Chance Survivor
image of cover of Chance Survivor
Front cover
AuthorAndrew Karpati Kennedy
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Release number
1st edition
Subjectchildhood and youth
Genrememoir
Set inHungary and England
PublishedBristol
PublisherOld Guard Press (Shearsman Books Ltd)
Publication date
15 July 2012
Media typePrint
Pages207
ISBN978-1-84861-190-0
OCLC824602069
940.53161092
LC ClassD811.5 .K456 2012
WebsiteChance Survivor

Chance Survivor (2012) is Andrew Karpati Kennedy's literary memoir of his childhood and youth in Hungary, in a wartime labour camp near Vienna, and, from his mid-teens, at school and university in England.

Summary

"Strong visual, sensory images reconstruct the slow, orderly world of a provincial Hungarian town in the early 1930s and its abrupt collapse, seen through the eyes of a bright, curious little boy born into an affluent, assimilated Jewish family."[1] When the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944, Kennedy and his parents and sister were deported not to Auschwitz as intended but to a labour camp on the outskirts of Vienna. His father died there, but he, his mother and sister survived.[2] Kennedy reprints his evocative account first published in The Observer of travelling on one of the deportation trains.[3] He describes his return to his old school in Debrecen, his brief spell at the Fasori Gimnázium in Budapest and his outings to the theatre and opera as a young teenager.[4] "Part II of the book, set in early postwar England, shows most clearly the trauma sustained by this boy who emerged from the camps alive yet unable to exist in the deepest part of his psyche: the Hungarian language."[5] We see Kennedy moving to England to stay with his uncle in Ware and attending Hertford Grammar School,[6] before earning a place at the University of Bristol to read English Literature.[7] "What follows", writes Lazaroms, "is a long meditation on language, literature, and the tribulations of 'becoming English'."[8]

Critical reception

"With hindsight, one understands what an enormous work of emotional archaeology must have been involved in digging out that little boy from under the ruins of his destroyed world and reconstructing the smells, feelings, spaces and relationships that belonged to it."[9]

Notes

  1. ↑ Yudit Kiss, PN Review, vol. 40, no. 2, November - December 2013.
  2. ↑ See Guardian obituary.
  3. ↑ "The Deportation Train", pp. 80–4 in Chance Survivor was first published under the name Andrew Karpati in The Observer, 16 July 1961, ISSN 0029-7712 OCLC 905673558, p. 21.
  4. ↑ Chance Survivor, chapter 25: "Budapest, 1947 — Annus Mirabilis or Illusion", pp. 122–32.
  5. ↑ Ilse Josepha Lazaroms, Jewish Quarterly, 60:1. 2013, p. 72.
  6. ↑ Chance Survivor, chapter 27: "England, 'Demi-Paradise'", pp. 141–59.
  7. ↑ Chance Survivor, chapter 30, "Maturing or Else", pp. 173–82.
  8. ↑ Ilse Josepha Lazaroms, Jewish Quarterly, 60:1. 2013, p. 72.
  9. ↑ Yudit Kiss, PN Review, vol. 40, no. 2, November - December 2013.
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