My World of Books
Childhood
Books have been part of my world as far back as I remember. One of my early images is sitting in the lap of my father and he reads us at bedtime. I can’t recall what he read; I only remember his voice. An emotional reader – he sometimes laughed and sometimes fought his tears.
My parents owned a small collection of fictions by Jókai Mór and he was probably reading one of those. No one has heard about children’s books in our small hamlet just after the WWII.
Some years later we moved from this hamlet to the capital, Bratislava. My parents joined the Hungarian Reformed Church and strung up a friendship with the young, energetic Youth Pastor, Daniel Kostyánszky. He soon became a regular at my mother’s dining table and best of all, returned in the evening with a book tucked under his arm to read us. He had a voice trained for a big church before the age of wireless microphones and he was a born actor (like many a preacher is…). How we enjoyed those evenings filled with laugh and sometimes also tears
The first Christmas in Bratislava Pastor Kostyánszky gave me a gift-wrapped parcel, which, I thought, looked like a book. Oh. My very first book. I remember worrying how would I be able to keep it for myself, because in our family there were no personal possessions, we shared whatever little we had. For a while I clasped the wrapped parcel to my chest, savouring the feeling of ‘mine’. But I didn’t have to worry. The book – a selection of fairy tales was of no interest to my older brothers. It was graciously left to me to devour it all by myself. I read and re-read it for the entire year and more. In the process I learned to read and write Hungarian, which was a very different language to the official language of the country.the Slovak, the language of the school.
In my daydreams, I relived most of the fables. Needless to say, I took on the role of any Princess presented. The Prince varied. Usually it was my best friend at the primary school, Janko Husák. His mum, a director of a theatre in Bratislava, called Nová Scéna gave us free tickets for Sunday afternoon performances for children, starting at 2pm. Sitting there every Sunday, I soaked in the world of Christian Andersen and many folktales. I never questioned or wondered how did his mum manage such a repertoire of conventional fairy tales? I do not remember a single ‘educational’ piece based on the socialistic images so dominant in our school culture. Those Sunday sessions were a true wonder of my childhood, and I remember them with affection even after so many years. I did not know that his father was in prison, a victim of some purge in the Communist Party. Many years later Gustáv Husák, became a long time serving president of Czechoslovakia. But by then I did not live in the country anymore…