Arts & Entertainment Live From Budapest BANQUET HALL AFFORDABLE FLEGANLE Journalist Kati Marton discusses her latest book and the role of the free press for NCJW. Sandee Brawarsky Special to the Jewish News W 28847 FRANKLIN RD. SOUTHFIELD CONVENIENTLY LOCATED ON THE CORNER OF 12 MILE RD. AND NORTHWESTERN HWY. 1AONG 1-1 u4 - FINE CHINESE DINING Invites You To "A wonderful adventure in fine dining" — Danny Raskin Featuring Gourmet Oriental Cuisine Excellent Lunch and Dinner Selections 7 Days a Week I I a.m.- Midnight Complete Menu Carryout • Gift Certificates Available • We Cater To Private Parties 27925 Orchard Lake Road, north of 12 Mile • Farmington Hills 248.489.2280 1307920 Italian Grill Lounge open till 2 am Thursday thru Saturday Come try our new Happy Hour featuring our new Happy Hour Menu and 1/2 off Drinks. In lounge only. 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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