Gábor Schein Reihenfolge der Bücher

An unflinching narrative of family history in Hungary's Jewish community and the nation's deep complicity in the Holocaust

The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus are the first and the second novels by Hungarian writer G bor Schein. Published together in one volume, they comprise the first in Seagull Books's new Hungarian List series. Both novels trace the legacy of the Holocaust in Hungary. The Book of Mordechai tells the story of three generations in a Hungarian Jewish family, interwoven with the biblical narrative of Esther. Lazarus relates the relationship between a son, growing up in the in the final decades of late-communist Hungary, and his father, who survived the depredations of Hungarian fascists during World War II. Mordechai is an act of recovery--an attempt to seize a coherent story from a historical maelstrom. By contrast, Lazarus, like Kafka's unsent letter to his own father, is an act of defiance. Against his father's wish to never be the subject of his son's writing, the narrator places his father at the center of his story. Together, both novels speak to a contemporary Hungarian society that remains all too silent towards the crimes of the past.

Ein kurzer Blick, zwei sich berührende Knöchel: Als Ervin, der Schwede, und Frau Dr. Bíró einander in Budapest gegenübersitzen, blitzt für einen Moment Wagemut zwischen ihnen auf. Liegt hier ein Anfang, ein Neubeginn - obwohl die Suche nach der Vergangenheit sie zusammengeführt hat? Gábor Schein erzählt unnachahmlich schwebend und zartfühlend die Geschichte Ervins und mit seiner die Nachkriegsgeschichte Ungarns, deren Folgen bis in die Gegenwart hineinreichen.

Lazarus, an unflinching investigation of what it means to be the child of Holocaust survivors in postwar Hungary, is Gábor Schein's second novel.