It was “a pledge we made together,” Szabó, then 89, recalled in an interview with the writer János Háy. Szabó had been a teacher during the Nazi occupation and was banned from publishing by Hungary’s Communist regime in 1949 (her first novel appeared a decade later), by which time she had joined New Moon, a group of writers who resisted totalitarianism and consequently vowed not to have children. (The fine translation is by Len Rix, whose renderings of “The Door” and “Katalin Street” both earned awards.) Written in 1970, this enduringly popular work completes the author’s portrait of Hungary from World War I to the aftermath of the anti-Soviet uprising in 1956 and reflects the terror that she and her country endured.
Those invaluable volumes are now joined by “Abigail,” a tense, intimate narrative that brilliantly depicts youthful innocence ensnared by lethal menace. (Hermann Hesse was an early advocate.) The author of 50 works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, she remains best known for the novels “Iza’s Ballad” (1963), “Katalin Street” (1969) and “The Door” (1987), all later published in translation by New York Review Books. For Szabó had long been not only Hungary’s most beloved writer, but also a monumental literary figure to readers and writers world-wide. When Magda Szabó died in 2007 at the age of 90, the funeral bells that rang out in her native city of Debrecen on Hungary’s Great Plain seemed to echo across Europe.
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