Teri and Juji (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Margarida Anderson | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

This is the story of a lifelong friendship between two Hungarian women. It started in elementary school, continued through teenage, and ended in separation for two decades as a result of war and emigration, each one living in a different continent. Their relationship and happenstance of their reunion is based on their life events. Equally important are their mothers, survivors in their own right, guiding lights in their daughters' ambitions and future.

The characters are real, though the author changed their names and reconstructed the details of their interactions based on first-hand experience, research and her own imagination. Mims' story is recounted in a memoir entitled The Danube is not Blue, by her daughter, Elisabeth Norton, which Margarida edited. Margarida met Elisabeth Norton personally both in Australia and in the United States. The author lived the friendship between her mother and Elisabeth, thus many of the first-hand anecdotes. The story is as factual as can be told in a fictional work. The union of Austria and Hungary in 1867 as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is a typical example of how empires were created throughout history. The House of Habsburg controlled most of central and eastern Europe for 150 years. Within Austria's boundaries lived Austrian Germans, Magyars of Hungary, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs and Croats. They each practiced their own religion ranging from Roman Catholic to Protestant, Eastern Orthodox to Muslim. Only geography held these groups together. It was inevitable that they would start asserting their independence. The Magyars revolted in 1848, but were crushed. Austrian forces reasserted control soon afterwards.After World War I, Hungary ended up on the losing side suffering great territorial loss from the ensuing peace (Treaty of Trianon). It was left feeble from four years of fighting. During the 1920s and 30s, it moved far right politically to counter the growing Bolshevik wave pushing into the sphere of Nazi Germany. Growing antisemitism resulted against the prominent Jewish community, the second largest in Europe at the time.Our characters met ten years following World War I (1929), within this backdrop of history.