Modern Times

Beginning with the final decades of the doomed Austro-Hungarian Empire, Stephen Pogany explores the lives of his mother's family in Budapest and in the spa town of Balatonfüred. Drawing on a wide range of historical and literary sources, as well as extended interviews with family members and Holocaust survivors, Modern Times examines the reality of Hungarian-Jewish life in the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast to the familiar tropes that portray Jews as wealthy and privileged, many of Hungary's Jews, like most of the ones we encounter in this memoir, toiled at menial jobs for low pay while facing growing prejudice and discrimination in the years leading up to the Holocaust.