78 Spring Street (Tavasz utca 78)

About the Book

The apartment building where I grew up had peeling paint and unkempt trees and bushes. Perhaps the twenty families living in nineteen apartments didn’t even notice that it was not only the walls of the building that were chipping away little by little simply because they were glad that they had a roof above their heads. As I was growing up, each family represented its own soap opera to me. As a child, I became fascinated and, as a teenager, was appalled by the people, the tenants, who lived there and the hypocrisy that surrounded my family and me in our everyday life. One could only imagine how deeply they came to be part of my life with good but, most of the time, bad intentions. After all these years, those memories are as fresh as a harvested bouquet of flowers that still had the morning dew on its buds. I had to write about them; I needed to write about them. Why? Because I owe them a great deal. “For what?” you may ask. The answer lies in the stories that took place at 78 Spring Street: Tavasz Utca 78.

About the Author

I came into this troubled world during the early morning hours of June 17, 1950, in the city of Budapest, Hungary. I was the first and last child of my forty-one-year-old mother and my father, who was forty-five years old at the time of my birth. As I did not know any better, I could not possibly understand that we were living in poverty—as I was growing up with loving parents, and there was always a bite to eat. My childhood was poor and saddened with tragedies. As a six-year-old child, I witnessed the bloody 1956 revolution and received the first taste of true prejudice by those I thought liked us yet turned against my family. That tragedy did not match the untimely death of my beloved father on February 14, 1957, when I was not yet seven years old. My mother remarried in 1959, and our financial situation was upgraded from poverty to poor. After finishing elementary school, I made a decision to earn money as soon as possible to ease our financial situation, and I enrolled in a two-year business college (high school diploma was not required). I received my associate degree in 1966, and I began to work as a sixteen-year-old certified secretary/bookkeeper. During the same period, I began my high school education, which I completed while working full-time and attending night school. I discovered my love for writing when I was eleven years old, after a movie that my childhood friend and I saw in the movie theater. We were not pleased with the ending, and Steven suggested that I should write a different ending that we both liked, and voilà, a writer was born. With my family’s encouragement, I entered a writing contest given by a youth-oriented magazine, and to my genuine surprise, I won second prize. My desire to live in a free country and to improve my life was so great that in 1972—leaving everything, including my aging parents, behind—I managed to escape from Hungary during a tour to Austria then Yugoslavia and Italy. I spent almost nine long months in a rat-infested refugee camp located in Capua, Italy, while I waited for official permission to immigrate to the country of my dreams—the USA. In 1975 I met and married a wonderful man—my husband, Guy. Thanks to his everlasting patience, he assisted me in my task of learning the English language. He is truly my partner for life, and I remain forever grateful to him for standing by me in some tough times. It is difficult for me to describe my love for writing. I cannot think of a bigger emotional joy for an author than to see a published novel in somebody’s hand and to see a story come alive on the screen. I yearn to experience that joy.