Zsolt Béla

Zsolt Béla (1895 to 1949) was a Hungarian writer, poet, and journalist, and a distant kinsman of György Rauscher through the Milch family. Rauscher painted him in 1929, and the portrait is held at the Komáromi Klapka György Múzeum (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 19; catalogue no. 66).

Who he was

Zsolt was a sharp political journalist and a novelist and poet, active in the liberal press between the wars. He is remembered above all for Kilenc koffer (Nine Suitcases), his account of the persecution of Hungarian Jews, which stands among the major Hungarian works of Holocaust testimony. He survived the war and died in 1949.

The connection to Rauscher

The two men were related: Zsolt’s stepfather, Milch Bertalan, belonged to the same Komárom Milch family as Rauscher’s mother, Milch Emma (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 19). The kinship places the portrait within the cultivated-bourgeois circle that was one of Rauscher’s central subjects (see /biography/hungarian-years).

The portrait, painted in 1929, is held at the Komáromi Klapka György Múzeum and listed as catalogue no. 66 of the 1935 estate exhibition. The work record is at /works/zsolt-bela-1929.