Arts & Entertainment
Live From Budapest
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Journalist Kati Marton discusses
her latest book and the role
of the free press for NCJW.
Sandee Brawarsky
Special to the Jewish News
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56
October 4 2007
iN
hen Kati Marton speaks
Hungarian in New York
City, it's like a secret
code, she says, a kind of complicity
between fellow speakers of an impen-
etrable language. As a young child, she
escaped from Budapest with her fam-
ily soon after the Russians crushed the
1956 Hungarian revolution.
In her newest book, Marton digs
further back into the history of her
still-beloved city, to a golden era
between the late 19th century and the
early years of the 20th. Then, Budapest
— with its lively cafe life — was a hub
of great creativity, tolerance, energy,
optimism and opportunity. For many
Jews, it was a Zion on the Danube.
The Great Escape: Nine Hungarians
Who Fled Hitler and Changed the
World (Simon & Schuster; $27) is
a narrative history of a city and a
time, as seen through the lives of
nine Jewish men whose early lives
flourished there. But it's also some-
thing of a ghost story, as all of them
left Budapest, forced into exile by
profound anti-Semitism and fascism.
Their lives blossomed into true bril-
liance and remarkable accomplish-
ment elsewhere.
Marton will discuss her book,
as well as the role of the free press
in democracy and human rights,
Thursday, Oct. 11, at Congregation
Shaarey Zedek in Southfield as key-
note speaker for National Council
of Jewish Women-Greater Detroit
Section's fall event. "This tale is in my
bloodstream',' Marton writes. Like the
cast of the book, her own family "rode
the great crest of Budapest's golden
years." She conceived of this book as
an offering to her parents, expressing
regret that they're no longer alive to
read it.
"I grew up in a gray Budapest:'
she says. "This was the stuff of their
memories and dreams, my attempt to
get close to that world, to recapture it
for them and in the process reclaim it
for myself."
This is the sixth book by Marton, an
award-winning former National Public
Radio and ABC News correspondent,
and the book of which she's proudest.
She writes with passion and the jour-
nalist's eye for telling detail as she cre-
ates an integrated story of nine who
thought and dreamed large: four sci-
entists who did groundbreaking work
on the atomic bomb and the computer
(Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Edward
Teller and John von Neumann); two
major filmmakers (Michael Curtiz,
who directed Casablanca, and
Alexander Korda, producer of The
Third Man); two outstanding photog-
raphers who practically invented mod-
ern photojournalism (Robert Capa
and Andre Kertesz) and one writer,
Arthur Koestler, author of the momen-
tous political novel Darkness at Noon.
She begins the book by describing
Szilard, Wigner and Teller extracting a
letter from Albert Einstein to President
Franklin Roosevelt, alerting him of the
potential in nuclear chain reactions.
Ultimately, the result was the develop-
ment of the Manhattan Project, the
top-secret government effort to build
the atomic bomb.
Some of these men knew one anoth-
er and had encounters along their
journeys; they all would have known
of each other. They reinvented them-
selves in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London,
New York and Hollywood, but always
carried the baggage of exile.
As Marton learned more about
them — all secular Jews driven to
achieve, who left Budapest with only
their genius and ideas in their pockets
— she says that they felt increasingly
familiar to her.
While researching her 1982 book,
Wallenberg: Missing Hero, she made
the startling discovery that her fam-
ily was Jewish. She learned this from
an interviewee who told her that
Wallenberg came too late for her
maternal grandparents, who were sent
to Auschwitz.
Before that, Marton thought her
grandparents had been killed in fight-
ing during the war. Both in Budapest
and when she came to the United
States, Marton, now 58, was raised as
a Catholic. As she put the pieces of