En el cuarto oscuro is one of those rare books that unravels the messy fabric of identity while making you feel the full emotional weight of what it means to be both someone’s child and someone’s witness. Susan Faludi begins with an email from her estranged father that detonates like a quiet bomb in her inbox. “Dear Susan,” it starts, “I’ve got some interesting news for you. I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.” What follows is a cascade of images that seem to belong to two different lifetimes: snapshots of a seventy-six-year-old parent in a red skirt after gender-affirming surgery, a wigged figure in a Vienna garden posing as “Stefánie.” The message is signed, “Love from your parent, Stefánie.” And with that, Faludi’s life-long investigation of gender, family, and truth begins again, this time through a lens that blurs everything she thought she knew.
Faludi’s relationship with her father had long been fractured by violence and fear. Growing up in suburban New York, she remembers a household dominated by her father’s iron will: what they ate, where they went, even what they wore was decided by him. As a teenager, she knew him as an angry, volatile man, a photographer who controlled not just the lighting of his studio but the emotional weather of the family. Then came the rupture, her father’s violent attack on her mother’s boyfriend, the police intervention, and decades of silence. When Stefánie reappears, newly reborn, Faludi boards a plane to Hungary, both journalist and daughter, recorder in hand, to meet the person her father has become.
The Hungary she lands in is not only the landscape of her father’s reinvention but also the buried terrain of his past. Once István Friedman, born into a wealthy Jewish family in Budapest, he had survived the Nazi occupation by masquerading as a fascist, rescuing his parents from near-certain death through sheer audacity and performance. It’s one of the strange ironies that runs through the book: his survival, and later his gender transformation, both hinge on an almost theatrical mastery of disguise. “If you believe you are whoever you pretend to be,” he tells Susan, “you’re halfway saved.” The question that haunts the daughter, and, by extension, the reader, is whether any of it was pretense, or if the performance itself became the truth.
As Faludi follows Stefánie through Budapest’s streets, museums, and dinner tables, the personal becomes inseparable from the political. Hungary’s nationalist denial of its complicity in the Holocaust mirrors Stefánie’s own selective amnesia about her violent past. Faludi captures this with devastating clarity during their visit to the Hungarian National Museum, where the country’s role in the extermination of its Jews is largely erased from the exhibits. Only in the basement, literally underground, do they find an exhibit acknowledging the survivors. There, standing before the photographs, Stefánie finally breaks through her habitual detachment, denouncing Hungary’s hypocrisy with a fury that surprises them both. It’s one of the book’s most human moments, when self-deception gives way, however briefly, to truth.
Throughout the narrative, Faludi keeps returning to the tangled question of identity. What does it mean to be a woman, a Jew, a survivor, a parent? She confesses to her own uncertainties: a feminist who never felt fully traditional in her femininity, a Jew who grew up disconnected from religious ritual, a daughter who cannot reconcile the father who hurt her with the woman who wants her love. Her father’s transformation forces her to confront her own fluidity. Identity, Faludi comes to suggest, is not a fixed state but a shifting negotiation between how we see ourselves and how others see us.The book is filled with vivid, sometimes absurd, often heartbreaking scenes. There is the moment when Stefánie proudly shows Susan the video of her own surgery, complete with Thai pop music. There are awkward family meals where pronouns falter and patience thins. And there is the disco night in Budapest, where father and daughter, estranged for decades, finally dance together under flashing lights. It is the book’s most unexpected grace note: two people who have lived inside so many masks, finding fleeting harmony in movement, laughter, and music. It’s not reconciliation, exactly, but it’s something close to forgiveness.
Stefánie Faludi died in 2015, at eighty-seven, in Budapest. By then, her daughter’s understanding of her had deepened from suspicion to compassion, even if not all wounds had healed. In writing En el cuarto oscuro, Susan Faludi transforms her private reckoning into something larger, a meditation on how we construct ourselves, how history reshapes us, and how love can coexist with bewilderment. The book is a memoir, a biography, a cultural study, and an act of mourning all at once. It invites us to look into our own darkrooms, where identity develops not in perfect light but in shadow and contradiction.
Available via libreriaberkana
and theguardian.com and theguardian.com
Photos by Russ Rymer via theguardian.com
and Sigrid Estrada via Facebook
Post a Comment