Jozef Cíger-Hronský, Seller of Talismans, trans. John J. Kester (Scotch Plains, NJ: privately published by Kester, 1978 [1947]), 68 pp.
Ages ago, in the second entry for this Slovak Novels in English project, I reviewed Cíger-Hronský’s Jozef Mak, a tale from the perspective of a Slovak peasant perplexed by the forces around him. It has taken me all this time to track down the one other of his approximately ten Slovak novels that has been translated into English, Seller of Talismans. Now that I have it in hand I know why.
The issue is not the quality of the writing but of the publication. It does have an ISBN—I’ll give it that (0960208402 if you’re interested). Otherwise it appears to be a product of “self-publishing” back in the days when that meant you probably couldn’t talk anyone else into doing it for love or money. As a result, only six copies of the book exist in libraries worldwide, and until about two months ago I never saw it for sale on any bookselling website. It was sheer luck that I looked for it again and found it for well under $10! Obviously rarity is a financial virtue only in certain kinds of books.
Click on the cover to order your copy of my memoir from Amazon!
In any event, it seems to have been translated and published for love, not money, anyway: John J. Kester, as the back cover tells us, was a pious Slovak-American Catholic who visited his parents’ home village of Nižná Šuňava whenever he could. In addition to the pious material of the story itself, Kester clearly admired Cíger-Hronský as a person and an artist—the book includes a short testimony from another Slovak poet, Karol Strmeň, and a biographical sketch by Jozef Paučo (whose own novel will feature in a future post!).
What Cíger-Hronský, Strmeň, and Paučo all had in common was exile. One after another they fled Slovakia in the 1940s, variously landing in Italy, America, and Argentina. I don’t know about Strmeň and Paučo, but the Slovak Wikipedia page on Cíger-Hronský includes an embarassing detail that the English page leaves out: Cíger-Hronský supported the clerical-fascist puppet regime of briefly “independent” Slovakia under Nazi control and opposed the Slovak National Uprising against said clerical-fascist regime. After the Uprising failed, apparently he even went so far as to show the Nazi occupiers where resistance fighters lived! Even if communism hadn’t come along three years after the end of the war, I rather doubt Cíger-Hronský would have found himself welcome in Slovakia much longer. Yikes.
Well, if good literature was written only by good people, the library shelves would be empty. Seller of Talismans is an odd little book, clearly pious and yet modest, discreet, and generous about its piety. Not in the plot but in the tone it reminds me of Kristína Royová’s novels and Margita Figuli’s Three Chestnut Horses. Maybe the long outcome of this project will be the discovery that Slovaks are undiscovered masters of subtle spiritual fiction.
This story is not set, however, in Slovakia, or even in a century when Slovaks could have existed. It’s set in Rome, at the Porta Collina, in 244 AD, the last year of the reign of Emperor Gordian. (No connection to the knot.) The title character is a fat merchant named Liberius Gaius who makes a living off religious statuettes and passes his time fretting about his annoyingly meek wife Faustina. Worse than a meek wife, though, is that all the luck has run out of his life—ever since he sold off one statuette in particular with a bloodstained face.
I bet you can figure out who that was supposed to represent.
Liberius eventually learns the truth about the luck-bearing statuette from Felician, a Greek whom Liberius suspects of really being a Jew, which in turn makes Liberius suspect his wife of being a Christian. Not only was she a devotee of the statuette during its sojourn in their home, but she seems to be supernaturally protected—even her two burly brothers Zenon and Cyprian aren’t enough to account for it. Which puts Liberius into such a frenzy that he attacks the almost unmoved Cyprian and does himself serious physical damage in the process. Faustina tenderly nurses him back to health, and Liberius becomes convinced that she is in fact a most superior being.
But then—when he finally confronts her with the accusation—she assures him that she is not a Christian because she is not worthy to be counted among them. Liberius is so appalled that anyone, human or divine, would think so little of Faustina, that one day after his recovery he passes the niche where the bloodstained statuette used to reside, has a vision of it, and utters his first prayer to this God. It’s a strange prayer indeed: first, a confession of faith that this God must truly be the greatest of all if the people who worship Him are better even than Faustina, but, second, to recognize her goodness and humility all the same and therefore bless Liberius with a good income from the talisman-selling business so Faustina won’t starve.
Time skips ahead to the final act, where it appears that Liberius has actually given up the business of selling idols and now sells scabbards hand-carved from wood by his big brute brothers-in-law… except that, when no one’s looking, Liberius etches a little cross into each of them. Too tiny to be noticed, but big enough to convey a blessing all the same. But fortune or providence has one last reversal in mind: five years later, Emperor Decius comes to power and sponsors a persecution of Christians who will not offer the imperial sacrifices, and Liberius—former promoter of pagan gods—refuses. He goes to prison but even when he returns he refuses baptism, because Faustina still won’t be baptized either, and he doesn’t dare assert himself worthier than she.
That’s where the story ends.
Not exactly your rousing altar call. Still, as a meditation on humility and courage, it’s curiously affecting. It may be a distinctly twentieth-century kind of work, reflecting the rise of totalitarianisms not seen in ages and the subtle compromises and heroisms, outside of the limelight, to which they give birth. And perhaps it reflects the uneasy conscience of an author who not long before the time of writing supported a reigning religious terror.