The word nation (at this time in Hungary) did not mean simply a geographical collective of one people. Nation meant the nobility and their ability to control the political landscape of Hungary. To be Magyar was not to belong to the people; to be Magyar was to belong to the ruling class.
Read MoreMiklós Vámos's most recent novel The Book of Fathers is a family saga stretching across 300 years of Hungarian history. Each chapter contains the life and death of the first-born son of each generation of the Csillag family beginning in 1702 and ending in 1996. The book's images, like the one above, are what tie the threads of life, death, Judaism, revolution, parenthood, and time itself together, forming bridges that span consciousness and chill the blood with disturbing and poetic repetition.
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