Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (Texts and Contexts) [Hardcover]

Susan Rubin Suleiman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1996 | Series: Texts and Contexts

Can you forget the place you once called home? What does it take to make you recapture it? In this moving memoir, Susan Rubin Suleiman describes her returns to the city of her birth—where she speaks the language like a native but with an accent. Suleiman left Budapest in 1949 as a young child with her parents, fleeing communism; thirty-five years later, she returned with her two sons from a brief vacation and began to remember her childhood. Her earliest memories, of Nazi persecution in the final year of World War II, came back to her in fragments, as did memories of her first school years after the war of the stormy marriage between her father, a brilliant Talmudic scholar, and her mother, a cosmopolitan woman from a more secular Jewish family.

In 1993, after the fall of communism and the death of her mother, Suleiman returned to Budapest for six-month stay. She recounts her ongoing quest for personal history, interweaving it with the stories of present-day Hungarians struggling to make sense of the changes in their individual and collective lives. Suleiman's search for documents relating to her childhood, the lives of her parents and their families, and the Jewish communities of Hungary and Poland takes her on a series of fascinating journeys within and outside Budapest.

Emerging from this eloquent, often suspenseful diary is the portrait of an intellectual who recaptures her past and comes into contact with the vital, troubling world of contemporary Eastern Europe. Suleiman's vivid descriptions of her encounters with a proud, old city and its people in a time of historical change remind us that every life story is at once unique and part of a larger history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Suleiman (Risking Who One Is) and her parents left Budapest in 1949 as she was about to turn 10, and she put her birthplace out of her mind for years. Only later, when her own sons were hovering around that same age, did she return, first for a short visit with her children in 1984, and then for six months in 1993 as a fellow at the newly founded Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study. This fascinating, revealing journal covers both periods, as well as a 10-day return in 1994. Suleiman succeeds with this ambitious examination of nationality and religion (her father was a rabbi) and the aftereffects of the "the Change," which is how her Hungarian acquaintances refer to the political events of 1989, because she rarely edits herself. Whether dealing with emerging memories of her last years in Budapest, her thoughts on the political views of her colleagues ("He likes women, but not feminism," she observes of one), or her parents' unhappy relationship, she is brutally honest. The genealogical research is equally absorbing (she makes a short trip to her father's birthplace only to find that all official records of Jew have been destroyed), and her accounts of everyday conversations are illuminating (she records one dark joke she heard at dinner about a Jew who becomes rich by blackmailing the Christian family that hid him during the war). As with all journals, there are sometimes non sequiturs in these pages, and questions are often left open, but overall Suleiman's recollections offer real insight.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Harvard French professor Suleiman (Risking One Who Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature, Harvard Univ., 1994) weaves personal history with a tale of the modern realities of Hungarian life. As a fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study, she had the opportunity to reside once again in the city of her birth. Here she seeks to define a sense of home in the context of being Jewish and Hungarian American. The text is accessible and well written, but though the chronology of her search for her roots is fascinating, the contemporary political references require a basic background in Hungarian history and politics. Parts of this book have appeared as journal articles. Recommended for strong Hungarian and Eastern European collections.?Jenny Presnell, Miami Univ. Lib., Oxford, Ohio
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press; 1St Edition edition (September 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803242565
• ISBN-13: 978-0803242562
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,001,304 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My thoughts on "Budapest Diary", December 15, 1999

By 

Dr Gaby Krausz - See all my reviews

This review is from: Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (Texts and Contexts) (Paperback)

This is a book exploring the author's search for a childhood identity forged in Hungary in the shadow of the Holocaust and her family's subsequent emigration to the USA. For many complex reasons, childhood issues had not been addressed for much of the author's adult life. The book is a wonderfully evocative memoir of childhood, a search for a national identity and an accurate and sensitive portrayal of the sense of alienation felt by those with the immigrant experience. It is set in the background of the diary written by the author while she lived and worked in Budapest in an academic capacity. As she explores the issues around Hungary's newly found freedoms in the 1990s, she examines them in the context of the uglier aspects of Hungarian and European nationalism which had decimated Hungarian Jewry. Although told from the Jewish viewpoint, it has broad appeal and addresses many important aspects of the human condition.

The author's considerable literary ability (she is professor of Romance Languages at Harvard) is evident in the exquisitely sensitive descriptions of events and emotions from both a child's and adult's viewpoint. She seems to have learnt well from the authors on whom she has based her distinguished career. Emotions leap at the reader from every page, often rapidly traversing the spectrum of joy, sadness, longing, confusion and humor. At all times there is a strong prevailing sense of the author's awareness of how her uniquely Hungarian Jewish background profoundly influenced every important outcome of her life and her world outlook.

The dilemma of being an outsider, yet identifying culturally and nationally with a sovereign state is well known to many Jews and constitutes the fundamental European Jewish experience. Many of those (myself included) who underwent this in repressive political systems fled to the western world and became very successful and yet experienced a sense of national and cultural alienation in their adopted societies.

Despite addressing emotionally charged, controversial and sometimes uncomfortable subjects, there is always a sense of lightness and what is almost playfulness. Not all issues are serious and there is one hilarious description of Hungarian toilets, which every Westerner must have felt (if not voiced) upon their initial experience with these dreadfully designed pieces of porcelainware.

Although an emotionally charged book, it never descends into unrealistic sentimentalism - the message seems to be that no matter what we do with our lives, where we come from has a profound effect on who we are and how we see the events around us. Acknowledging this can be liberating.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What "A reader from Cambridge" did not understnad, April 25, 2003

By 

Wolfgang Barina "wb4392" (Frankfurt/Main) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (Texts and Contexts) (Hardcover)

Further up "A reader from Cambridge" proved that he did not understand nothing at all. It's just for this guy that I do have to explain, that this book has nothing got to do with scholarships or so. It's hard to belive that he did not find out while reading the book to its end. He or she however seemed to have noticed in the end that he or she might blame himself or herself and therefore missed to leave the full name.

For the rest of the world I would like to say that this is not big literature, but an important book. Once individuals stop to be interested to investigate in their history and to try to understand what was happening when and why, we will loose a chance to prevent dark parts of human history from coming back. This is why this book has a right to exist and this is what we can learn from it. It gives us an example for ourselves. And Suleiman does not celebrate herself, as her critic says, but gives us an unproctected view into her feelings. This makes her vulnerable and the "reader from Cambridge" takes his freedom to eagerly touch her wounds.

I say it very clearly: Books like Suleiman's help to make sure that "readers from Cambridge MA" buy a book about the Iraque war the other day and complain that it is not really on the oil business.

5.0 out of 5 stars Budapest Diary:In Search of the Mother Book, October 31, 2008

By 

S. M. Bardy (Adelaide South australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (Texts and Contexts) (Paperback)

I am one who like Susan was also born in Budapest. I was excited as I found this title while browsing the Amazon catalogue pages.
Susan Suleiman awoke memories I did not think I had and her journey back to her birth place called forth emotions about my childhood there. Like Susan I left Hungary at an early age and built a new life in Australia.