My Happy Days in Hell

By György Faludy and Gyogy Faludy

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0002174618
• ISBN13: 9780002174619
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Totem Press.
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.7" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Orwell's 1984 was really 1948: Hungary under communist takeover

George, or Gyorgy, Faludy died at 95 on the first of this last September. Quite a character, even more than this autobiography (some call it an 'autobiographical novel'). This is his classic, now nearly forgotten in the West, account of his early life under first fascist and then communist tyranny, My Happy Days in Hell. He tells here of the period of flight from fascist Hungary in 1938, his escape through a France capitulating to Hitler in turn, and his North African brief but evocatively detailed stay. Roosevelt enables him to gain American asylum. There, he serves in the military and for the Free Hungary Movement. In 1946, compelled by his 'radical liberalism' and democratic socialist principles to help his country, he returns. His account of how life is endured under communist dictatorship is classic. Soon, he is arrested on farcical charges as a Titoist and Yank spy, and sentenced at the AVO secret police's dungeon (the same site had been used by the Nazis and their Arrow Cross sympathizers in WWII, symbolically) to death. Commuted to 25 years, he then goes through two prisons on his way to a labour camp for 1300 intellectuals where he faces slow starvation over the next three years, from 1950-1953. After this book ends with the release of the prisoners in the wake of Stalin's death, he served Hungary again, until he again faced a second exile after the defeat of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. He never shirked a challenge. In his memoir, he notes that he, like his professorial father, preferred to live outside of Hungary even as he longed for his homeland. Too restrictive for dreamers and idealists, Hungary, with its extraordinarily complicated language and its ethnic distinction from the Slavic and Germanic peoples who surround its great plains, after WWI lost half of its homeland. Isolated in the center of Europe by terrain and language, it sits between East and West, an Asian people who have endured over a millennium at the continental center. This nation commanded Faludy's loyalty yet chafed his cosmopolitan intellect and inquisitive nature. He faced fourteen years in prison for an anti-Hitler poem. He had fled, after its fascist Horthy regime had drafted him in November 1938 into its army, allied with the Nazis. In his late twenties, Faludy was already an acclaimed poet, best known for his translations of another jailbird rascal, the medieval balladeer François Villon. His obituary revealed his later life to be as exciting as the period, from 1938 to 1953, described in Happy Days. I encourage you to find out more about his fascinating subsequent literary career and love life in and out of Hungary. You will be surprised, I guarantee you. Reminding myself when I read his obituary how I had always meant to read his autobiography, I hunted down a dog-eared and spine-slanted library copy, the only one in my vast city. The large volume, over 450 small-type pages, showed, at least a few decades ago after its English-language translation (