Antal Szerb

Origins and early life

Antal Szerb was born on 1 May 1901 in Budapest, to assimilated Jewish parents, and was baptized a Catholic as a child — this fiche says so plainly; he figures in this directory by his documented Jewish birth and parents, and it was as a Jew that the Hungarian state would kill him.

Work and career

One of the most cultivated minds of his generation, he wrote at thirty-three a History of Hungarian Literature (1934) that remains a reference, then a History of World Literature (1941), light, witty and immense. His novels made him loved: The Pendragon Legend (1934), a gothic comedy set in Wales, and above all Journey by Moonlight (1937), the story of a Budapest honeymoon that dissolves into a flight through Italy and the past — a cult book in Hungary, and since Len Rix's English translation in the 2000s, a rediscovered European classic.

The anti-Jewish laws stripped him of his university post and banned his books; refusing to flee, he was taken for forced labor in 1944 and beaten to death by Arrow Cross guards in the camp at Balf on 27 January 1945, months before the liberation. His books outlived his murderers.