The novel is titled Prayer for an Unborn Child. However, the protagonist is a man accustomed to being driven by fate and has no religious faith. His prayers are not religious but secular. They are a lament for the millions of victims, for the next generation who were born but could not be born, and for every individual life cursed by fanaticism, hatred, and resentment.