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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My parents owned a small collection of fictions by J\u00f3kai M\u00f3r and he was probably reading one of those. No one has heard about children’s books in our small hamlet just after the WWII.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 Kosty\u00e1nszky. 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 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first Christmas in Bratislava Pastor Kosty\u00e1nszky 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. <\/p>\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/suesaintmichel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/IMG_0299-e1558696418989-204x300-1.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nIn 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 Hus\u00e1k. His mum, a director of a theatre in Bratislava, called Nov\u00e1 Sc\u00e9na 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 Gust\u00e1v Hus\u00e1k, became a long time serving president of Czechoslovakia. But by then I did not live in the country anymore…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-374","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/suesaintmichel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/suesaintmichel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/suesaintmichel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/suesaintmichel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/suesaintmichel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/suesaintmichel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":395,"href":"https:\/\/suesaintmichel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/374\/revisions\/395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/suesaintmichel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}