Those Absent On the Hungarian Plain
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.
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Part history, part detective story, part personal memoir, Those Absent brings to life a cast of characters fitting for a Dickensian novel, deals with the fallibility of memory, the nature of prejudice and persecution, and the past as both history and fiction.
Dr Michael Talalay, Writer, Lecturer, Regents University London
A fascinating literary journey, and frank investigation of the region’s daily life, its common beliefs and rarely mentioned truths. Highly recommended.
Mel Cederbaum, Executive Director, Toronto Workmen’s Circle
Part memoir, part travelogue, part history, part elegy, this multi-layered homage to the Great Hungarian Plain embraces its majesty and tragedy at virtually the last possible moment.
Robin Roger, Psychotherapist, Writer, Reviewer
The long history of hatred toward the Jews combined with the exploitation and misery of the peasants have forged Hungarian identity. Jill Culiner’s Central Europe is plagued by the same demons that led to the tragedies of the past century.
Dr Marcel Calvez, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Rennes, France
In a narrative of village life, coarse xenophobia and cruelty contrast with acceptance, friendship and laughter. The horror of the past is concealed, yet Culiner finds compassion in human failure.
Penny-Lynn Cookson, Art Historian, Writer
Jill Culiner
Born in New York, raised in Toronto, Jill Culiner, writer, social critical artist, and photographer has spent most of her life in France, England, Germany, Hungary, Turkey, and the Sahara. Her photographic exhibition about the First and Second World Wars, La Mémoire Effacée, toured France, Canada, and Hungary under the auspices of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and UNESCO. Her non-fiction book, Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers, won the Joseph and Faye Tannenbaum Prize for Canadian Jewish History.
Her latest book, Those Absent On the Great Hungarian Plain (Claret Press 2024) won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Biographies/Memoirs 2024.
She presently lives in a former auberge in France that is so chaotic and strange, it has been classified as a museum.
Books by this author:
