Tesla,” the vicar mused. “That’s a foreign name, is it not? Hungarian, is it?” “Serbian,” I corrected him. “I’m afraid the ——shire Teslas are a scant three centuries in these parts, having constructed Tesla Hall in the reign of Qu...
I was proud of 'Robin Hood,' even though critics wrote negative things. But I had to laugh when this big, shaven-headed Hungarian stunt guy first saw me. He said, 'You Jonas? You playing Robin Hood? You need to go to the gym today.' So I thought, 'I'...
Then there are some minor points that strike me as suggestive - for instance, the position of Mrs. Hubbard's sponge bag, the name of Mrs. Armstrong's mother, the detective methods of Mr. Hardman, the suggestion of Mr. MacQueen that Ratchett himself d...
Charters: If only we hadn't missed that train at Budapest. Caldicott: Well, I don't want to rub it in, but if you hadn't insisted on standing up until they'd finished their national anthem... Charters: Yes, but you must show respect, Caldicott. If I'...
It was true. After our divorce, I'd ended up in a slight relationship with my last research assistant, Aurelia Feinstein, age 34-though let me state for the record it was not as hot as it sounded. Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a c...
Modern nationalism swept Europe alongside the flourishing of industrialisation. Across the continent, poets and intellectuals cultivated and often heavily modified vernacular languages to be bearers of 19th century modernity. These guardians of langu...
Good sociologists have always had an insatiable curiosity about about even the trivialities of human behaviour, and if this curiosity leads a sociologist to devote many years to the painstaking exploration of some small corner of the social world tha...
Look now,' Vesna's mother continued, 'what do you know, a civil war might break out any minute: Serbs would fight with Croats, Czechs would fight with Slovaks, Hungarians would fight with Jews. how can you be sure of anything?' 'But, Mother, if this ...
Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to...
Verbal: He lets the last Hungarian go. He waits until his wife and kids are in the ground and then he goes after the rest of the mob. He kills their kids, he kills their wives, he kills their parents and their parents' friends. He burns down the hous...
I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hu...
Arkosh Kovash: [in Hungarian] Why are you just standing there, you idiot? I'm not speaking English am I? Wouldn't it make sense to find someone who could talk to me so you could find the person that set me on fire, perhaps? He is the Devil. You've ne...
When I was in Auschwitz, I kept asking, why am I here, what did I do wrong? What did my grandfather do wrong? And a young American man, he put me in the right knowledge. You didn’t do anything wrong, he said, the world did something wrong, terribly...
concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation. Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pai...
