Susan Faludi’s Temná komora, the Czech edition of her internationally acclaimed book In the Darkroom, is one of those rare memoirs that slips between the borders of genre and identity just as easily as its subject slips between genders and nationalities. It begins, almost cinematically, with a moment of remembrance and forgetting, a scene in the Hungarian National Museum where Faludi and her father, a Jewish-born Hungarian photographer turned American patriarch turned elderly trans woman, wander among curated evasions of history. Hungary’s right-wing government had proclaimed a year of Holocaust remembrance, yet the exhibition they encounter seems more intent on erasing guilt than confronting it. In that basement, surrounded by the portraits of survivors, Faludi’s father explodes with fury, denouncing Hungary’s complicity in the murder of its Jews. It is a moment both political and personal, as if decades of repression, denial, and disguise had suddenly cracked open.
But to understand why this moment is so devastating, you have to know the strange, haunting story that Temná komora tells. In 2004, Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning feminist journalist, received an email from her estranged father after nearly three decades of silence. The subject line read simply “Changes.” Attached were photographs of a tall, elderly woman in Vienna and Bangkok, her father, now calling herself Stefánie, newly transitioned after gender confirmation surgery in Thailand. “I’ve had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man,” the email said. “Love from your parent, Stefánie.” For Faludi, who had grown up under the shadow of a violent, controlling man, this announcement was not just startling; it shattered everything she thought she knew about her past. The book that followed is her attempt to make sense of that shock, to understand identity not as a declaration, but as an ongoing negotiation between memory, disguise, and survival.
When Susan travels to Budapest to see her father, the encounter is both comical and painful. Stefánie, who insists that she has “developed another personality” since the surgery, greets her daughter in floral housecoats and sundresses, seeking approval, while at the same time demanding to be the center of attention. She revels in the courtesies of Hungarian waiters who kiss her hand and call her “Madam,” seeing in this gallantry not just gender validation but the restoration of old-world order. Yet beneath the surface charm, Faludi finds the same contradictions that haunted her father’s earlier life. As a Jew who survived wartime Budapest by pretending to be a fascist, Stefánie learned early that survival meant performance. The lesson stuck. To pass as non-Jewish in 1944, to pass as masculine in postwar America, to pass as feminine in twenty-first-century Budapest, each act of self-creation was also an act of concealment.
The brilliance of Temná komora lies in how it refuses to give easy answers. It is as much a history of twentieth-century Europe as it is a memoir. The Holocaust, the Cold War, and the rise of nationalist populism in Hungary are not mere backdrops but living forces shaping every conversation between father and daughter. Stefánie’s longing to belong, to be accepted as a woman, as a Hungarian, as anything other than a perpetual outsider, becomes a metaphor for the nation’s own evasions of guilt and truth. Faludi sees in her father’s personal transformations a mirror of the political transformations around them, each insisting on a narrative of purity while quietly burying the evidence of violence.
What makes the book emotionally devastating is the slow unpeeling of Faludi’s own guardedness. She begins as a reporter, arriving in Budapest with her tape recorder and a list of questions, but gradually she becomes a daughter again, bewildered by the persistence of love in the face of betrayal. Her memories of childhood, the running battles, the night her father broke into their house with a baseball bat and knife, crash against the image of the elderly woman offering her makeup advice and insisting that “we’re all women here.” The intimacy between them is awkward, painful, sometimes absurd, yet never wholly broken.
By the time Faludi writes about her father’s death in 2015, the story has expanded far beyond the personal. It becomes an inquiry into what it means to inhabit a self that history has repeatedly tried to erase. Faludi, who calls herself both a Jew and a woman but admits she rarely observes the rituals of either, realizes that identity, for her as for her father, is not a set of attributes but an act of resistance, a stubborn insistence on existing in a world that prefers its categories neat.
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