Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook

by Susan Rubin Suleiman

Can you forget the place you once called home? What does it take to make you recapture it? In this moving memoir, Susan Rubin Suleiman describes her returns to the city of her birth—where she speaks the language like a native but with an accent. Suleiman left Budapest in 1949 as a young child with her parents, fleeing communism; thirty-five years later, she returned with her two sons from a brief vacation and began to remember her childhood. Her earliest memories, of Nazi persecution in the final year of World War II, came back to her in fragments, as did memories of her first school years after the war of the stormy marriage between her father, a brilliant Talmudic scholar, and her mother, a cosmopolitan woman from a more secular Jewish family. In 1993, after the fall of communism and the death of her mother, Suleiman returned to Budapest for six-month stay. She recounts her ongoing quest for personal history, interweaving it with the stories of present-day Hungarians struggling to make sense of the changes in their individual and collective lives. Suleiman's search for documents relating to her childhood, the lives of her parents and their families, and the Jewish communities of Hungary and Poland takes her on a series of fascinating journeys within and outside Budapest. Emerging from this eloquent, often suspenseful diary is the portrait of an intellectual who recaptures her past and comes into contact with the vital, troubling world of contemporary Eastern Europe. Suleiman's vivid descriptions of her encounters with a proud, old city and its people in a time of historical change remind us that every life story is at once unique and part of a larger history.

Genres: Memoir, History, Nonfiction, Hungary

232 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1996

About the author

Susan Rubin Suleiman is the C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and Research Professor of Comparative Literature

She was born in Budapest and emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She obtained her B.A. from Barnard College and her Ph.D. from Harvard University, and has been on the Harvard faculty since 1981, where she is currently the C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and Research Professor of Comparative Literature. She retired from full-time teaching in 2015.

Suleiman is the author or editor of numerous books and more than 100 articles on contemporary literature and culture, published in the U.S. and abroad. Her latest book, The Némirovsky Question, to be published by Yale University Press in fall 2016, is about the Russian-French novelist Irène Némirovsky and issues of “foreignness” in 20th-century France. Her other books include Crises of Memory and the Second World War; Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre; Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde, and Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature. She has edited and co-edited influential collective volumes, including French Global: A New Approach to Literary History and Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances.

In addition to her scholarly work, Suleiman is the author of Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, a memoir about Hungary. Her book reviews and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The American Scholar, Moment Magazine and other newspapers and magazines.

Suleiman has won many honors, including a decoration by the French Government as Officer of the Order of Academic Palms (Palmes Académiques). She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, and several NEH Fellowships. She has been an invited Fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest and at the Center for Advanced Study of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo, as well as the Texas A&M Institute for Advanced Study. During the 2009-2010 academic year, she was the invited Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2015-16 she was a Faculty Fellow at the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study in College Station, Texas, and in the fall of 2017 a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of the Central European University in Budapest. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Andy Oram · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful look at the life a leading literary scholar, drawing on her experiences as a Jew in Budapest and other parts of her life. I found the personal reflections to be the best reason for reading this book. Suleiman doesn't deliver a real memoir, but there is enough about her stresses and life choices (particularly in the last couple chapters) to give the reader a lot to think about. As a chronicle of Budapest in 1993 and 1994, the book is too superficial to provide much insight. Of course, a lot has happened since its publication and we now see it occurring at a time of relative hopefulness. In any case, the book's insights are simply impressions of a visitor, and she wouldn't have gotten a chance to talk to anyone but the globalized intelligentsia if she hadn't taken a taxi once in a while. I was disappointed that Suleiman didn't include any of the photographs that she reports taking of interesting historical sites.

[Maui Island · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book promises so much and delivers so very little. Her lack of knowledge of Hungary is evident on every page. She is so self centered and proud of her French literature professorship at Harvard (look, everyone, I'm a professor at Harvard) that she forgot to look at Hungary. Budapest diary? Not really. She spent time with academics in Budapest, but never spent time in Budapest. She could have learned this much about Budapest if she had emailed these people from Harvard Yard. Her diary has a lot about her feelings toward her abusive adulterous father and disturbed mother which could have been interesting had she actually given us any insight instead of whining and lying to herself and to us.

[Lee Kofman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Suleiman is a highly cerebral and brilliant woman, but there are not enough emotions or magic in her otherwise very engaging memoir.

[Isabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really great book. If you are travelling to Budapest I really recommend you read this as it gives an interesting perspective on the place. This book addresses many issues such as discrimination, immigrated at a young age or at all or can simply identify with a growing feeling of loss of culture, being trapped between two worlds, loss of mother tongue and/or many more. Even if you know nothing about these subjects, it's a superb read.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

she was in Budapest during the time of my first visit to my father's birthplace. So I expected to feel more of a connection. Her memories of childhood were sad and engaging but the contemporary diary struck me as terribly self centered. Guess that makes sense for a diary. On the whole found it moderately interesting.

[Jennifer J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a marvelous time reliving my time in Budapest, and adding context to so many of my memories through this memoir. All in all though, its not essential.