Author: Jessica Keener
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616204974
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
“Jessica Keener has written a gorgeous, lyrical, and sweeping novel about the tangled web of past and present. Suspenseful, perceptive, fast-paced, and ultimately restorative.” —Susan Henderson, author of Up from the Blue Budapest: gorgeous city of secrets, with ties to a shadowy, bloody past. It is to this enigmatic European capital that a young American couple, Annie and Will, move from Boston with their infant son shortly after the fall of the Communist regime. For Annie, it is an effort to escape the ghosts that haunt her past, and Will wants simply to seize the chance to build a new future for his family. Eight months after their move, their efforts to assimilate are thrown into turmoil when they receive a message from friends in the US asking that they check up on an elderly man, a fiercely independent Jewish American WWII veteran who helped free Hungarian Jews from a Nazi prison camp. They soon learn that the man, Edward Weiss, has come to Hungary to exact revenge on someone he is convinced seduced, married, and then murdered his daughter. Annie, unable to resist anyone’s call for help, recklessly joins in the old man’s plan to track down his former son-in-law and confront him, while Will, pragmatic and cautious by nature, insists they have nothing to do with Weiss and his vendetta. What Annie does not anticipate is that in helping Edward she will become enmeshed in a dark and deadly conflict that will end in tragedy and a stunning loss of innocence. Atmospheric and surprising, Strangers in Budapest is, as bestselling novelist Caroline Leavitt says, a “dazzlingly original tale about home, loss, and the persistence of love.”
Author: Janos Szekely
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374382
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 689
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Book Description
A Dickensian coming-of-age tale about poverty, sex, World War I, and the darker side of human nature as seen through the eyes of a lobby boy in a Budapest hotel. Temptation is a rediscovered masterwork of twentieth-century fiction, a Dickensian tale of a young man coming of age in Budapest between the wars. Illegitimate and unwanted, Béla is packed off to the country to be looked after by a peasant woman the moment he is born. She starves and bullies him, and keeps him out of school. He does his best to hold his own, and eventually his mother brings him back to live with her in the city. In thrall to his feckless father, Mishka, and living in a crowded tenement, she works her fingers to the bone, while Béla shares a room with a hardworking prostitute. Finally, Béla secures a job in a fancy hotel. Though exhausted by endless work, he is fascinated by the upper-crust world that his new job exposes him to; soon he is embroiled with a rich, damaged, and dangerous woman. The atmosphere of Budapest is increasingly poisoned by the appeal of fascism, while Béla grows ever more aware of how power and money keep down the working classes. In the end, with all the odds still against him, he musters the resolve to set sail for new future.
Author: John Lukacs
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802194214
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
A distinguished historian and Budapest native offers a rich and eloquent portrait of one of the great European cities at the height of its powers. Budapest, like Paris and Vienna, experienced a remarkable exfoliation at the end of the nineteenth century. In terms of population growth, material expansion, and cultural exuberance, it was among the foremost metropolitan centers of the world, the cradle of such talents as Bartók, Kodály, Krúdy, Ady, Molnár, Koestler, Szilárd, and von Neumann, among others. John Lukacs provides a cultural and historical portrait of the city—its sights, sounds, and inhabitants; the artistic and material culture; its class dynamics; the essential role played by its Jewish population—and a historical perspective that describes the ascendance of the city and its decline into the maelstrom of the twentieth century. Intimate and engaging, Budapest 1900 captures the glory of a city at the turn of the century, poised at the moment of its greatest achievements, yet already facing the demands of a new age. “Lukacs’s Budapest, like Hemingway’s Paris, is a moveable feast.” —Chilton Williamson “Lukacs’s book is a lyrical, sometimes dazzling, never merely nostalgic evocation of a glorious period in the city’s history.” —The New York Review of Books “A reliable account of a beautiful city at the zenith of its prosperity.” —Publishers Weekly
Author: Istv¾n De¾k
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803217164
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Istv¾n De¾k is one of the world's most knowledgeable and clearheaded authorities on the Second World War, and for decades his commentary has been among the most illuminating and influential contributions to the vast discourse on the politics, history, and scholarship of the period. Writing chiefly for the New York Review of Books and the New Republic, De¾k has crafted review essays that cover the breadth and depth of the huge literature on this ominous moment in European history when the survival of democracy and human decency were at stake. ø Collected here for the first time, these articles chart changing reactions and analyses by the regimes and populations of Europe and reveal how postwar governments, historians, and ordinary citizens attempt to come to terms with?or to evade?the realities of the Holocaust, war, fascism, and resistance movements. They track the acts of scoundrels and the collusion of ordinary citizens in the so-called Final Solution but also show how others in authority and on the street heroically opposed the evil of the day. With its depth, conciseness, and interpretive power, this collection allows readers to consider more clearly and completely than ever before what has been said, how thought has shifted, and what we have learned about these momentous, world-changing events.
Author: Vilmos Kondor
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062098829
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
“Kondor’s impressive first novel, which unfolds against an atmosphere tinged by alienation, fear, and the threat of violence, stands out for its deft writing, plausible scenarios, vivid sense of place, and noir sensibility.”— Library Journal A dark, riveting, and lightning fast novel of murder, intrigue, and political corruption, set in 1936 Hungary during the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis in Germany. Budapest Noir marks the emergence of an extraordinary new voice in literary crime fiction, Vilmos Kondor. Kondor’s remarkable debut brings this European city to breathtaking life—from the wealthy residential neighborhoods of Buda to the slums of Pest—as it follows crime reporter Zsigmond Gordon’s investigation into the strange death of a beautiful woman. As Gordon’s search for the truth leads him to shocking revelations about a seedy underground crime syndicate and its corrupt political patrons, Budapest Noir will transport you to a dark time and place, and hold you there spellbound until the final page is turned.
Author: András Koerner
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633861489
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
This book documents the physical aspects of the lives of Hungarian Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the way they looked, the kind of neighborhoods and apartments they lived in, and the places where they worked. The many historical photographs—there is at least one picture per page—and related text offers a virtual cross section of Hungarian society, a diverse group of the poor, the middle-class, and the wealthy. Regardless of whether they lived integrated within the majority society or in separate communities, whether they were assimilated Jews or Hasidim, they were an important and integral part of the nation. We have surprisingly few detailed accounts of their lifestyles—the world knows more about the circumstances of their deaths than about the way they lived. Much like piecing together an ancient sculpture from tiny shards found in an excavation, Koerner tries to reconstruct the many diverse lifestyles using fragmentary information and surviving photos.
Author: Kinga Frojimovics
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9789639116375
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 618
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Book Description
This history of the Jews in Budapest provides an account of their culture and ritual customs and looks at each of the "Jewish quarters" of the city. It pays special attention to the usage of the Hebrew language and Jewish scholarship and also to the integration of the Jews
Author: András Koerner
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633862744
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
Winner of the 2019 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Food Writing & Cookbooks. The author refuses to accept that the world of pre-Shoah Hungarian Jewry and its cuisine should disappear almost without a trace and feels compelled to reconstruct its culinary culture. His book―with a preface by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett―presents eating habits not as isolated acts, divorced from their social and religious contexts, but as an organic part of a way of life. According to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett: “While cookbooks abound, there is no other study that can compare with this book. It is simply the most comprehensive account of a Jewish food culture to date.” Indeed, no comparable study exists about the Jewish cuisine of any country, or―for that matter―about Hungarian cuisine. It describes the extraordinary diversity that characterized the world of Hungarian Jews, in which what could or could not be eaten was determined not only by absolute rules, but also by dietary traditions of particular religious movements or particular communities. Ten chapters cover the culinary culture and eating habits of Hungarian Jewry up to the 1940s, ranging from kashrut (the system of keeping the kitchen kosher) through the history of cookbooks, the food traditions of weekdays and holidays, the diversity of households, and descriptions of food and hospitality industries to the history of some typical dishes. Although this book is primarily a cultural history and not a cookbook, it includes 83 recipes, as well as nearly 200 fascinating pictures of daily life and documents.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Books
Languages : en
Pages : 110
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Book Description
Author: Zsolt Spéder
Publisher: Reinhold Kramer, Dr.
ISBN:
Category : Hungary
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
