The Book Of Mordechai And Lazarus

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 Bookss 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 latecommunist Hungary and his father who survived the depredations of Hungarian fascists during World War II. Mordechai is an act of recoveryan attempt to seize a coherent story from a historical maelstrom. By contrast Lazarus like Kafkas unsent letter to his own father is an act of defiance. Against his fathers wish to never be the subject of his sons 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.