You Cannot Forbid the Flower, by Elizabeth Lukács Chesla

A novel by Elizabeth Lukács Chesla, reviewed by Benjamin Selesnick
YOU CANNOT FORBID THE FLOWER (Tolsun Books)

Elizabeth Lukács Chesla’s hybrid auto-fiction novel, You Cannot Forbid the Flower, includes three different voices, each looking through the same historical period: in Hungary, from the decades leading up to World War II up through the communist occupation in the decade afterward that led to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The narrator is a daughter born to parents who each experienced the revolution and immigrated to the United States soon after. Her parents ‘voices come through, too: the father who experienced the revolution in his late teens and early twenties and the mother who experienced it during her infancy. The dominant voice is that of the narrator craving to know her father’s experience and seeking to find a way to relate to him since they’ve drifted apart through the course of her life. Her father, who was psychically wounded by the revolution but still wishes to maintain his Hungarian identity following his immigration, has a strong voice of his own in the work.

Chesla’s approach to the historical novel is wholly unique and one of the greatest aspects of this novel: throughout the seventy-eight vignettes that make up this slim book, the narrator’s father takes on alternate identities and experiences. In the second section of the book, titled, in which my father dies many tragic deaths, any of which might have happened, her father indeed dies many tragic deaths. Rather than recount her father’s exact experience during the turbulent two weeks in October and November of 1956 when the revolution occurred—his experience is largely unknown to the narrator, which is felt throughout as a loss to her—the narrator imagines her father into others’ experiences. The vignette titles say it all: My Father Dies In His Mother’s Arms (99), My Father Dies In A Game of Charades (88), My Father Dies Like a Fish In A Barrel (116). The list goes on. The vignettes manage to keep the intimacy and the emotional weight of the protagonist despite the fractured imaginings. The various scenarios all point back to one central fact: her father could have easily been killed. She and the book might not have existed at all.

This seems like a primary message in the book, too: that her father, although unique to her, did not have a unique experience during these awful decades in Hungary’s history. He faced poverty, lost his family, had to move to the city in the days after the city’s bombing in search of employment, and lived in an abandoned building as he saved up money. He also fell in love, searched for his love, and failed to find his love. In following his experience—before and after he dies many deaths—the reader gets a clear picture of the devastation and deprivation the occupying forces inflicted upon Hungarians, and the strength and persistence it took for them to survive.

In addition to the inventive approach to the historical novel, Chesla employs many different, interesting forms and rhetorical devices on the vignette level. Some of the vignettes are poems, others are seemingly verbatim replications of historical documents, and others, like the series of vignettes titled Facts About [XXX], Presented in the Style of a Harper’s Index and A Brief History of [XXX], appear almost wry and tongue-in-cheek in their delivery—yet, these vignettes, perhaps intentionally, always felt like those that contained the darkest, most heartbreaking content, as in Facts About Hungary’s Great Terror, 1950-1953, Presented in the Style of a Harper’s Index where the narrator lists the number of Hungarians prosecuted, jailed, and executed during those years. The variation in style gives these many vignettes a strong sense of identity and keeps the reading experience varied and lively; however, at times, a few of the vignettes stray slightly and feel more like a history lesson than something fitting for a novel

You Cannot Forbid the Flower also does an excellent job framing the narrator’s father’s quest through and out of Hungary. We know how the story ends. The introduction tells us: the father ends divorced from the narrator’s mother, alienated from the narrator and her sibling, friendless aside from one relationship with a woman who he’s not convinced he loved, and a harboring a penchant for violence and impulsivity that comes to life in the early vignette, Three Memories I have of My Father with a Gun, in Reverse Chronological Order.

1. My father chasing my mother out of the house. She threatened to leave after he punched another hole in the wall; he threatened to get his gun. She holds my little sister, hurries my brother and me out of the front door. I am six and terrified. Does he point the gun at her, at us? I only remember the running, in our pajamas, into the car, into the night.

Knowing how his life ended up, and that this is how his daughter has come to know him, there’s a blend of frustration and empathy that is carried through learning of his journey through Hungary. There’s the anger and hurt felt on behalf of the narrator’s father and the Hungarian people, but also on behalf of the narrator, who the reader knows will be deeply impacted by this violence decades before her birth.

It also—the violence, the escape from Hungary—creates a divide between the narrator’s father and her mother: how closely should they hold onto their Hungarian identity, and how much of that identity and history should they pass down to their children, given how painful it had been to live in Hungary? The narrator informs the reader that her father wanted to have a “Hungarian family” and that her mother wanted to forget Hungarian culture; she didn’t teach her children the language intentionally, something the narrator wishes she had done. In this conflict, Chesla artfully describes, for those who’ve escaped terror, what seems like an impossible decision: to identify with that terror or not? How to find the good, the identity-enriching, and let go of the bad? Intergenerational trauma, although not a central subject in the telling of the novel, runs deeply throughout the work.

You Cannot Forbid the Flower is a quick, engaging read. Those with an interest in Hungarian history or with seeing the boundaries of the historical novel get pushed will greatly enjoy it, as this reader did.

Benjamin Selesnick is a psychotherapist in New Jersey. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Barely South Review, Lunch Ticket, The Tel Aviv Review of Books, and other publications. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Rutgers University-Newark.