"Certain groups are united only by storytelling" - András Kepes is interested in anecdotes - the article was published on the Maszol.ro portal. Kepes was a guest of the 10th Cluj-Napoca Holiday Book Week, and Tasi Annabella's article is about the conversation that took place there, which you can read here
We highlight two ideas from this.
At the writer-reader meeting, among other things, the writer said: it is a peculiarity of Eastern Europe that a nation does not have a common history, so in his opinion neither do we, the Hungarians, we do not think about what happened to us in the last hundred years, the narrative that it is about the 20th century.
He believes in the power of storytelling, but he experiences with a bitter taste that Hungarians do not have a common history, instead his generation "re-lies" the past every ten years, and the narrative about the events of the 20th century has lost its credibility.
At the end of the conversation, András Kepes also revealed a personal story: although he is visiting Cluj-Napoca for the first time, he has such a connection to the city that his uncle was Imre Kádár, the former director of the Hungarian Theater in Cluj-Napoca. His aunt and grandfather lived in Magyarzzombor, they were taken from there during the Holocaust, and on his current trip to Transylvania, he wants to get to know their story, because there is someone who would tell about them.
We are eagerly awaiting the new work, especially with the view that "Hungarians do not have a common history, instead their generation 're-lies' the past every ten years." Not to mention that the facts are sometimes distorted in fairy tales, and this can also happen in storytelling.
