A Tale of Two Nobel Prize Winners
I got this from Dennis Kobray via Green Alliance’s general discussion listerv.
Recently on Ready Steady Book I came across a link to an essay (apparently written in 2002) by the distinguished Hungarian writer Imre Kertész, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature.
In it he bitterly attacks Jose Saramago, the distinguished Portuguese writer and 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.
What divides them is not literature but politics and history; in a word, Israel.
Kertész is a passionate supporter of Israel, and as a Holocaust survivor and former inmate of Auschwitz he was appalled by Saramago’s bitter criticisms of human rights violations committed by the Israeli army in the occupied territories in early 2002:
I saw the Portugese writer Saramago on TV, how he bent over a sheet of paper, compared Israel’s line against the Palestinians with Auschwitz—proof that the author did not have the slightest idea of the scandalous irrelevance of his comparison. Even worse, he did not know that the concept represented by the term Auschwitz has long had a fixed meaning in Europe’s cultural consensus and can be used indisputably in a populist way and for populist purposes.
http://ellissharp.blogspot.com/2006/07/tale-of-two-nobel-prize-winners.html