Posts tagged Hungary
Commentary: Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City & Its Culture by John Lukacs

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.

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Commentary: The Book of Fathers by Miklós Vámos

Miklós 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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Commentary: Transylvania: History and Reality by Milton G. Lehrer

Oppression, like many things, is a spectrum. There are a few people who exist at the extremes-- either free from any persecution or, on the other extreme, persecuted from every possible angle. But all too often we don't discuss the rest of the spectrum in the middle, where the relationships between oppressor and oppressed blur, become tangled, and, in their bewildering complexities, reveal a great deal about a society's true self. It is easy-- especially when attempting to make a case for one specific people-- to focus on the surface level of their immediate reality. But it is far more important to take the time and energy to delve deeper, into the tangle, where you can learn the whole truth.

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