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Overview
There are few figures in literature as riveting as the precocious nine-year-old Magda Denes who narrates this story. Her stubborn self-command and irrepressible awareness of the absurd make her in her mother's eyes "impossibly sarcastic, bigmouthed, insolent, and far too smart" for her own good. When her family goes into hiding from the fascist Arrow-Cross, she is torn from the "castle" of intimacies shared with her adored and adoring older brother and plunged into a world of incomprehensible deprivation, separation, and loss. Her rage, and her ability to feel devastating sorrow and still to insist on life, will reach every reader at the core. Recounting an odyssey through the wreckage and homelessness of postwar Europe, Castles Burning embodies a powerful personality, a stunning gift for prose and storytelling, a remarkable sense of humor, and true emotional wisdom and makes a magnificent contribution to the literature of childhood and war.Synopsis
An unsparing portrait of childhood in 1939 Hungary, told in the voice of a brave and unforgettable nine-year-old Jewish girl.
Publishers Weekly
This extraordinarily moving Holocaust memoir adds a new dimension to the literature. Denes was five years old in 1939 when her father, a wealthy Hungarian Jewish publisher, left Hungary after his newspaper was seized by the authorities, leaving Magda, her 12-year-old brother, Ivan, and their mother to cope with wartime conditions in Budapest and, ultimately, the German takeover in March 1944. The author recounts with unsentimental candor how she and her family survived years of hiding in Hungry and, later, lived as displaced persons in Germany. Denes endured starvation, the death of her beloved brother and homelessness with a feisty refusal to give way to despair. What sustained her and what makes this recollection remarkable is Denes's ability to recall and express the enormous hostility she felt toward her mother for placing her in homes away from her family, her impatience with her aunt and grandparents, her fury at her father for his desertion and the cynicism beyond her years she used as a defense against an insane world. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour. (Jan.)