The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus

The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus are the first and the second novels by Hungarian writer Gábor Schein. Published together in one volume, this book is the first in Seagull Book’s new Hungarian List series.

Both novels trace the legacy of the Holocaust in Hungary. The Book of Mordechai tells the story of three generations in a Hungarian Jewish family, interwoven with the biblical narrative of Esther. Lazarus relates the relationship between a son, growing up in the in the final decades of late-communist Hungary, and his father, who survived the depredations of Hungarian fascists during the Second World War. Mordechai is an act of recovery—an attempt to seize a coherent story from a historical maelstrom. By contrast, Lazarus, like Kafka’s unsent letter to his own father, is an act of defiance. Against his father’s wish to never be the subject of his son’s writing, the narrator goes on to place his father at the center of his story. Together, both novels speak to a contemporary Hungarian society which remains all too silent towards the crimes of the past.

Gabor Schein is one of the most important writers to emerge in post 1989 Hungary. The author of several acclaimed volumes of poetry, he has also written several prose works and verse dramas. He is a professor at the Hungarian Literary History Institute of Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. Adam Z. Levy is a translator from Hungarian and the publisher of Transit Books in California. Ottilie Mulzet is a literary critic and award-winning Hungarian translator, whose work includes a translation of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens, also published by Seagull Books.