Lost and Found in Budapest (1936-1937)
A Memoir
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
Award-winning writer Evelyn Wexler creates a world as vivid as the one created by Italian Vittorio De Sica in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis--the world of the Jewish privileged class in Budapest Hungary. The time is 1936 and the author is an 11-year-old from the Bronx, accompanying her emotionally troubled mother to her native Hungary and the home of her father’s older brother for compassionate psychiatric care that was unaffordable at that time in the United States. But the world is in turmoil; the Nazi jackboots are on the march and will soon shatter this world as irrevocably as these two years in Budapest will shatter the innocence of the author.
“The memoir beautifully portrays a child’s curiosity and confusion, not only about anti-Semitism but about grownup affairs, sex and romance, even while it brings an adult understanding to bear on the memories of these crucial years. In an important story that is both personal and larger than personal, the writing sparkles with detail and with the particular clarity that resides in well-examined, powerfully formative experiences.”
Judith Barrington
author of Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art and Lifesaving, A Memoir.
About Wexler’s Earlier Work, The Geisha House
“Luminous. Brilliant. Evocative. Evelyn Wexler is a writer of great imagination, wisdom, and passion.”
Ursula Hegi
author of Stones from the River and Floating in My Mother´s Palm: A Novel
About the Author
Evelyn Wexler is a former English teacher and guidance counselor. Her work has been accepted for publication in many literary journals such as negative capability and Nimrod. A prizewinner in several contests, she is the 1990 recipient of The Bronx Council on the Arts grant for excellence in poetry. She has also been awarded a 1995 Bronx Council on the Arts Ace prize in Non-fiction, Literature for excerpts from her Memoir Lost And Found In Budapest (1936-37). Her chapbook of poems, The Geisha House was published in 1992 by Mayapple Press. They also published her another collection of poems Occupied Territory in 1994. She is married and the mother of two sons. As a young child she was catapulted from New York to Budapest Hungary. This experience triggers much of her work.