A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life
Michael Henry Heim
Language: English
Pages: 303
ISBN: 1590511395
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Winner of the 2007 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Biography, Autobiography & Memoir
A powerful memoir of war, politics, literature, and family life by one of Europe's leading intellectuals.
When George Konrad was a child of eleven, he, his sister, and two cousins managed to flee to Budapest from the Hungarian countryside the day before deportations swept through his home town. Ultimately, they were the only Jewish children of the town to survive the Holocaust.
A Guest in My Own Country recalls the life of one of Eastern Europe's most accomplished modern writers, beginning with his survival during the final months of the war. Konrad captures the dangers, the hopes, the betrayals and courageous acts of the period through a series of carefully chosen episodes that occasionally border on the surreal (as when a dead German soldier begins to speak, attempting to justify his actions).
The end of the war launches the young man on a remarkable career in letters and politics. Offering lively descriptions of both his private and public life in Budapest, New York, and Berlin, Konrad reflects insightfully on his role in the Hungarian Uprising, the notion of "internal emigration" – the fate of many writers who, like Konrad, refused to leave the Eastern Bloc under socialism – and other complexities of European identity. To read A Guest in My Own Country is to experience the recent history of East-Central Europe from the inside.
Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship
Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference
those nines—svelte, swollen heads—for the potbellied zeroes. With its large, backward-looking head, the nine seems so intelligent, while the three zeroes signify self-satisfied achievement. The millennium is over. It’s time to pay the bill. Here comes the waiter. “I had a twentieth century,” I tell him. He pauses. I don’t see why. I’ve made it clear I intend to pay. “What about the second millennium?” he asks. “Must I pay for that as well?” “Who else?” “Fine. Add it to the bill.” But the
with his farts and thereby let me read in peace (though of course I had to smell as well as pay). My Hungarian literature teacher encouraged my readings, inviting me to his apartment and lending me books. When he opened his glassed-in bookcase to me, it was as if a beautiful woman had undone her robe. Those were the days when I discovered manifold meaning in every line and found profound wisdom in clichés. I was sixteen and entering my next-to-the-last year at the gimnázium. I walked into the
listened to him, fascinated, whenever he stopped her to take packets of sugar for his rice pudding from her wooden tray. He would lunge into copious detail about the madness inspired by Fichte and so transfix her with classical German philosophy that jealous cries of “Bread!” “Sugar!” rose up from all corners of the room. Flitting past Vera and me on the Kossuth Bridge one day, he apologized for his rush by saying he had to drop Hegel and go back to Kant, because nothing existed outside of
whatever they are. In the library catalogue room a former professor of mine mentioned that he had been hearing identical antigovernment theories from various students of his and that when quizzed they all turned out to have talked to me recently. My teacher, who was in direct contact with the highest echelons, shook his head and said no good would come of this. I should think carefully about what I said. And to whom. After the fall of the Revolution, in the “consolidated sixties,” I
time our exhaustive conversations helped us to make a point more clearly, we earned a refreshing hike up the Oszoly Cliff. We fleshed out my old idea that history was the locus of the intellectual, the knight of totality, the poet of thoughts, explanations, principles, and nightmare scenarios, the elevating force and the force of outrage. Look to the words, for in the beginning was the word. Look to the modelers of sentiment, the confectioners of feeling. Look to their own rhetorical gumbo.
