Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America | 
| Author: Kati Marton
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 8711
Format: Deckle Edge
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 1416586121
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.9069140922439
EAN: 9781416586128
ASIN: 1416586121
Publication Date: October 20, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| • | ISBN13: 9781416586128 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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Product Description
"You are opening a Pandora's box," Marton was warned when she filed for her family's secret police fi les in Budapest. But her family history -- during both the Nazi and the Communist periods -- was too full of shadows. The files revealed terrifying truths: secret love aff airs, betrayals inside the family circle, torture and brutalities alongside acts of stunning courage -- and, above all, deep family love.In this true-life thriller, Kati Marton, an accomplished journalist, exposes the cruel mechanics of the Communist Terror State, using the secret police files on her journalist parents as well as dozens of interviews that reveal how her family was spied on and betrayed by friends and colleagues, and even their children's babysitter. In this moving and brave memoir, Marton searches for and finds her parents, and love. Marton relates her eyewitness account of her mother's and father's arrests in Cold War Budapest and the terrible separation that followed. She describes the pain her parents endured in prison -- isolated from each other and their children. She reveals the secret war between Washington and Moscow, in which Marton and her family were pawns in a much larger game. By the acclaimed author of The Great Escape, Enemies of the People is a tour de force, an important work of history as it was lived, a narrative of multiple betrayals on both sides of the Cold War that ends with triumph and a new beginning in America.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 46
 Reflections On The Past February 25, 2010
Michael Finegan (Concord, NC 28027)
Enemies of the People brought back many memories from the past. As a chid of the 1950's "cold war", I can remember this time and place in history. My uncle Joe of European heritage, hated the communists and as a child,I was subjected to his long conversations with his fellow countrymen. Reading Enemies of the People has given me a deeper understanding of communist rule. I am so overwhelmed by the courage of the Marton family. I admire the author Kati Marton,for having the inner strength to re-live this terrible time in history and in her own life. I highly recommend reading Enemies of the People,it will give you a true sense of what freedom really is.
 OK read February 18, 2010
C Wahlman (Merrillville, IN)
I truly thought I would love this book. I loved Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret and I thought since the vine recommended this for me that this book would be similar: Family intrigue, old world versus new world, but actually more compelling since Kati Marton's personal history deals with communism, real-life spy parents, and escape. Unfortunately, she became bogged down by details--too many irrelevant details. It slowed the story and made it difficult to continue reading. I know many people liked this book, some even loved it. But for me it is just too tiring to enjoy.
Remember February 17, 2010
Andras
Hard times should be remembered. The communist dictatorship was such a time. The reaction in the free world was exagerated.
Kati Marton went through an enormous amount of documents the uncover those years.
The reading is both informative and entertaining
Learn and enjoy at the same time February 17, 2010
Ludwik Kowalski (Fort Lee, NJ USA)
This book is very informative and very well written. I could not stop reading it. The book is a good example for those who write autobiographies. I wish my book were at least one half as good as the "Enemy of the People." Learn and enjoy at the same time.
Ludwik Kowalski, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus,
Montclair State University
A Unique Hungarian Story February 10, 2010
Leslie Kriebel (Massachusetts)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Book review of Kati Marton (2009) Enemies of the People: My family's journey to America. NY: Simon & Schuster, by Leslie Kriebel.
In spite of the fact that much of the content of this book is derived from the archives of the Hungarian secret police dating back to the communist era, this is the memoir of a child. How many of us could reconstruct our lives from zero to pre-teens, and if we did, how would it come across? Apart from some written materials by her parents, and some interviews, Kati Marton has done an admirable job piecing very complex parts of hers and her parents' lives together; it is an impressive feat. That said, the book needs more editing, and begs for a more complex explanation of her parents' behavior; indeed one comes away wondering what was their actual strategy, or were they flying by the seats of their pants - as their desperate attempt to find boats that would ferry them across the Danube, at one point, suggests? Their ultimate escape from Hungary, coupled with her own revelation that her father was approached to spy for Hungary in America, certainly is the stuff of any good cold war drama.
This is not a story of your average Hungarian family, let alone an average Budapest family. Kati Marton was the daughter of two journalists who were descended from Jews who had either lost their lives or all their belongings in the Nazi occupation of Hungary. Contrary to what one would expect if the story had started out this way, her parents did not keep their noses down, out of sight, and clean - which is what most Hungarians did at this time (1950s) even if they were not of Jewish descent. Her parents stood tall as if they carried a precious cultural tradition with them that had been shattered by the establishment of the Iron Curtain. This tradition is urban, sophisticated, erudite, imperialist, bourgeois, and materialist. Her parents embodied it and perhaps appeared to their fellow Hungarians not so much as "naïve" but more likely as "well connected." The Chinese describe someone who dares to display controversial behavior as having a "roof," meaning: protection in high places. The Martons no doubt appeared to many to have such a protection - otherwise how could they get away with such behavior? Of course implicit in this popular view of protection, is the notion that the communist leadership and their families lived by one set of rules and standards while the rest of the population lived by another.
Marton's explanation for her parents' admittedly reckless behavior while living in Budapest during the Stalinist era (driving one of only a few private cars, wearing western clothing, fraternizing almost exclusively with western journalists and diplomats..) is that they were either extremely naïve, or they had a great deal of bravado. Given that both parents suffered significant loss of family and wealth in the Nazi period, it is difficult to believe that they would have emerged so utterly naïve. She herself admits that her parents were oddballs - and she knew this even as a child. She was sent to school in outfits which drew attention to their bourgeois-type lifestyle at a time when average people feared being noticed by any officials. This story necessarily lacks a contrasting outsider perspective such as another character whose life we also see at an intimate level but with which we could contrast hers. One gets the impression that the contact she had with other, "normal" Hungarians, was indeed limited.
It occurred to me as I read this book that her parents were not in the least bit naïve. Rather, they may well have decided that life without freedom was not worth living. Unlike Kati's grandparents (one pair killed in Auschwitz the other gone into hiding only to flee the country), her own parents took a bet on their own bravado and beliefs, and on the possibility that the foreigners they befriended would assist them if the need arose. (This was also perhaps a bet made by the Nagy government in 1956, but as we know the west turned a deaf ear.) Perhaps for some young Jews emerging out of the Nazi period this is one possible, fatalistic approach to life. Lack of trust in a socialist government which ultimately turned over their relatives to the Nazis and seized their property is understandable, and this might have led to an inflated view of the ability of westerners in Budapest to be of assistance. Once the war was over, the only force or authority to be trusted, from their point of view, was that of the Allied presence in the form of the foreign press and the small diplomatic core.
Marton does us a service by contrasting over and over the strong values which are implicit in the western attitude towards a free and independent press with the complete lack of reverence for these values as signified by the behaviors of the communist led Hungarian government. Her parents and she paid a price to deliver information to the world about life in Hungary - particularly during the 1956 Revolution - and it is easy to take this hidden cost for granted in the west, particularly at this moment when respect for investigative reporting is at its lowest. Her family was far more fortunate than the Hungarian nation as whole, as the Soviet tanks rolled in to crush the liberalizing regime of Imre Nagy. This could potentially work as a film if taken on by a director sensitive to the socialist reality of the times and who can create contrast between hers and even a fictional local family, so that the risks the Martons took are most fully appreciated and the sufferings of the Hungarian people are accurately conveyed.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 46
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