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László Krasznahorkai, whose family hid Jewish roots during Holocaust, wins literature Nobel
For decades, Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has written sentences that seem to stretch to the end of time — long, feverish, unpunctuated meditations on chaos, faith, and collapse. Now, the writer once dubbed “the contemporary master of apocalypse” has received the world’s highest literary honor. On Thursday, the Swedish Academy awarded Krasznahorkai, 71, the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born in 1954 in the small Hungarian town of Gyula to a Jewish family that survived the Holocaust and concealed its identity, Krasznahorkai has spent decades chronicling moral disintegration and spiritual endurance.
If you don’t read Hungarian, you might know Krasznahorkai through film: his longtime collaborator Béla Tarr turned several of his novels into movies — Sátántangó (a seven-hour black-and-white epic), Werckmeister Harmonies, and The Turin Horse — all staples of international art-house cinema.
Who is László Krasznahorkai?
A cult figure in world literature, Krasznahorkai is known for sprawling, hypnotic prose and bleak humor. He first drew attention in 1985 with Sátántangó, a novel about life in a decaying Hungarian village.
He has since written a series of darkly comic epics, including The Melancholy of Resistance and Seiobo There Below — each circling questions of despair and transcendence.
Some of his later novels, including Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming and Herscht 07769, feature neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists. The latter contains only a single period in 400 pages. The rest is one relentless cascade of clauses — a symbol of his determination to hold chaos together by grammar alone.
He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015.
How does his Jewish background fit into his work?
Krasznahorkai rarely writes explicitly about Judaism, but the sense of exile, concealment, and moral reckoning runs through his fiction. As antisemitism intensified in the 1930s, his grandfather changed the family name to the more Hungarian-sounding Krasznahorkai. “Our original name was Korin, a Jewish name. With this name, he would never have survived,” the writer told an interviewer in 2018. “My grandfather was very wise.”
Decades later, Krasznahorkai gave the name Korin to the doomed archivist who narrates his 1999 novel War and War — turning family history into fiction. Krasznahorkai didn’t learn about his Jewish ancestry until he was 11, when his father finally told him. “In the socialist era, it was forbidden to mention it,” he recalled.
That buried history gives his novels their haunted tone. In a way, his work continues a Jewish literary tradition: bearing witness in extremity, searching for meaning in ruin.
In that 2018 interview, Krasznahorkai described himself as “half Jewish,” then added darkly: “If things carry on in Hungary as they seem likely to do, I’ll soon be entirely Jewish.”
Do Jews disproportionally win Nobels?
Jews make up about 0.2 percent of the world’s population but have received roughly 20 percent of Nobel Prizes across all categories — a record that spans science, peace, and the arts. That lineage stretches from Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Richard Feynman in physics to Rita Levi-Montalcini and Gertrude Elion in medicine, Milton Friedman and Daniel Kahneman in economics, and Henry Kissinger and Elie Wiesel in peace.
Krasznahorkai now joins that global pantheon — one that also includes Isaac Bashevis Singer, a longtime Forward staff writer, whose Yiddish storytelling won him the 1978 Nobel in Literature.
Who are some other Jewish Nobel laureates in literature?
Louise Glück (2020): The American poet mined family grief and faith, blending autobiography and myth to confront the quiet devastations of ordinary life.
Bob Dylan (2016): The folk legend was honored “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” His Jewish heritage and biblical imagery made his win both celebrated and debated.
Imre Kertész (2002): A Holocaust survivor who was honored in 2002 for Fatelessness, a semi-autobiographical work about a boy in Nazi concentration camps.
Elias Canetti (1981): Born to a Sephardic family in Bulgaria and raised in Vienna, he spent much of his life in exile from fascism. His noted work of nonfiction, Crowds and Power, dissects how mobs become monsters — and how leaders learn to feed them.
Saul Bellow (1976): The Canadian-born American novelist who captured the restless intellect and moral hunger of postwar Jewish life. His novels, including Herzog and The Adventures of Augie March, turned immigrant striving and urban alienation into high art.
JTA contributed to this report.
The post László Krasznahorkai, whose family hid Jewish roots during Holocaust, wins literature Nobel appeared first on The Forward.
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Herzog Says Wellbeing of Israelis His Only Concern in Deal With Netanyahu’s ‘Extraordinary’ Pardon Request
Israeli President Isaac Herzog speaks during a press conference with Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics in Riga, Latvia, Aug. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ints Kalnins
i24 News – In an interview with Politico published on Saturday, Israeli President Isaac Herzog remained tight-lipped on whether he intended to grant Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “extraordinary” pardon request, saying that his decision will be motivated by what’s best for Israel.
“There is a process which goes through the Justice Ministry and my legal adviser and so on. This is certainly an extraordinary request and above all when dealing with it I will consider what is the best interest of the Israeli people,” Herzog said. “The well-being of the Israeli people is my first, second and third priority.”
Asked specifically about President Donald Trump’s request, Herzog said “I respect President Trump’s friendship and his opinion,” adding, “Israel, naturally, is a sovereign country.”
Herzog addressed a wide range of topics in the interview, including the US-Israel ties and the shifts in public opinion on Israel.
“One has to remember that the fountains of America, of American life, are based on biblical values, just like ours. And therefore, I believe that the underlying fountain that we all drink from is the same,” he said. “However, I am following very closely the trends that I see in the American public eye and the attitude, especially of young people, on Israel.”
“It comes from TikTok,” he said of the torrent of hostility toward Israel that has engulf swathes of U.S. opinion since the October 7 massacre and the subsequent Gaza war, “from a very shallow discourse of the current situation, pictures or viewpoints, and doesn’t judge from the big picture, which is, is Israel a strategic ally? Yes. Is Israel contributing to American national interests, security interests? Absolutely yes. Is Israel a beacon of democracy in the Middle East? Absolutely yes.”
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Syria’s Sharaa Charges Israel ‘Exports Its Crises to Other Countries’
FILE PHOTO: Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa addresses the 80th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S., September 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo
i24 News – Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa on Saturday escalated his messaging against Israel at the Doha forum.
“Israel is working to export its own crises to other countries and escape accountability for the massacres it committed in the Gaza Strip, justifying everything with security concerns,” he said.
“Meanwhile, Syria, since its liberation, has sent positive messages aimed at establishing the foundations of regional stability.
“Israel has responded to Syria with extreme violence, launching over 1,000 airstrikes and carrying out 400 incursions into its territory. The latest of these attacks was the massacre it perpetrated in the town of Beit Jinn in the Damascus countryside, which claimed dozens of lives.
“We are working with influential countries worldwide to pressure Israel to withdraw from the territories it occupied after December 8, 2014, and all countries support this demand.
“Syria insists on Israel’s adherence to the 1974 Disengagement Agreement. The demand for a demilitarized zone raises many questions. Who will protect this zone if there is no Syrian army presence?
“Any agreement must guarantee Syria’s interests, as it is Syria that is subjected to Israeli attacks. So, who should be demanding a buffer zone and withdrawal?”
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Turkey’s Fidan: Gaza Governance Must Precede Hamas Disarmament in Ceasefire Deal
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan attends a press conference following a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, May 27, 2025. Photo: Pavel Bednyakov/Pool via REUTERS
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told Reuters on Saturday that not advancing the US-backed Gaza ceasefire plan to its next stage would be a “huge failure” for the world and Washington, noting that President Donald Trump had personally led the push.
In an interview on the sidelines of the Doha Forum, Fidan said a credible Palestinian civil administration and a vetted, trained police force needed to be in place to allow Hamas to disarm, and that the group was prepared to hand over control of the enclave.
“First of all, we need to see that the Palestinian committee of technical people are taking over the administration of Gaza, then we need to see that the police force is being formed to police Gaza – again, by the Palestinians, not Hamas.”
NATO member Turkey has been one of the most vocal critics of Israel’s assault on Gaza. It played a key role in brokering the ceasefire deal, signing the agreement as a guarantor. It has repeatedly expressed its willingness to join efforts to monitor the accord’s implementation, a move Israel strongly opposes.
Talks to advance the next phase of President Trump’s plan to end the two-year conflict in Gaza are continuing.
The plan envisages an interim technocratic Palestinian administration in the enclave, overseen by an international “board of peace” and supported by a multinational security force. Negotiations over the composition and mandate of that force have proven particularly difficult.
Fidan said the Gaza police force would be backed by the international stabilisation force. He added that Washington was pressing Israel over Turkey’s bid to join the force, to which it has voiced readiness to deploy troops if needed.
FIDAN SAYS KURDISH SDF IN SYRIA NOT WILLING TO INTEGRATE
Asked about a landmark deal in March in which the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and Damascus agreed that the SDF would be integrated into Syria’s state structures, Fidan said signals from the SDF showed it had “no intention” of honouring the accord, and was instead seeking to sidestep it.
Ankara, which considers the SDF a terrorist organisation, has threatened military action if it does not comply, setting a deadline of the end of the year.
“I think they (SDF) should understand that the command and control should come from one place,” Fidan added. “There can be no two armies in any given country. So there can only be one army, one command structure … But in local administration, they can reach a different settlement and different understandings.”
Almost a year after the fall of president Bashar al-Assad, Fidan said some issues of minority rights were unresolved, insisting that Turkey’s backing of the new Syrian government was not a “blank cheque” to oppress any groups.
He said Damascus was taking steps toward national unity, but that Israeli “destabilisation policies” were the chief obstacle.
Israel has frequently struck southwestern Syria this year, citing threats from militant groups and the need to protect the Druze community near the frontier. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday he expected Syria to establish a demilitarised buffer zone from Damascus to the border.
TURKEY: U.S. COULD REMOVE SANCTIONS ‘VERY SOON’
Fidan also said Washington’s initial 28-point plan to end the Russia-Ukraine war was just a “starting point,” and that it was now evolving in a new format. He said mediation by US officials was “on the right path.”
“I just hope that nobody leaves the table and the Americans are not frustrated, because sometimes the mediators can be frustrated if they don’t see enough encouragement from both sides.”
Asked about efforts to lift US sanctions imposed in 2020 over Ankara’s purchase of Russian S-400 air defense systems, he said both sides were working on it, adding: “I believe we’ll soon find a way to remove that obstacle.”