Hungary After 1956

Spiro is a Hungarian Jewish writer of my generation. His new book deals with the formation and workings of the Kadar regime (post 1956 revolution). His hero is a Jewish mechanical engineer that during the revolution and the Soviet invasion is interned in a hospital and misses the action. Yet in the following new regime of Kadar, he is accused of having fought and is thrown out of the party, cannot go back to his job nor his home and he is almost executed. In Hungarian,

Hősünket a főnökei, a kollégái, a barátai egyik napról a másikra kiközösítik, és a munkahelyére sem járhat be többé. Felesége el van foglalva a reprezentatívnak szánt képzőművészeti kiállítás, a Tavaszi Tárlat szervezésével, és semmi egyebet nem vesz tudomásul. Kettejük hideglelős története fél évvel a váratlanul kitört forradalom után, a szintén váratlan demonstrációvá váló május elsejei felvonulással zárul.

While the novel mostly tells the engineer's personal problems, like his bosses and his family's icy indifference and rejection, the background is the new regime, which purges the Party (and the Government and the industry) of old-time idealists (many of them Jews) and replaces them with uneducated non-ideological carreerists. The post 1956 Kadar regime (I was not there) - the parallel of the Brezhnev regime in the Soviet Union - is presented as the rule of the non political incompetent. Hungary loses its sense of purpose and enters a long process of decadence. The novel ends surprisingly with the 46 y.o. Jewish engineer having a juicy flirt (love affair) with a young, blonde schikse (that was a period when East Europeans lost all sexual restrictions), illustrating the limits of the freedom allowed by the regime.