The second world war changed Budapest for ever
At one time it almost rivalled Berlin, Paris and Vienna in intellectual heft. Effortlessly, it seemed, Budapest nurtured heavyweights. The city was home to world-renowned musicians (Bela Bartok, Franz Liszt), writers (Arthur Koestler, Karl Polanyi), film-makers (Michael Curtiz, of 'Casablanca' fame, and Alexander Korda) and physicists (John von Neumann, Leo Szilard). Before the second world war Hungary was also a hub of Jewish culture. Budapest was home to one of the biggest Jewish communities in Europe, with about 200,000 people—roughly a quarter of the city's population. The beautiful central synagogue on Dohany Street was, and remains, the largest on the continent.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
11 hours ago
- Spectator
Should family history, however painful, be memorialised forever?
Be under no illusions: this is not a food memoir. Chopping Onions on My Heart is a linguistic exploration of belonging; a history of the Jewish community in Iraq; and an urgent endeavour to save an endangered language. Above all, it is a reckoning with generational trauma. The subjects of Samantha Ellis's previous books include the life of Anne Brontë, heroines of classic literature, feminism and romantic comedy. She is the daughter of Iraqi Jewish refugees, and the language she grew up around, the language of her people and culture, is dying. Judeo-Iraqi Arabic 'came out of the collisions of Hebrew-speaking Jews and Aramaic-speaking Babylonians, and then absorbed linguistic influences from all the other people who conquered Iraq'. Ellis is irrepressible in the way she talks about her mother tongue, calling it 'earthy, sinewy, witty, excessive, wry, noisy, vivid… Hot, where English often seems cold. Mouth-filling, where English seems empty. Patterned, when English seems plain.' Jewish people first came to Iraq in 586 BC. At the community's height in the 1940s there were 150,000 Jews living in the country. At best guess, by 2019 just five remained. Most left in the decade following Farhud, the pogrom carried out against the Jews of Baghdad over two days in 1941. More than 180 Jews were murdered and countless raped and injured. Ellis's father's family left for Israel, while her mother's stayed on for more than 20 years. But both her parents eventually ended up in London, where Ellis was born. She was raised speaking English, 'but all the gossip, all the stories, all the exciting, forbidden grown-up life happened in Judeo-Iraqi Arabic'. She quietly absorbed the language, but as she grew up, lost it. Now, as an adult and mother, she is acutely aware of the consequences for herself and her son. The mass exodus of Iraqi Jews in 1950-51, and their assimilation into adopted countries, meant that the language was marginalised, and speaker numbers dwindled fast. Ellis's early investigations are urgent, panicked, motivated by a combination of incredulity and guilt that a language that informs her heritage, but that she doesn't speak, isn't being preserved by someone else: 'I raced to my laptop to find out if anyone was saving my language. Someone had to be!' She begins language classes, visits museums and consults relatives. She attempts to trace the history of her people. She cannot accept that the reason languages become extinct is because second generation, non-native speakers 'didn't value or care for them, that we were recklessly letting them die'. She realises that 'there was always violence somewhere in the vanishing of languages. There certainly was in mine'. The mother tongue is 'earthy, sinewy, witty, excessive, wry, noisy, vivid…Hot, where English often seems cold' The psychological effect of being brought up by families who have experienced war, discrimination and displacement is what makes Ellis both neurotic and determined not to pass on that inherited fear to her son. When he garbles the history of how they came to Britain, Ellis decides: 'If I was going to unmuddle him, maybe I had to try to unmuddle myself first.' But how does one preserve the stories of a culture's past without also holding on to the pain that imbues them? In her search for home and belonging, she finds solace in cooking her country's traditional dishes. But this is not a tidy personal narrative that finds resolution in a comforting stew or finishes with a glorious homecoming wrapped neatly in bread dough. Ellis is wary of simplifying the past and making it more palatable through food. The problem is not Iraqi Jewish cuisine; that's the easy bit. It's the gnarly, traumatic parts that are harder to engage with. So, no, this is not a food memoir. And if at times it doesn't seem to know quite what it is, then isn't that sort of the point? Unpicking, extricating different facets of heritage is near impossible, compounded by the conflicting motivations of a second generation immigrant. What begins as a shapeless mass, a grey cloud of uncertainty, slowly morphs into a full-colour, defined picture of a more confident, peaceful acceptance of Ellis's duality – of being Judeo-Iraqi, but not in Iraq, of belonging to two places at once, even if one place cannot be visited. Like her identity, Ellis's book contains multitudes.
Daily Mirror
2 days ago
- Daily Mirror
David Attenborough's great-nephew gets explosive role in brand new drama
A new addictive series is coming to U&Drama and one name in the line-up might have a familiar ring to it. Sir David Attenborough's great-nephew Will takes on a surprising role. David Attenborough has retired from public life but another member of his family is keeping his legacy in the spotlight. David, 99, has most recently starred in a powerful documentary to raise the alarm bells for our oceans. Now, Sir David Attenborough 's great-nephew Will Attenborough stars in a new show on U&Drama, titled Outrageous, alongside Bessie Carter, James Purefoy, Anna Chancellor and Joshua Sasse. In the six-part series, Will, 33, plays a fictional character named Joss, crafted from several real figures. 'It was originally going to be Evelyn Waugh, then writer Sarah Williams thought it'd be interesting to make him Jewish, but not very openly,' Will says. 'He's also gay, but that's never really talked about in the show.' Joss forms a bond with main character Nancy, played by Bessie Carter, particularly in scenes that reflect the wider political chaos of the time. One scene in Buckinghamshire stands out to Will in particular. 'They're talking about the far-right,' he remembers, 'And we were filming while riots were actually happening around the country last summer. It was a reminder: 'These things don't happen in isolation. There's a culture behind it. History is being repeated.'' READ MORE: NARS' new summer collection includes cream eyeshadow that 'doesn't budge' on oily eyelids Actress Bessie Carter made her name as the scheming Prudence Featherington in Bridgerton. Now, she's taking centre stage in Outrageous, a drama with bite, built on truth, and unafraid to rattle the bones of British history. Adapted from Mary S. Lovell's novel The Mitford Girls, the six-part series set in the 1930s sees Bessie play Nancy Mitford - the eldest of six aristocratic siblings who each challenged, defied or catastrophically clashed with the values of their time. 'I knew a weird amount about them already,' Bessie says, 'I've been strangely connected to Nancy for ages.' That connection turns out to be more than just artistic. Bessie, who is the daughter of actors Jim Carter and Imedla Staunton, voiced the audiobook of Nancy's The Pursuit of Love and later discovered they shared some eerie life overlaps. 'I found out I went to the same school as her for the same amount of time, only three years. During the war she worked at St Mary's Hospital, which is where I was born,' Bessie says. 'She lived in Maida Vale, 10 minutes from where I used to live. It's a series of really odd coincidences.' That synchronicity only deepened Bessie's instinct for Nancy. In Outrageous, Nancy is the anchor - a writer determined to make sense of the crumbling world around her, and to carve a new one through sharp prose and even sharper choices. Her sisters, however, take wildly different paths. 'They want to find their own rules because there's so much to fight against in that house. They grew up with a bit of a dictator as a father,' says Bessie, 'Nancy is fearless as a writer, but the others veer off into other directions perhaps because they lack real purpose in life.' Enter Joanna Vanderham as Diana, Nancy's closest sister - and political opposite. At first, Diana is the glamorous wife of London's richest man. But after a bitter divorce, she finds solace in Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. The series traces her transformation and the painful wedge it drives between her and Nancy. 'Diana and Nancy are best friends to begin with, but the story follows the breakdown of their relationship,' Joanna says, 'You realise how problematic fascism is through Nancy's eyes because you see what it does to Diana. Politics cause the fracture between them. Neither can see it from the other's perspective.' To make matters worse, Diana's relationship with Oswald is nothing short of hectic. 'He's had numerous affairs, but she stood by him,' Joanna says. 'When she says, 'He's the one I'm going to spend the rest of my life with,' she makes that happen.' Joanna adds: 'The Mitfords are known for their sense of humour but Diana starts losing that. She can't poke fun at herself anymore. She becomes a bit uptight and keeps her emotions very private.' Yet she remains outspoken about her views - which became increasingly difficult for Joanna to portray on-screen. 'I had a line the other day and was like, 'This is just horrible to say and to think,'' Joanna recalls. 'The biggest acting demand is to say that with conviction and to not feel physically revolted by it.' To ground her own performance, Bessie leaned on the sisters' extensive real-life correspondence. 'One book I found really useful was The Mitford: Letters Between Six Sisters. They wrote over 17,000 letters between them,' Bessie says, 'This book obviously doesn't contain nearly as many as that, but it's already as thick as a brick.' Outrageous doesn't shy away from the more uncomfortable chapters. Shannon Watson plays Unity Mitford, infamous for her obsession with Adolf Hitler and her open antisemitism. Zoe Brough also joins the cast as Jessica Mitford, who became a staunch communist. The ideological gulf between the sisters mirrors the chaos of the era. 'We see the pressure these political divides put on Nancy,' says Bessie. 'Do you stay true to your family because they are blood…or do you stay true to yourself and your beliefs? I found all that so interesting.' Outrageous airs on U and U&Drama from Thursday, June 19th.
Spectator
3 days ago
- Spectator
Lineker forbidden from speaking at Jewish writer's memorial by son
Gary Lineker may have been finally forced out of the Beeb, but the ex-footballer is still managing to make headlines. Now it transpires that the son of the late award-winning football journalist Brian Glanville – who was made football correspondent for the Sunday Times in 1958 and covered every World Cup for the next 44 years – has forbidden Lineker from speaking at his Jewish father's memorial ceremony after the pundit shared a controversial post about Zionism on social media. Mark Glanville hit out at the former Match of the Day presenter after his sister Jo suggested Lineker speak at their father's service due to the journalistic duo's close acquaintance – and blasted the ex-pundit's post as 'crossing a line'. Despite his father's friendship with Lineker, Glanville has insisted his late father – who died last month aged 93 – would not have wanted the ex-pundit to speak at the ceremony.
