Search results for ""Author Gabor Schein""

An unflinching narrative of family history in Hungary’s Jewish community and the nation’s deep complicity in the Holocaust “Gábor Schein is that rarest of elegists, endowed equally with a respect for history and an ecstasy of imagination.”—Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus Born in 1723 in a small German town, Johann Klarfeld is thirteen when his father dies. He is taken in by a kind Italian painter to live with him and his daughter in The Hague. But the daughter, beautiful and blind, has a secret. Two centuries later, Berta Jósza is born during World War II in a village in northern Hungary. The daughter of a police officer, Berta watches chaos unfold through her father’s eyes, from the plundering of the possessions of murdered Jews to the carnage of the 1956 Revolution. When she happens upon an enigmatic autobiography in a secondhand bookshop, she can’t shake the sense that she somehow knows the author. Lyrical and haunting, this is an unforgettable story about the spirit of history and the individual fates that make up the whole—the entwinements of the past and their unshakable hold on the present.

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The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus are the first and the second novels by Hungarian writer Gabor Schein. Published together in one volume, they comprise the first in Seagull Books's new Hungarian List series. Both novels trace the legacy of the Holocaust in Hungary. The Book of Mordechai tells the story of three generations in a Hungarian Jewish family, interwoven with the biblical narrative of Esther. Lazarus relates the relationship between a son, growing up in the in the final decades of late-communist Hungary, and his father, who survived the depredations of Hungarian fascists during the Second World War. Mordechai is an act of recovery an attempt to seize a coherent story from a historical maelstrom. By contrast, Lazarus, like Kafka's unsent letter to his own father, is an act of defiance. Against his father's wish to never be the subject of his son's writing, the narrator goes on to place his father at the center of his story. Together, both novels speak to a contemporary Hungarian society which remains all too silent towards the crimes of the past.

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