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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.
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.
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Pixel (Hardcover)
Owen Good; Krisztina Toth
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R583
Discovery Miles 5 830
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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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.
An inventive collection of stories by one of the most prominent and
acclaimed writers in Hungary today. The Birth of Emma K., a
collection of twelve short stories rich with magic, introduces
English-language readers to one of the most vibrant and original
voices in contemporary Hungarian literature. Zsolt Lang's new
collection opens with God sitting on a bench looking over Budapest;
later, a Hungarian man who has stumbled into a Romanian music
theory class suddenly finds he is able to speak expertly about
Hungarian composer Bela Bartok-and in perfect Romanian; and even
later, against all odds, the embryo of Emma fights for her future
life from within the womb. Drifting between melancholic and witty,
in sentences that are winding, subtle, and colloquial, Lang's
stories are deeply rooted in Transylvanian culture and history.
Reminiscent of the best writings of Irish modernist masters such as
Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien, The Birth of Emma K. presents an
unforgettable collage of human nature.
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Market Day (Hardcover)
Pál Závada, Owen Good
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R575
R475
Discovery Miles 4 750
Save R100 (17%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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A novel exploring the descent of superficially decent people into
vindictive killers. Â 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. Â
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