The dispossessed : a novel

Summary: In a tiny village in northeast Hungary, close to the Romanian border, a young, unnamed boy warily observes day-to-day life and chronicles his family's struggles to survive. Like most of the villagers, his family is desperately poor, but their situation is worse than most - they are ostracized because of his father's Jewish heritage and his mother's connections to the kulaks, who once owned land and supported to fascist Horthy regime before it was toppled by Communists. With unflinching candor, the little boy's observations are related through a variety of narrative voices - crude diatribes from his alcoholic father, evocative and lyrical tales of the past from his grandparents, and his own simple yet potent prose. Together, these accounts reveal not only the history of his family but that of Hungary itself, through the physical and psychic traumas of two world wars to the country's treatment of Jews, both past and present.