Susan Faludi’s Nella camera oscura is a book that begins with a shock, one that feels like a letter from another dimension. “Dear Susan,” her father writes, “I’ve got some interesting news for you.” The “news” is that at seventy-six, the father she had long feared and barely known has undergone gender-affirming surgery and now lives as a woman named Stefánie. Attached to the email are photos: a tired figure in a red skirt and sleeveless chemise, another in a Vienna garden wearing a wig and ruffled blouse. Signed, “Love from your parent, Stefánie.” With those few words, a relationship that had already been ruptured by violence and silence transforms into something even more ungraspable. The father who once ruled their home like a small dictatorship reemerges decades later, reborn yet still shrouded in secrecy.
Faludi, the Pulitzer Prize-winning feminist journalist, doesn’t treat this revelation as mere family drama. She does what she has always done: she investigates. Armed with her notebooks and recorder, she flies to Hungary to meet this new version of her father, a parent she both dreads and feels compelled to understand. What she finds is not the clarity of a happy reunion but the haze of a mystery: who was this person, really? How could the same individual who once terrorized his family also live a life of constant masquerade, now claiming womanhood as both truth and salvation?
The Budapest she arrives in feels thick with ghosts, of family, of history, of memory gone missing. Faludi’s father, born István Friedman, grew up Jewish in a wealthy prewar household, the child of privilege who later survived Nazi occupation through disguise and deception. After the war, he changed his name to Faludi, then to Steven after immigrating to America. Reinvention was, for him, a survival tactic, and Nella camera oscura becomes the story of how a lifetime of performing identities culminated in the most radical transformation of all. Yet it is not just the story of one person’s gender transition; it is also an inquiry into the fragile, shifting boundaries of identity itself, religious, national, sexual, familial.
The book weaves this personal reckoning with a deeper political one. As Faludi learns more about her father’s past, she confronts Hungary’s troubled history of denial, the country’s unwillingness to fully acknowledge its role in the Holocaust, its resurgent nationalism, its casual antisemitism. Stefánie, oddly enough, seems to share this blindness. Despite having lived through the Nazi occupation and lost countless relatives, she insists that “it’s not a problem” when black-shirted extremists parade through Budapest’s squares. Faludi is horrified by this self-erasure: how can someone who has lived as both persecuted Jew and marginalized woman still cling to the fantasy of national purity? The answer lies, perhaps, in the psychology of survival. To endure, her father has always needed to blend in, to pass, to “get away with it,” as she puts it. Passing becomes both defense and addiction, a lifelong rehearsal of new selves.
What makes Nella camera oscura extraordinary is Faludi’s refusal to simplify any of this. She resists sentimental narratives of transformation and instead explores identity as a series of mirrors reflecting fragments of truth. Her father’s life, Jewish boy, fascist impersonator, American patriarch, Hungarian exile, transgender woman, is a kaleidoscope of masks. Faludi studies each one not to expose a single authentic core but to reveal how authenticity itself is constructed, how it shifts under pressure. The camera obscura of the title is both literal and metaphorical: a darkened room in which an image is projected, reversed and distorted, until it becomes visible. Her father’s gender, her Jewishness, Hungary’s history, even the idea of family, all emerge as ghostly projections inside this chamber of refracted light.
There are moments of dark humor and even absurd beauty. Faludi’s father, now living in a bunker-like home surrounded by alarms, watches a video of her own surgery as if screening a favorite movie. She drags her daughter to a transgender disco in an abandoned factory, then complains that no one is dancing. Later, as Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” blares, mother and daughter finally dance together, an awkward, unexpected reconciliation through movement. For the first time, the old battle of control gives way to a fragile rhythm of shared humanity. It is as close to peace as the two will come.
Faludi’s prose moves between irony and compassion, her journalist’s precision softening into something elegiac. She never excuses her father’s cruelty, but she also refuses to deny the complexity of her transformation. The book’s emotional center lies in that contradiction: the idea that one can cause great harm and still long for redemption, that reinvention may be both cowardice and courage at once. “If you believe you are whoever you pretend to be,” her father once said, “you’re halfway saved.” It is a chilling line, but also an insight into the human need to survive through illusion.When Faludi and her father visit the Hungarian National Museum, the irony becomes unbearable. In a country still hiding its complicity in genocide, they stumble upon a small basement room labeled “Survivors.” On the walls are portraits of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Standing before a photograph of a Jewish family now thriving in Israel, Stefánie finally breaks her silence, railing against her country’s hypocrisy. “Let the people in Hungary look at them!” she cries. “They were your neighbours. Your friends. And you let them die!” In that moment, something cracks open. The performance drops, and the survivor speaks. Yet even her rage is bittersweet, for as she soon notes with grim wit, the exhibit is kept in the cellar. “Thank you for putting the Jews in the cellar,” she mutters, half-laughing, half-mourning.
Faludi’s portrait of her father’s final years is unsparing but tender. In old age, Stefánie enjoys small victories, flirting with waiters, receiving the Hungarian greeting reserved for women, “Kezét csókolom.” When asked if it was harder to be accepted as a woman or as a Jew, she answers without hesitation: “As a woman. Because I am a woman. My birth certificate says so.” It is both a declaration and a defense, a bureaucratic form of faith. Faludi understands the pathos in this answer. Her father has spent a lifetime chasing legitimacy, whether in gender, nationality, or history. Paperwork becomes proof of existence, a fragile shield against erasure.
Stefánie Faludi died in Budapest in 2015, aged eighty-seven. Her daughter’s book is not just an obituary but an x-ray of identity itself. It shows how personal history and collective history intertwine, how the lies we tell about ourselves echo the lies nations tell about their past. In the end, Nella camera oscura is not about transgender experience alone, nor about Jewish memory alone, but about the universal human hunger to be seen and believed. It asks what happens when the people closest to us become unrecognizable, and whether love can survive the shock of that recognition.
Faludi’s gaze is steady, her empathy hard-won. She neither condemns nor sanctifies. She looks into the darkroom where her father lived, a place of projection, secrecy, and artifice, and turns on the light, not to destroy the illusion, but to understand it. The result is a haunting masterpiece, a story of transformation that is also a meditation on truth, memory, and forgiveness. In the flicker of that dim light, we see both of them, father and daughter, circling each other on a dance floor, finding at last a rhythm that feels almost like grace.
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Photos by Russ Rymer via theguardian.com
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