Above all, it isn’t one because it’s not about someone who has died, but about a survivor — me — and about another survivor who, even if he has passed away, somehow continues to live on in me as long as I live, and about how all that came to be.
“It was in the Tibetan mountains that I received the news that István Jelenits had died at the age of 92. Like for so many others, he had been a defining teacher for me at the Piarist high school in Budapest. Even my handwriting is his. God be with him.”
This short post of mine was spotted by Válasz Online, and they asked me to write about how exactly his handwriting became mine.
When he lectured — freely, wittily, thoughtfully, pausing now and then as if formulating his thoughts for the very first time, just for us — he would occasionally jot down key words on the board, distributing the material in elegant flowcharts, marking connections with arrows, wavy lines and other signs of relation, almost constantly analysing his own text. In a postmodern way, alongside the free-flowing talk, he would reveal its logical structure. That’s how I learned to take notes, to synthesise content logically — to such an extent that later other teachers would ask to borrow my notebooks to better understand what they themselves had said. My university art history exam notes were copied by the entire year, and later I was astonished to see that subsequent generations had assembled them into a photocopied book, reproduced for years.
He wrote in printed lowercase letters, yet mostly linked them together — just not in the usual schoolchild cursive way. As he wrote, I watched how he curved the lines, the original solutions he found in shaping the letters so that each would fit the overall ductus of the writing, yet retain its own small, free, improvisational flourish; how unexpectedly and cleverly he connected them, what ligatures he created, as if some cool little sprite made only of letters were running across the board. It was this creativity — the union of order and calligraphic freedom — that fascinated me as I copied the board into my notebook, again and again, until his handwriting somehow entered my hand. Not through mere imitation, but because, as with note-taking, understanding the creative principle led to a similar result.
He approached the material with the same creativity. He would always speak up against received opinion and clichés, seeing and showing the nuance in every situation — how little is truly black and white, how many perspectives must be considered, always at least one — and an important one — more than we would normally think of. At such moments, he would turn one — or in significant matters, both — hands palm down, fingers slightly spread, gently rocking them back and forth, as if to signal: this is tricky, unstable. Hold your horses. And then he would introduce a perspective that changed everything. That, too, became mine: the urge to jab at overly obvious and flat consensus with a new angle — and as I do so, my hand, too, turns palm down and my fingers spread.
A striking example: in church history — which he also taught alongside literature — as we moved through the Old Testament, he shared with us the findings of the most modern biblical scholarship, which, to put it mildly, did not favour literal interpretation. Instead, they explored what myth-making mechanisms, what literary forms and social expectations had shaped the individual biblical stories — rather like Thomas Mann does in the introduction to Joseph and His Brothers, or Stefan Heym in The King David Report. My traditionally devout mother was aghast when I brought these explanations home — especially since they came not from some atheist party official, but from a respected teacher at a Catholic high school.
In the end, she posed the question that, at the end of the term, I stood up and put to him — though judging by the class’s reaction, we all wanted to ask it, and surely others had asked it at home as well: so is the whole Bible merely a literary product? A neatly polished collection of mythologems? Where is the historical truth in it? The divine plan? This time he did not use the usual palm-rocking gesture, but another, rarely employed and alarmingly firm one: with that same open palm, he forcefully pressed down an imaginary column of air about ten centimetres. Look, he said, the situation is this: by the 7th century BC, where we had reached in these stories, the Assyrians and Babylonians had deported every small people of the ancient Near East. In exile, they all assimilated and disappeared. Why? Because they had no such stories. The Jews did. They continued to tell them — indeed, elaborated them in exile — and those stories gave them an identity they could preserve until the end of captivity, and take home with them.
Literature — and faith in what literature speaks about — gives strength for life, he drew, with emblematic brevity, his two subjects together.
Because of his attraction to the unconventional, in our literature elective we spent a semester reading the interwar literature of neighbouring countries — so that we wouldn’t reduce them to slurs, but would see what their problems were, how they wrote about them, and that in the end they struggled with much the same as we did.
Perseverance — in independent thinking and in everything else — showed itself also in the cycling and sailing trips (so common among the Piarists), where he would ride ahead of us, urging us to perform. We sometimes tried his heavy Csepel bicycle; we could barely pedal it. Once we received world passports, he cycled to Rome with twenty boys, and returned with twenty others who had arrived by train. He rode that bicycle there and back — and in the evenings, still full of energy and joking, he led the pitching of tents and the lighting of the fire for tea.
Perseverance again. When I was drafted into the army as a pre-admitted university student, at the end of the first month I wrote to him, torn by the thought that according to the laws of the time, no more than five sons per family had to serve — and we were six. I could have requested exemption, or at least transfer from the border to somewhere closer to home. The only thing holding me back was that during the harsh months of basic training, a few of us had supported each other throughout; I didn’t want to abandon them, as we had become important to one another. He replied briefly: I could choose the easier path, but if I had the strength to choose the harder one, I should do so — it would pay off one day. It did.
From such a remembrance, the reader expects the description of a happy relationship — a doubled hagiography of the sort often told about Jelenits and Péter Esterházy. But I cannot offer that. Despite all his attentiveness and quiet, cunning cheerfulness, Jelenits drew his inner boundaries very firmly; emotionally he was extremely reserved. Many of us were in love with him — and only because of the Church’s present unfortunate circumstances do I feel compelled to stress what should be obvious to any normal person: this is a metaphor — but that love was unrequited. I don’t know whether he could love at all, whether there was any student who could say Jelenits loved him. If we went to him with our problems — the usual adolescent soul-searching — he would offer a few new perspectives, but imply that ultimately we had to solve them ourselves, and then usher us out of the room.
He did not emote, did not share emotionally, did not give of himself. For many of us — I know of others too — this was a deep disappointment.
But perhaps it was more honest for him that way. Analysing János Pilinszky’s Fable — “Once there lived a lonely wolf. Lonelier than the angels.” — he asked why, in Pilinszky’s view, angels are lonely. When no one knew, he quoted Jesus: “After the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels.” However beautiful it may be to be an angel — or a monk — it comes with a consciously embraced solitude, a refusal of emotional attachment. It seems he practised that with the same perseverance as everything else.
From roughly the end of university, I had no more contact with him. What I could receive from him, I received; what I could not, I let go. Nearly forty years have passed, and yet he lives on in every note of mine that does not go astray, in every conjunction I do not misuse — and in the way my hand, guided by his, follows my thoughts and writes down what is worth writing.
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