ABSTRACT
Hungarian Jewish poet Miklós Radnóti, a reluctant exile, was shot and killed by his Hungarian “brethren” during an enforced death march from a slave labor camp in Yugoslavia back “home” to his beloved Hungary. Examining a handful of the poems that Radnóti penned whilst enduring this journey into a hellish abyss, this essay unpacks the impossible tension they embrace between the poet’s sense of Jewish heritage and his desperate longing to gain admittance into the pantheon of Hungarian poets.
