A remarkable book by a young writer, who is telling a story that is literally part of her family, but the personalness of the tale makes it warmer and richer. The book is built around the relationship of two Hungarians, Andras and Klara. He is the middle of three talented Hungarian Jewish brothers and an aspiring architect, forced by his increasingly anti-Semitic homeland's university quotas to pursue his education in 1930s Paris, where he meets and is influenced by Le Corbusier. It's there that he also encounters the mysterious Claire Morgenstern, also a Hungarian émigré whose name change from Klara Hasz is only one of the secrets she has been forced to keep. Klara, nine years Andras Lévi's senior, is a ballet instructor and choreographer and, while he is working as a set designer and decorator in her theater, they fall in love.
Soon, however, the shadows of the coming war force them back to Hungary, where they soon are caught up in the almost hallucinatory history that ultimately decimated one of Mitteleuropa's most glittering Jewish communities. The majority of Hungarian Jews were among the region's most assimilated; many occupied leading positions in the arts, sciences and commerce and had served with distinction in their country's military during World War I. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, the Kingdom of Hungary slid irrevocably into a politics dominated by right-wing nationalism and fascism, ultimately slipping into Nazi Germany's embrace. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Hungary sent most of its troops to his aid; most never returned. Jews were first isolated and dispossessed and, then, drafted into forced labor battalions that sustained the war effort at home and the Hungarian troops in the field--and in the end they went to death camps, but the process was very different than in other parts of occupied Europe, and it is a great backdrop to the story. Why was Hungary diiferent? Read all about it.
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