Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Place

Winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Biographies/Memoirs 2024 |

A Hungarian village on the Great Plain: a microcosm reflecting this country's history from early tribal invasion to Soviet subordination to European Community membership. Here, peasants, herders, party girls, former Nazis and lapsed communists share gossip as well as love stories; and unscrupulous leaders, totalitarian or freely elected, decide behaviour.

Like a fly in amber, this is a moment captured of a time and a place under peaceful upheaval. The old ways are vanishing. But what is being lost and what is remaining only slowly comes clear.

Celebrated photographer and author, Jill Culiner, spends years of her life there, chronicling these changes, learning the language and buying property. She is as committed as any. She weaves her own story with the story of that community and the history of living on the edge of the Great Hungarian Plain.

It's a raw story, honestly told, of a people crisscrossed with violence and hatreds, loves and escapes.

There remains one constant: hatred of the long-vanished rural Jew.