In My Brother's Image
Twin Brothers Separated by Faith After the Holocaust
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- £9.49
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
In My Brother's Image is the extraordinary story of Eugene Pogany's father and uncle-identical twin brothers born in Hungary of Jewish parents but raised as devout Catholic converts until the Second World War unraveled their family. In eloquent prose, Pogany portrays how the Holocaust destroyed the brothers' close childhood bond: his father, a survivor of a Nazi internment camp, denounced Christianity and returned to the Judaism of his birth, while his uncle, who found shelter in an Italian monastic community during the war, became a Catholic priest. Even after emigrating to America the brothers remained estranged, each believing the other a traitor to their family's faith. This tragic memoir is a rich, moving family portrait as well as an objective historical account of the rupture between Jews and Catholics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Here is an eloquent memoir of a family ripped apart by the Holocaust. Born into a Jewish family, Pog ny's grandfather, B la, converted to Roman Catholicism before WWI so he could work in the Hungarian civil service. A few years later, his wife, Gabriella, and their six-year-old twin sons, Mikl s (the author's father) and Gyuri, were also baptized as Catholics. Gabriella took her new religion more seriously than her husband and was delighted when Gyuri became a priest. At the outbreak of WWII, he was in Italy living with Padre Poi, a noted Catholic mystic, and he remained there for the duration of the war. Initially, their status as converts protected Gabriella and Mikl s (B la died in 1943) from the Nazis, but not for long--Mikl s was interned in Bergen-Belsen and Gabriella died at Auschwitz. After the war, Mikl s settled with his wife in the U.S., where, revolted by the passivity of Christians during the Holocaust, he returned to Judaism. A few years later, his brother also arrived in the U.S. and became a parish priest in New Jersey. But as Pog ny, a clinical psychologist, movingly explains, the war created an unbridgeable emotional gulf between the brothers: Mikl s couldn't forgive Gyuri, who could not, or would not, acknowledge the savageness of the persecution of the Jews, not only by the Nazis, but by Hungarian Christians as well. Gyuri, in turn, considered Mikl s's return to Judaism to be a betrayal. Pog ny deftly conveys the power of the brothers' feelings as he relates this tragic story. Author tour.
