BITTER WISDOM

By John Skow

READ AS A WORK OF PURE IMAGInation, the powerfully written Holocaust chronicle that Hungarian author Janos Nyiri calls a novel (Battlefields and Playgrounds; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 536 pages; $25) has some inconsistencies. Most of these involve a too broad awareness of the military and political progression of the war, which might be appropriate to an adult survivor looking back at chaos, but not to the day-to-day fears of the young Jewish boy Jozska, eight years old at the war's outset, from whose point of view the story is told.

But if "novel" here simply means "fictional memoir," a warning that the events of real life have been rearranged, Battlefields rings clear and true. It is worth noting that what is most memorable in Nyiri's account is not the war's horrors or the coldhearted hypocrisy of the "Jewish laws" enforced by authorities in Budapest to appease the Germans and deal with the "Jewish question." It is the unsinkable humanity of his characters. Most of them aren't especially noble or heroic, but they are full of life, an important quality in a time of extermination.

The boy Jozska--surely to some degree modeled after the author as a child in wartime Budapest--is a rowdy, unscholarly wise guy more interested in cutting class to play soccer than in learning Hebrew like a proper Jewish son. But as he races about the city, often daring the devil by leaving off his yellow star, he sees clearly that two kinds of disintegration are occurring. And that one of them, the falling apart of German military strength, will not happen soon enough to prevent the second, the collapse of Hungarian civic morality, from grinding to completion.

That's a load of bitter wisdom for a boy to carry. So the author lets Jozska's father, a con man and survivor, speak the summation. Blaming the entire German nation, this fellow says wryly, "would be too German ... so collective responsibility is probably a myth." Here we imagine a grimace from the cafe intellectual. "Collective irresponsibility, on the other hand, certainly exists ..."