A novel exploring the descent of superficially decent people into vindictive killers.   What could bring people to form a mob and attack others? What circumstances could provoke a thirst for blood at the market square? Who will gang up to batter their neighbor, improbably returned from deportation? How can a person be swept up among lynchers? Pál Závada’s novel examines and analyses the anti-Semitic mass hysteria and political opportunism surrounding the pogroms in Hungary that followed World War II and the Holocaust. In May 1946, at the village market, Mária Csóka witnessed a group of women set upon and beat to death a Jewish egg seller. The wife of a schoolteacher accused of anti-Semitic incitement, and daughter of a respected shopkeeper, Mária fears for her husband’s life yet cannot ignore the victims. The murderous fury spreads through the neighborhood like wildfire, dragging out women, children, and the elderly alike. Mária’s notes from the bloody day at the village market and from the subsequent trial in Budapest testify to a state of human relations that is intimately complex and irreparably scarred.  

Like stars in the sky, pixels may seem like tiny, individual points. But, when viewed from a distance, they can create elaborate images. Each pixel contributes to this array, but no individual point can create the whole. The thirty stories that comprise Krisztina Toth's book similarly produce an interconnected web. While each tale of love, loss, and failed self-determination narrates the sensuousness of an individual's life, together, the thirty stories tell a more complicated tale of relationships. Circumstances that appear unrelated may converge in harmony or in heartbreak, just as the events that loom largest may fail to produce a longed-for outcome. These threads often determine the course of lives in unpredictable ways--sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, but rarely in the ways we originally anticipated.

Three generations of a family of lawyers have run a firm founded in 1893 in the small city of Becskerek (today in Serbian Zrenjanin), first part of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg monarchy, then Hungary, then Yugoslavia, then for a while under German occupation, then again part of Yugoslavia and finally Serbia. In the Banat district of the province of Vojvodina, the multiplicity of languages and religions and changes of place-names was a matter of course. What is practically unprecedented, all files, folders and documents of the law office have survived. They concern marriages, divorces, births and testaments, as well as expulsions, emigrations, incarcerations and releases of these largely rural and small-town dwellers. Mundane cases reflect times through war, peace, revolution and counter-revolution, through serfdom and freedom, through comfort and poverty. The files also show everyday lives shaped in spite of history. Tibor Varady transforms them into affecting and vivid vignettes, selecting and commenting without sentimentality but with empathy. The law office of the three generations of the Varady family demonstrates that the legal profession permits and in difficult times even requires its members to defend the ordinary men and women against the powers of state and society.