Azarel

The novelist and short-story writer Károly Pap was the son of the Reform rabbi of Sopron, Hungary. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I and then joined Béla Kun’s Red Army. When the communist regime collapsed in 1919, Pap was jailed for eighteen months. He then lived abroad until 1925. His great novel, Azarel (1937), was a roman à clef that probed the successes and failures of Jewish acculturation and integration in Hungary. It scandalized many Jews because of its harsh depiction of the protagonist’s father, a rabbi. He continued to write during the war years and his two dramas, Batséba (1940) and Mózes (1943–1944), were performed in the Budapest Jewish community theater. In 1944, he was sent to a compulsory labor camp, from which he was deported to Buchenwald and then Bergen-Belsen.