The Case Worker

When Hungarian writer George Konrád, his sister and his parents returned to their hometown of Berettyóújfalu in 1945 they were the only Jewish family to have survived the war intact. Their troubles were not over, however, as his father’s business was soon appropriated by the new Communist government. Despite this, Konrád chose to remain in Hungary in 1956 and eventually, after various short-term jobs, worked for seven years as a social worker focusing on children’s welfare from 1959. Ten years later his first novel, The Case Worker, was published, drawing heavily on these experiences. It was translated into English in 1974 by Paul Aston as part of Philip Roth’s Writers from the Other Europe series, and, though this is not the only edition, it has been out of print for decades.

This might be partly explained by the fact that it is one of the most depressing novels you are likely to encounter. Narrated by a case (or social) worker who is tasked with aiding the dregs of society, and who himself undergoes a crisis in the course of the novel, it observes the very worst of humanity and offers little, if anything, in the way of hope or redemption. As Irving Howe explains in his introduction, where other writers have included characters from this underclass:

“Konrád was perhaps the first to place them in a distinctive contemporary setting as the ‘clients’ of a social welfare system that is overwhelmed by their needs and clamour, and proceeds to slot them into categories, hospitals, files and clinics, attempting through society’s benevolence or callousness to cope with the gratuitous cruelties of nature.”

In such circumstances a case worker cannot help but harden their heart as Konrád makes clear in the opening paragraph:

“He thinks his situation is desperate; seems perfectly normal to me. He swears his cross is too heavy; seems quite bearable to me. He hints at suicide; I let it pass. He thinks I can save him; I can’t tell him how wrong he is.”

The narrator describes his job as being like “swallowing fistful of mud; I can neither digest it or vomit it up.” The novel opens with a series of ‘cases’, the overwhelming nature of his task emphasised by the frequent use of lists. In one example, he imagines what sounds might originate from a filing cabinet containing all his cases:

“Children’s cries, woman’s moans, resounding blows, quarrels, obscenities, recriminations, interrogations, hasty decisions, false testimony, administrative platitudes, jovial police slang, judges’ verdicts, the vapid chatter of female supervisors, the incantations of psychologists, my colleagues’ embittered humour, my own solitary invective, and so on and so on.”

We are soon introduced to the particular case at the heart of the novel, the Bandulas, who have committed suicide by poison. The narrator already knows the couple, and we learn that they lost their daughter during the war, and that afterwards their house was nationalised (as happened to Konrád’s family) and tenants moved into some of the rooms. Bandula is denounced by one of the tenants for hording jewellery and imprisoned, eventually returning home with “his mind unhinged” and taking to drink. They have another child, a boy, Feri, but he is born both physically and mentally disabled. The narrator first sees him while his parents are still alive:

“Feri was stamping about in his crib on an excrement-stained nylon sheet strewn with apple cores, cabbage stalks, carrot ends, a bare rib of mutton, and various unidentifiable scraps of meat. It was the same carpet of miscellaneous garbage as in the monkey house at the zoo.”

The narrator is tasked with taking the child to an institution where he will “disappear through the trap door leading to the repository for infantile rubbish…” He describes in detail the journey and the institution itself up to the point he waves a “token farewell” but we find him waking the next morning in the Bandula’s room with Feri “asleep in his ramshackle bed.” His decision is instinctive rather than rational; “it is not duty that keeps me here,” he says but, even though he knows he can walk away at any moment, “this chid has undeniably become my lot.”

Konrád frequently uses war imagery to describe the situation the narrator finds himself in. The room is “a house abandoned the previous night by drunken soldiers”; the cases he deals with are people who “live in a state of perpetual siege”; the case worker is a “neutral but armed observer.” Now it seems, he wants to experience the life of the observed, however artificial he knows this is. This highlights that, beneath the cynicism, the novel retains, if not hope, at least some faint belief in humanity. Ultimately, The Case Worker is a cry of rage rather than despair at the suffering that surrounds us and the state’s ineffectual attempts to relive it, a lesson that goes beyond any particular time or place.