Recommendation

Thoughts of Literary Historian Miklós Csűrös

about Kodolányi’s I AM

 “Kodolányi places at the focus of the plot the connection between Yeshuah and Yehudah, but from the viewpoint not of the betrayed ‘Son of God’ but of the traitor.

Why and how could Yehudah have committed the sin which has for ever been linked to his name in the unforgiving consciousness of mankind? Kodolányi traces the course of events from what seems a fatal flaw of character, a misconception regarding the national interests and an appreciation of the situation influenced by what might today be called ‘misinformation’.

He analyses in the most minute detail the process leading through the alienation of Yehudah – who had joined Yeshuah with the best of intentions – through his suspicion, his instinctive, later considered, antagonism and his suppressed indignation to the germination, development and realization of the idea of denunciation, followed by the traitor’s remorse and its tragic climax in his suicide.

The hero of the novel is a strange, negative criminal: he cannot be condemned for infringement of the law but for the precise opposite – slavish adherence to regulations, gambling away the pulsing reality of life, and cowardly forfeiting of the true, concrete chances of redemption.

And so he betrays Yeshuah for the sake of ephemeral social forms, fearing for fossilized traditions and misconstruing with lamentable persistence values which are genuine.”