The Newest Witness

Dunajská Streda, 1999. The photographer Júlia Fodor comes home and finds an envelope waiting on a bench beside the church. Inside is a print that cannot exist: the residents of a street cleared by machines in 1971, standing in their good coats before the Cyrus building on Vámbéryho námestie, which was not built until this decade. She has seven Wednesdays before a commemorative book fixes a beautiful and false version of her town in nineteen hundred kitchens. What she uncovers is thirty six household keys the state ordered destroyed, a housing officer who counted very slowly, a confession signed five days before the act it confesses to, and one uncropped negative proving that the photograph which made her name was never hers alone. Set on the Great Rye Island, the Csallóköz, and moving between the winter of the clearance and the last weeks of the century, The Newest Witness asks whether a town can recover its memory without inventing its past. It is a novel about captions, and about how a true sentence in the wrong place can erase a place twice. With eight photographs of the square and six facsimile plates, and an afterword separating documented history from invention.