Are you a Jew? (Excerpt)

"It's only later that I learn the best. A droplet from everybody's sample is meant to be put in a spider. I was also injected into a spider and they were waiting to see what web it was going to weave. What web my spider was going to weave. If it was going to be nice and orderly, then my conscience is not broken, if jumbled, well then, unfortunately, it is broken, then I'm schizophrenic. "

Bespeckled (a poem)

Sándor Tatár

"Whatever you say, it's plain to see,
man is the strangest entity -
nothing will please him, but nonetheless
he yearns not to reach Nothingness"

The Snake's Shadow (Excerpt)

"And did it really come to pass that one time, not far from where I was lying, the grass quivered, and a great snake hauled its thick, ringed body alongside me, so close that my upper arm shuddered from the touch of its cold, flaky skin? Was I only dreaming that the hand, which only a moment before had been stroking the nape of my neck, stretched out into the thick of the dark grass, grasped the snake and flung it far into the undergrowth?"

Who Plays the Other Role? (Poems)

Orsolya Karafiáth

"Lo, here I stand. No drama, no poetics. / My dear one tells me I'm a frigid bitch: / my solid scale of values seems to topple."

The Crunch of Empty Boots

Gábor T. Szántó (1966) belongs to the third generation of postwar Jewish Hungarian writers, who came of age after the period of silence about Jewishness that characterized the experience of their parents' generation.

Juliet: A Dialogue About Love

An Eastern European Juliet set during the times of darkest dictatorship and without a Romeo: this, in a single sentence, is the essence of András Visky's drama, a "dialogue" in which the Transylvanian writer has documented the true story of his parents. In 1939, his father fled from Rumania to Hungary, where he was to meet his future wife.

On the Nature of Love (Poems)

"... How should I have reacted? Glacially still,
reached down into my bag and drawn
a gun on you, like in the films?"

My Hero's Square (Excerpts)

"'Homeless,' she reported, 'three homeless individuals of unknown provenance.' 'So what, sweetheart,' a vexed yet liquid voice replied. 'So what?' 'But, I wish to report... the point is, they're more or less the size of the Embassy, or the whatchamacallit next door.'"

Celestial Harmonies (Excerpts)

"But the worst of all was the silver cutlery, the fact that we ate with the silver cutlery every day, not only on Sunday or holidays. 'Why?' 'Because we haven't got anything else,' our father grinned. Our mother shook her head. The weight of the silver got imbedded in our hands. When we were invited somewhere, or at school, our hands could hardly switch to aluminum."

Hungarian Wine

"Wine is a man thing; one must talk about it softly. The best way to do that is with a glass of wine. When I'm old I want a wine cellar. I have strongly decided that. I do not want anything else from life."