Product Description

Extravagantly praised by critics and readers, this stunning story by bestselling author Kati Marton tells of the breathtaking journey of nine extraordinary men from Budapest to the New World, what they experienced along their dangerous route, and how they changed America and the world.

They are the scientists Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neuman; Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon; Robert Capa, the first photographer ashore on D-Day; Andre Kertesz, pioneer of modern photojournalism; and iconic filmmakers Alexander Korda and Michael Curtiz.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24990 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Noted journalist and bestselling author Marton (Hidden Power) offers a haunting tale of the wartime Hungarian diaspora. The nine illustrious Hungarians she profiles were all "double outsiders," for, as well as being natives of a "small, linguistically impenetrable, landlocked country," they were all Jews. Fleeing fascism and anti-Semitism for the New World, each experienced insecurity, isolation and a sense of perpetual exile. Yet all achieved world fame. The scientists Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, along with game theorist and computer pioneer, John von Neuman, spurred Albert Einstein to persuade Franklin Roosevelt to develop the atomic bomb. Robert Capa and Andre Kertesz became legendary photojournalists. Alexander Korda was the savior of the British film industry, and Michael Curtiz directed Casablanca. Arthur Koestler penned the monumental anti-Communist novel Darkness at Noon. Marton intricately charts each man's career in the context of WWII and Cold War history. Herself Hungarian-born, the daughter of journalists who escaped Soviet-occupied Hungary in 1957, Marton captures her fellow Hungarians' nostalgia for prewar Budapest, evoking its flamboyant cafes, its trams, boulevards and cosmopolitan Jewish community. Marton writes beautifully, balancing sharply defined character studies of each man with insights into their shared cultural traits and uprootedness. 16 pages of photos, map. (Nov.)
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From The New Yorker
Among the Hungarian Jews who made their way to England and America as Hitler rose to power were four scientists, two filmmakers, two photographers, and a writer. These men, products of the same few Gymnasien and cafes, delivered the Manhattan Project, game theory, and "Casablanca." Marton, who fled Hungary as a child in 1957, illuminates Budapest's vertiginous Golden Age and the darkness that followed (a darkness that some of her subjects, notably Arthur Koestler, never shook). Seeing how abruptly the world could change, the Hungarians didn't doubt that they could change it. They also stuck together; even Leo Szilard, who crusaded against the bombs that he made possible, and Edward Teller, who sold Reagan on missile defense, stayed friends. By looking at these nine lives - salvaged, and crucial - Marton provides a moving measure of how much was lost.
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From The Washington Post
In his wonderful book Danube, a discursive, literary and historical journey downstream, the Italian writer Claudio Magris rightly called Budapest the most beautiful city on the whole river. Its story has also been fascinating and deeply troubled: While fin de siècle Vienna has become something of a standby for cultural commentators, Budapest had just as vivid a tale to tell. And, in either case, it is largely a Jewish tale. A hundred years ago, both cities had Jewish populations of around 200,000, a tenth of Vienna's total but a fifth of Budapest's.

In her very readable new book, Kati Marton tells the story of nine Hungarian Jews who left the country between the world wars and prospered. Whether four physicists, two moviemakers, two photographers and a writer have much in common apart from their origins and their brilliance may not really matter. No exaggeration at all is needed to stress the importance of these individuals, who really did "change the world," as the book's subtitle has it.

The two filmmakers were Alexander Korda and Michael Curtiz. Characteristically, they lived in many countries, spoke many languages and usually had more than one name: Korda was born Sándor Kellner and died Sir Alexander. Having cut their teeth in the infant Budapest film business, they crossed Europe and the Atlantic; they made many movies between them, two unforgettable. "The Third Man," which Korda produced, is an exercise in Mitteleuropean nostalgia, and it's not far-fetched to think that Rick's in "Casablanca," which Curtiz directed, pays homage to his beloved New York Cafe in Budapest, which he remembered until the end of his life.

The photographers were Andre Kertesz and Robert Capa. The exquisite landscape photographs for which Kertesz is remembered contrast with Capa's still more famous war photography. Marton didn't quite convince me that Capa's "Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death" (1936) was genuine rather than posed, but there was nothing inauthentic about his amazing photographs of American GIs landing on Omaha Beach. Capa was ashore with the first wave of GIs on D-Day. He later achieved another, more melancholy distinction -- as the first American journalist killed in Vietnam, in 1954, when it was still a French war.

What linked the physicists Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and John von Neumann was the creation of the atomic bomb. No false melodrama is needed for Marton to make this an intensely gripping story, from the early misgivings of Szilard and Wigner to the electrifying moment in the spring of 1954 when Teller publicly denounced J. Robert Oppenheimer as a security risk. This led to what Teller called his final exile; he was ostracized by many colleagues and mocked on film as "Dr. Strangelove." But the father of the H-bomb had his revenge when he was honored by President Ronald Reagan and outlived all his contemporaries, surviving into his 90s and into the 21st century.

Even by Central European standards, Arthur Koestler was strikingly capricious in his affections, by which I don't mean his amorous life so much as his political affiliations. Between the wars, some European Jews were attracted by a rightist brand of Zionism led by Vladimir Jabotinsky and some by communism, but Koestler was perhaps unique in passing from one to the other almost without blinking. His experience with both movements -- and, more generally, an implausibly dramatic life story that no screenwriter would dare invent -- gave him the materials for two deathless political novels. They were Thieves in the Night (about Zionism) and his 1941 masterpiece, Darkness at Noon (about communism). Marton spent her own earliest years in communist Hungary before escaping with her parents soon after the anti-Soviet uprising of 1956, and she describes Koestler's immortal political novel about the Moscow show trials with controlled but strong emotion.

Her technique here is episodic -- almost cinematic, jumping from one character at one moment to another at another. It is unusual to complain that any book is too short, but sometimes the jump-cuts can be a little confusing. And her broader history is not faultless. It's misleading, for instance, to call Adm. Nicholas Horthy, the dictator of interwar Hungary, a fascist. He was an authoritarian and a reactionary, but Hungary was the only country in Central Europe to preserve something like a rule of law in those years; Hungary witnessed a rising tide of anti-Semitism, but it stopped short of violence. Horthy promised to protect the Hungarian Jews and did so until the hideous summer of 1944, when Adolf Eichmann arrived to complete the Third Reich's task.

Nevertheless, for a European, this story -- with its reminder of horrors still within living memory -- is painful and absorbing to read. These nine extraordinary men were part of a huge self-inflicted wound by Europe; your gain, but our loss.

Reviewed by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

OK, but...
I found this book quite interesting although not very well written. I am also less than happy with some of choices made by the author - why these nine are featured when some of them (A. Korda, for example) are not in the same league of significance as others. Why were others ignored?
But that was all well until I read that E. Wigner never returned to Hungary late in his life and was never honored there officially. I met Wigner in Budapest in the late seventies on one of his several trips to Hungary and I know that he received numerous acknowledgments there. Among others, he was elected an Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. So I wonder, what else is inaccurate in the book?

Very important
In this very insightful work the lives of only nine people, saved from the Holocaust, are delved into and their impact on the world shown. John Von Nueman, Edward Teller and Robert Capa are only a few of these. The idea is partly to give a slice of life of the Hungarian Jews who were able to flee, showing how they made new lives and impacted the world. But the more sad and disturbing question is, imagine the contribution the 400,000 or more Hungarian Jews could have had, had the German Nazis and their collaborators not murdered them, gassing them all as they were deported in just a few weeks in 1944, destroying in one breadth an entire world.

Seth J. Frantzman

Budapest's loss is the world's gain...
Ms Marton is a wonderful writer and her subject matter is close to her heart as she is a transplanted Hungarian, like the subjects of her fascinating tale: "The Great Escape". Marton has focused on nine Hungarians,scientists, film makers and photographers, who fled their homeland because of the country's intolerance to their religion. To a man they went on to make their mark in their respective fields the common thread besides their birthplace, was their everlasting affection for Budapest as one of the subjects stated "Everything I am is because of my experience growing up in Budapest". A very fine read, as a result of the book, I have been looking into travelling to this fabled city .