Where the Angels Lived: One Family's Story of Exile, Loss, and Return - Softcover

McMullan, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 194459308X ISBN 13: 9781944593087

Publisher: Calypso Editions, 2019

Synopsis

The moment she discovers the existence of Richard, a long-lost relative, at Israel’s Holocaust Museum, Margaret McMullan begins an unexpected journey of revelation and connectivity as she tirelessly researches the history of her ancestors, the Engel de Jánosis. Propelled by a Fulbright cultural exchange that sends her to teach at a Hungarian University, Margaret, her husband and teenage son all eagerly travel to Pécs, the land of her mother’s Jewish lineage. After reaching Pécs, a Hungarian town both small and primarily Christian, Margaret realizes right then and there how difficult her mission is going to be. Heart-wrenching, passionate and insightful, Where the Angels Lived by Margaret McMullan beautifully documents the relentless determination of a woman picking up the pieces of her family’s fragmented history throughout the Hungarian Holocaust.

“The destruction of the Jews in the country districts of Hungary was a simple business. The Germans made good use of their experience gained annihilating between three to four million Polish, German and Austrian Jews.”

In Where the Angels Lived, Margaret quickly discovers just how distinguished and influential her relatives appear to have been before the Holocaust. However, no one seems to recall the man whose name she saw that day in Israel: Richard Engel de Jánosi. With the help of students, strangers, and long-lost relatives, Margaret slowly pieces together bits of information about Richard’s past she never would have found without venturing to her family’s homeland.

While Margaret’s research starts to reap its own rewards, the road to discovery still comes at a price. Back in the United States, Margaret’s father is sick and her mother is looking frailer every time they Skype. Despite her parents’ deteriorating health, there is much more work to be done abroad.

“Remembering the dead, especially family members is important. I know this.”

As Margaret struggles to discover why Richard’s existence is wiped from Pécs history, her journey soon becomes her mother’s journey, a nation’s journey, and even perhaps, all of our journeys to reconnect with an inexplicable past.

“Sitting there in the pew carved of Moravian oak, I start to shake. I curse every last Hungarian who deported or murdered my family. See? Look at me. My mother got out and she had me and I had a son. You didn’t end us.”

Historical, authentic and family-oriented, Where the Angels Lived tells the tale of a somewhat parallel universe that exists even in the 21st century—dealings with Soviet-style bureaucracy; skepticism; anti-Semitism; and ironically the same sort of isolation and rejection Margaret’s Jewish Hungarian family experienced in 1944 before they were forced into concentration camps. Straddling memoir and reportage, past and present, this story reminds us all that we can escape a country, but we can never escape history.

About this title

Review

“Margaret McMullan has written a beautiful and heartrending account of her pilgrimage to Pécs, Hungary in the hope of retrieving what she can of the story of a distant (Jewish) relative, lost in the Holocaust. Written with her usual vividly realized, emotionally engaging prose, in which Margaret emerges as a protagonist with whom the reader identifies, Where the Angels Lived is a powerful testament of familial mourning as well as a vision of 20th century European history that is both searing and uplifting.”

-Joyce Carol Oates

“An absolutely riveting story by an utterly engaging narrator–a triumphant blend of honesty, insight, research and imagination. The lethal, irrational hostility of one people towards another is movingly conveyed in all its appalling vividness, at the same time as a vein of humor and delight in discovering and recovering the past animates the prose. McMullan’s best book.”

-Phillip Lopate

“An impressive textual monument of the impact of Nazi genocide and the Shoah on individual lives and family, even three generations after the actual events. [McMullan] does not hesitate to point out the social dissonances, sometimes even in the form of “hatred,” that still persist on many different levels as a consequence of this massive crime against humanity. Facing these dissonances is a necessary step towards a sustainable form of remembrance.”

-Dr. Christian Dürr, Mauthausen Memorial

“Where the Angels Lived is an engaging, humorous account of one American’s discovery of family roots and her personal struggle to understand the hate-filled history of 20th century Europe. Like Edmund de Waal’s Hare with the Amber Eyes, McMullan pieces together the lost story of her forgotten ancestor and reminds us all how easy it is for humans to willfully ignore the murderous past and contemporary evil.”

-Evelyn Farkas, Senior Fellow, German Marshall Fund; National Security Contributor, NBC/MSNBC

“Into this terrifying moment of severe intolerance in America, arrives this meticulously researched, soul-driven account of the generational trauma caused by another country that turned on and gave up its own. Margaret McMullan did not ask for the assignment that sent her and her family to Hungary to mourn an unknown family member lost to the Holocaust, but her radical courage, determination and stamina in the face of that assignment is breathtaking, insisting we pay attention, to the crimes of the past and our actions in the present, because, of course, it can happen here.”

-Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek

“McMullan brings us along on a fascinating journey to discover the history of her once influential and industrious family – the Engel de Jánosi....They are entrepreneurs, musicians, lovers, builders and fighters, who, without the author’s painstaking research, would have been erased from history forever.”

-Eleni Kounalakis, Lt. Governor of California & U.S. Ambassador to Hungary (2010-2013)

“McMullan beautifully pieces together a family history and the history of a country and its ethnic groups to create a stirring and highly informative narrative, full of information, wonderful wisdom and anecdotes, both sorrowful and joyful.”

-Josip Novakovich, April Fool’s Day

 

Edition details

• Publisher: Calypso Editions
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 194459308X
• ISBN 13: 9781944593087
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272