György Ferdinandy

György Ferdinandy

GYÖRGY FERDINANDY (Budapest, 1935), literary historian. He started his studies at the Secondary School of the Piarist Fathers, but was forced by the regime to work at the Ikarusz Bus Factory and could never graduate. He managed however to get enrolled at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, as a double major in French and Hungarian, but he had to leave the country after the fall of the 1956 Revolution. He lived in Paris until 1964 and worked as a translator, bookshop assistant and mason. He received his PhD in Literary History at the University of Strasbourg in 1959. Between 1964 and 1976 he taught Western Civilisation at the University of Puerto Rico. He published many novels, short stories and poems, and is a receiver of the Commander’s Cross of Merit of the Order of Hungary.

MOTHER AND THE REVOLUTION

Every time I tackle this, I stop and work out how old mother was. The result always takes me by surprise. In the autumn of ‘fifty-six, as I remember it: an old lady. Nervous, timid. She sits by the radio, listening to the Voice of America. She doesn’t set foot

TWO STORIES

MR CSATÁRI I waited eleven years for my first visa back to Hungary. To be more precise, for a permit to stay for two weeks, supplied on a purpose-designed form. This was all I had to present at the border, so my trip would leave no sign of the date