If history does act with cunning, as Hegel claimed, recent events involving Hungary’s extreme right wing Jobbik remind us that it does not always keep a straight face when doing so. A better Hungary, according to Jobbik, the country’s third largest party, is a Hungary emptied of its Roma and Jewish communities. As a result,…
Elie Wiesel announced today his decision to renounce a Hungarian state award he received in 2004. Hungary has been “whitewashing” its fascist history during World War II, Wiesel said, including attempting to rebury the ashes of a writer, Jozsef Nyiro, a member of the notorious pro-Nazi Arrow Cross, in his native Transylvania. As Wiesel put…
In the scenic and enchanting lands of Transylvania, the ashes of a dead fascist have sparked a diplomatic incident. On May 27, the remains of Hungarian writer and politician Jozsef Nyiro were supposed to be reburied in the Romanian town of Odorheiu Secuiesc. The village is today heavily populated with Hungarians, as it was part…
A sickly, wheelchair-bound nonagenarian who sat in court Monday covered in a blanket and hooked up to an IV was acquitted of Holocaust-era crimes. The scene sounds familiar, but it wasn’t John Demjanjuk on trial again. In this latest attempt to bring World War II criminals to justice, 97-year-old former Hungarian police captain Sandor Kepiro…
András Mezei (1930-2008) was a major Jewish-Hungarian poet who left behind a retrospective exploration of the Holocaust for our time. There are many voices speaking to us of terror, folly, greed, cruelty and absurdity, but Mezei’s poetry makes them sound like our own voices. His testimony has been published in England, in my translation, as…
Most New Yorkers I’ve spoken to think Hungarian cooking is the oil-soaked stuffed cabbage served up at every synagogue dinner or worse, the dry kokosh cake (a long yeast-chocolate roulade) old-fashioned New York bakeries so pride themselves on. But good Hungarian food, the kind made lovingly in private kitchens, is completely different, almost unidentifiable to…
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