Tag #133985 - Interview #78503 (Katalin Andai)

My father brought home everything from the Orvosi Hetilap [Medical Weekly] to the Kerteszek Lapja [Gardeners’ Paper]. There was the literary periodical, Mult es Jovo [Past and Future, a Jewish periodical], Egyenloseg [Equality, a Jewish weekly], Nyugat [West, a modern literary periodical that has since taken on near-mythical status]. The morning’s paper was the Pesti Naplo, after lunch the Est, and in the afternoon there was the Magyarorszag. He brought that home, too. My mother read everything from horticultural papers to medical ones, but my father didn’t. He mostly read the Jewish ones. My father read only in Hungarian – he wasn’t a very talented linguist  and loved classical things very much, such as Ancient Greek and Latin. He knew Ancient Greek from school. But he read Hungarian and German classics as well. Unfortunately, when it came to light in 1925 that a little tubercular center remained from my mother’s pneumonia, he had to sell his hundred volumes of Jokai [one of the most famous Hungarian romantic prose-writers]. My mother read everything, even in German. Dr. Norbert Langer had a rental library on Andrassy Street, we were registered there and we rented books from there. My father also bought books but not as many as he would have liked.