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Susan Rubin Suleiman's Budapest Diary offers a classic story of self-discovery or rather, rediscovery, but she touches on so many other issues, from feminism to East-West relations, that her book can also be read as a peripatetic American academic's end-of-century stocktaking - a stocktaking rendered philosophic and tentative by new-found self-knowledge.
At the heart of her narrative is a very personal journey. In 1993 a Harvard professor returns to her native Budapest, a city she left in 1949 at the age of ten, in search of her Hungarian Jewish roots, and a past she thought she had long ago consigned to oblivion. She spends six months in her rediscovered hometown as a fellow at Collegium Budapest, a new, German-sponsored institute for advanced study. The actual diary portion of the book describes events and impressions of those months, and is preceded by a chapter that recounts her first trip back, undertaken with her two young sons in 1984, when Hungary was still very much a part of the East bloc. There is also an epilogue, a return to Budapest in 1994, just after Hungary's first post-Communist government, a right-of-center, nationalist coalition, was voted out of office by the party of old Communists turned hip socialists.
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A few days after her arrival, having just attended a piano recital, Susan Suleiman notes in her diary: "it felt good to be in a 'culture crowd' in Budapest. Interesting how certain groups remain the same, no matter where you are or what language is spoken around you." She discovers as time goes on that this crowd is Budapest's urbane, largely Jewish cultural-intellectual elite. It is mainly this circle, this milieu that she gets to know during her stay. It is the same milieu that other writers on Central Europe have tried to get a fix on in recent years. In Eva Hoffman's Exit into History and, earlier, in Claudio Magris's Danube or in Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Europe, Europe, 2 some of the same places and faces keep turning up. And the same world, in its earlier ascendancy, is the real subject of John Lukacs's book, Budapest 1900. And no wonder: this segment of Hungarian society remains the most interesting, the most worldly, the most appealing to foreigners. Yet Hungarian nationalists do have a point when they contend that there is another Hungary out there that few visiting Western intellectuals bother to explore.
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2 * See Eva Hoffman: Exit into History, New York: Viking, 1993, pp. 189-261; Claudio Magris: Danube, New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1989, pp. 241-287; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Europe, Europe, New York: Pantheon, pp. 87-132.