Homage to the Eighth District
Tales from Budapest
-
- $8.99
-
- $8.99
Publisher Description
The vibrant Jewish quarter of Budapest provides the setting for these stories by Hungarian twins Giorgio and Nicola Pressburger. Holocaust survivors and refugees from Communism, the brothers settled in Italy after 1956; and both pursued successful careers in journalism. Nicola died in 1985 and Giorgio died in 2017, now recognised as a major modern Italian writer, always conscious of the echoes between the languages and cultures he absorbed from Hungary, Italy and European Judaism.
Homage to the Eighth District introduced the brothers into English, and their unusual composition for two pens has impressed readers across Europe and America for its high dignity and perfect artistic control. The style seems to issue from a single hand, the language seemingly raw and unadorned, yet deeply psychological with flashes of striking lyricism conveyed by Gerald Moore’s fine translation.
“Bare narrative and bitter irony, but not without humour…Faced as we are with so much over-writing it is sobering to reflect on the Pressburgers’ brevity, and to realize that humanity and the agony of oppression can be encompassed in a few well written pages.” — Times Literary Supplement
“History can be told in many ways, but the most memorable accounts often employ the techniques of fiction
to tell the truth… A beautiful collection of tales. Where others are angry, the Pressburgers are wise.” — The Village
Voice
“A clarity, tact and affection utterly devoid of nostalgic distortion.” — Independent on Sunday
“Opens a new and fascinating page in the grand passion of European Jewry…” — Books of the Month
“In Homage to the Eighth District – published in Italy only after rejection by several publishers – there are beautiful
and harrowing stories of memorable characters like Ilona Weiss with her seven lovers or the disturbed Leuchtner,
among the filthy market stalls and mysteries of the Temple, peeling hovels with inhabitants ‘bearing in their eyes
strange flashes of anxiety’, all poised on the threshold of the huge historical tragedy of the Holocaust.” — Corriere
della Sera
“History, but full of the feeling of fable.” — El País
“A Hungarian rhapsody.” — Panorama
“A vibrant portrait of a people who retained their courage and individuality under German and communist siege.
Written in exile, the book is humourous and sad, nostalgic and proud, revealing a Hungary hitherto unknown.”
— Cardiff Western Mail
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The title of this provocative short-fiction collection, written in their adopted Italian by Hungarian emigre twins, refers to the Jewish quarter of Budapest, ``a crucible of poverty and human suffering'' blighted by Nazism, Stalinism and the suppression of the 1956 uprising. We meet Ilona, a former beauty who attracted six lovers; her hair is now burnt from dyeing and her legs are shriveled, but a seventh admirer courts her: death. The grotesquely obese Selma believes that her double conversion--from Judaism to Christianity and back again--magically saved her loved ones from Hitler's gas chambers. The daughter of a punitive mother, the wife of a husband who steals her money and has a mistress, Rachel escapes reality by stuffing herself with tranquilizers. For one narrator, a Sabbath stew arouses bitter youthful memories: a gentile bully called him a ``filthy Jew'' and snatched a pot of stew from his hands; a cousin then punished him for not avenging himself on ``the criminals who wiped us out.'' A man who returns to the synagogue where he hid, hungry and dirty, as an angry boy during the war tells a poignant story, but a monologue by a brain-damaged man on the eve of his commitment to a mental institution manipulates the reader.
