Hungarian Goulash: A Historical Memoir
Robert Hajdu, "Hungarian Goulash: A Historical Memoir"
English | ISBN: 098644670X | 2015 | 570 pages | AZW3 | 1135 KB
English | ISBN: 098644670X | 2015 | 570 pages | AZW3 | 1135 KB
This work of literary nonfiction recalls the life of a secular Jewish boy who was born in Budapest during World War II, grew up under Communist rule and escaped with his family to America during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Estranged from his own past for half a century, after his father's death the memoirist returns to the country of his birth to see what is still there for him to reclaim. Since he is a historian, he recovers whatever he can of that boy’s life and sets the fragments in various historical contexts, from the most immediate to the broadest. And so the personal story is woven together with engagingly told accounts of, and historical reflections on, the Revolution itself, the Holocaust in Hungary, Communism as a religion, human migrations, the Cold War, Jewish life in Hungary through the centuries, and the differences between the Old World and the New. In the end, the main characters of Hungarian Goulash, a work as much history as memoir, turn out to be not just the memoirist’s mother and father but also Budapest, all of Hungary and its people, and even America.
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