Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary features works by twenty-four of Hungary’s best writers who have written about what it means to be Jewish in post-Holocaust Eastern Europe. This
volume includes work by Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész and other internationally known writers such as György Konrád and Péter Nádas, but most of the authors appear here in English for the
first time. This anthology features poetry, long and short stories, and excerpts from memoirs and novels by postwar writers. Some of these authors were well known in Hungary before World War
II, some were children or adolescents during the war and began publishing in the 1970s, some were born to survivors in the years immediately following the war and grew up during the decades
of Communist rule, while others started publishing chiefly after the fall of Communism in 1989.
Unique among Eastern European countries, Hungary still has a large and visible Jewish population, many of them writers and intellectuals living in Budapest. This anthology introduces
English-speaking readers to outstanding works of literature that show the wide range of responses to Jewish identity in contemporary Hungary. The editors’ introduction provides a historical
and critical context for these works and discusses the important role of Jews in Hungarian culture from the late nineteenth century to the present.
