Almost 40 years ago I was a newcomer to San Francisco. On weekends we would hang out at North Beach with friends at the Caffe Trieste and always had a mandatory stop at City Lights the legendary (and cozy) bookstore on Columbus Ave. I often chatted with the tall, friendly older guy behind the cashier’s desk. He sat on a […]
Before I got involved with current events in Hungary, I wrote fiction and occasionally poetry. I began my post-secondary education as an undergraduate student in English literature, immersed mostly in Canadian and British literary fiction. Some fifteen years later and after writing more than one thousand articles on current affairs in my two online publications, I felt that it was […]
Poet and translator Sándor Kányádi has died at age 90. Kányádi was born in 1929 in Nagygalambfalva (today Porumbeni), in rural Transylvania. He moved to Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) in 1950 where he completed his university studies and worked as a Hungarian language and literature teacher. He started to publish poems in 1955 in literary and children’s magazines and also became active […]
Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian government plans to turn the Budapest International Book Festival (April 20–23) into a political propaganda event. The festival is supposed to be for book lovers. It is an annual four-day extravaganza with panel discussions, book signings, readings where thousands of newly published and older books can be purchased. (Click here to see this year’s program of the […]
To be honest, I didn’t know that in the last decades Yevgeny Yevtushenko lived here in the US, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He died at the age of 84 due to heart failure. Born in 1933 in a tiny Siberian outpost near Irkutsk, he was a descendant of Ukrainian exiles. As a young and good-looking poet Yevtushenko had pop-star status in […]
(Excerpt from my journal of my visit to ‘witness” Hungary’s 60th celebration of the 1956 uprising.) Being a writer, artist, you can’t help but see the symbolic significance in everything. It’s the blessing and the curse. It’s cloudy, gray and raining as I step out of the Franz Liszt airport. Its name has been changed only recently. It used to […]
Synopsis Set in post-war Communist Hungary, in the fictional town of Hajdubékes, Never, Again is the story of seven-year-old Tomi Wolfstein, the son of Holocaust survivors who have never told him anything about their past experiences in the concentration camps of World War II. When the story opens, in the fall of 1956, the boy is about to start school. […]
Eighty-seven year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel died peacefully after a long illness on July 2, 2016 in New York City. “My husband was a fighter. He fought for the memory of the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust,” his widow, Marion said in a statement. US President Barack Obama wrote “Elie Wiesel was one of the […]
We’re remembering and celebrating mothers today in North America and instead of perusing contemporary Hungarian politics this Sunday, I flipped through my copy of Winter Night, an anthology of Attila József poems translated into English by John Bátki. Attila József (1905-1937), perhaps Hungary’s most “canonical” twentieth century poet, almost always paints the bleakness of everyday life for Hungary’s early twentieth […]
On this frigid, bitingly cold Sunday (it’s currently -26°C in the Canadian capital) Hungarian poet Attila József’s piece “Winter Night” seems like something appropriate to share with our readers. Attila József (1905-1937) is one of Hungary’s iconic twentieth century poets and one of the few who built much of his oeuvre on exploring the human condition within the Hungarian industrial […]
