scholarly journals Review Article: The Vanished Ghosts in Two Hungarian Family Memoirs. Farkas, Charles. 2013. Vanished by the Danube: Peace, War, Revolution, and Flight to the West (Introduction by Margaret McMullan). Albany: Excelsior Editions, State University of New York Press. 472 pp. Illus; and Barlay, Nick. 2013. Scattered Ghosts: One Family's Survival through War, Holocaust and Revolution. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. 240 pp. Illus.

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 11-20
Author(s):  
Ruth G. Biro

Recent personal documentary works about major historical events of the twentieth century, e.g., World War II, the Holocaust and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, offer their readers a rich and multifaceted narrative, or a history that is also "his story," "her story" and that of entire families, cohorts and communities. Often, these works are accompanied by visual artifacts such as photographs, family tress, maps etc., or supported by concise historical surveys. Thus these memoirs complete the work of historians with the lived experiences of the few that represent many. Such is the case with two 2013 books by Charles Farkas and Nick Barlay depicting their mid-twentieth century Hungarian families, one Christian and one Jewish, through two World Wars and the anti-communist uprising, culminating in their escape to the West and in the two authors looking back upon the Hungarian past of their families.

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 220-230
Author(s):  
Ruth G. Biro

The personal experiences of individuals who lived through the catastrophes of World War II, the Holocaust and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution have been told in many recent memoirs, greatly expanding our understanding of these historical events. In addition to the experiences of the narrators, the fate of their family members, friends, colleagues and entire communities who were all impacted by these events are also illuminated in these accounts. The two memoirs by George Pogany (b. 1928) cover his life since the early 1930s in Hungary, the Holocaust, communism, his escape to the West in 1956, his settlement in England, resettlement in Holland and his years as an international management consultant in several countries. Few memoirs transmit so vigorously the sweep, resiliency, and duration of the author's life and reflections as in Pogany's exceptionally detailed and insightful twofold memoir.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 21-27
Author(s):  
Evi Blaikie

How did the rich and the super-rich Hungarian Jews in Budapest fare during the 1930s, World War II and the Holocaust, and beyond? Two new books deal with their stories: Marianne Szegedy-Maszák's "I Kiss Your Hands Many Times" and Katherine Griesz's "From the Danube to the Hudson". Szegedy-Maszák was able to use her journalist's profession and skills to explore and vividly present her family's story in a work that can likewise satisfy the historians, the romantics and all those who like a “good read.” Griesz’s epic family memoir encompasses the same time period and topic as Szegedy-Maszák's book in its portrayal of a multi-generational Hungarian Jewish family's fate in the crisis -full mid-twentieth century, as seen and interpreted by its female descendant decades later.


2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-130

Katja Weber and Paul A. Kowert, Cultures of Order: Leadership, Language and Social Reconstruction in Germany and Japan (Albany: State University of New York Press 2007)Reviewed by Rainer BaumannSimon Green, Dan Hough, Alister Miskimmon, and Graham Timmins, The Politics of the New Germany (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)Reviewed by David P. ConradtJeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)Reviewed by Thomas FreemanMarc Fenemore, Sex, Thugs and Rock’n’Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold-War East Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007)Reviewed by Henning WrageFrancis R. Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi-Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Reviewed by Klaus L. Berghahn


2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Bracher

Winner of the 2014 Renaudot prize, David Foenkinos’s novel Charlotte recounts the tragic life and highly original work of the German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, arrested in the south of France and deported to her death at Auschwitz in the fall of 1943. As is often the case in twenty-first-century narratives, Foenkinos engages in a highly personal mode of narration that plunges back into the most momentous aspects of World War II and the Holocaust. Charlotte thus links the quandaries of the narrator’s own life and times to those of this protagonist in ways that lead us to face key questions of ethics and aesthetics. These concern not only the destiny of Charlotte Salomon, but also our own manner of approaching and remembering the most momentous events of the twentieth century through the medium of the literary text.


2006 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabetta Merlo ◽  
Francesca Polese

The Italian fashion industry rose to a position of international prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. An important factor in the sector's global success was the opening up of the international, particularly the American, markets. The changes that occurred within the fashion industry after World War II, most critically the end of the Parisian monopoly, offered opportunities that were exploited differently by the various competitors. While cities like London and New York managed to promote themselves as alternatives to Paris, Italy was initially unable to create a single fashion capital. Florence, Rome, and Milan felt themselves equally entitled to become the staging ground for Italian fashion production, but Milan, benefiting from certain features of its productive structure, eventually emerged as the winner. The city's success was based on a long, steady accumulation of resources and the ability to harness its creative and managerial capabilities. The result was Milan's emergence as a fashion “superstar” in the 1970s.


2020 ◽  
pp. 528-540
Author(s):  
Iskra V. Churkina

The reader is offered a brief autobiography of Peter Kogoy — a Slovenian member of the partisan movement in Yugoslavia during World War II, a Communist who emigrated to the USSR in 1948, after the Information Bureau adopted a resolution on Yugoslavia. He spent most of his long life in Moscow. He studied at Lomonosov Moscow State University, then worked for many years as an employee of the Slovenian section of the Moscow radio, until its liquidation in 1994 and his retirement. The Autobiography of P. Kogoy, written by himself in the 1990s, is a sincere and emotional eyewitness account of the struggle of the Yugoslav partisans, about the life of a Slovenian emigrant in Russia during the second half of the twentieth century and his perception of the events. It also contains interesting materials about Russian-Slovenian relations of this period. P. Kogoy gave his autobiography to I. V. Churkina, doctor of history, the Russian premier expert on the history of Slovenia, at that time also the Chairman of Triglav, the Russian-Slovenian society of friends of Slovenia. It is located in her personal archive. I. V. Churkina translated the text into Russian, wrote comments and introductory remarks.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 131-141
Author(s):  
Ilana Rosen

How long and how strong is Diasporic memory? How many generations can it encompass? How deeply can generations that never lived in the old country relate to its landscape, language, colors and tastes? In the case of Israelis of Hungarian origin, these questions inevitably have to do with the history of Hungarian Jews in the late nineteenth- and early-to-mid twentieth-century, with a focus placed more acutely upon World War II and the Holocaust. Written by a female Israeli researcher of folk and documentary culture who belongs to the second-generation of Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivors, the present article strives to deal with the foregoing and other relevant questions through a comparative literary-cultural analysis of the only two presently existing Hebrew-language Hungarian cookbooks. These two cookbooks were published in Israel in 1987 and 2009, respectively, by two male cultural celebrities, the first by a Hungarian-born journalist, author and politician and the second by an Israeli-born gastronomer and grandson of Hungarian-Israelis.


Author(s):  
Alys Moody

As literary modernism was emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of its most important figures and precursors began to talk about their own writing as a kind of starvation. The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism uses this trope as a lens through which to examine contemporary literature’s engagement with modernism, arguing that hunger offers a way of grappling with the fate of aesthetic autonomy through modernism’s late twentieth-century afterlives. The art of hunger appears at moments where aesthetic autonomy enters a period of crisis, and in this context, the writers examined here develop an alternate theory of aesthetic autonomy, which imagines art not as a conduit for freedom, but rather as an enactment of unfreedom. This book traces this theme from the origins of modernism to the end of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on three authors who redeploy the modernist art of hunger as a response to key moments in the history of modernist aesthetic autonomy’s delegitimization: Samuel Beckett in post-Vichy France; Paul Auster in post-1968 Paris and New York; and J. M. Coetzee in late apartheid South Africa. Combining historical analysis of these literary fields with close readings of individual texts, and drawing extensively on new archival research, this book offers a counter-history of modernism’s post-World War II reception and a new theory of aesthetic autonomy as a practice of unfreedom.


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