was born in Szajla, a village in north-eastern Hungary in 1943. Oravecz is a major poet and writer. He has been awarded a number of prestigious prizes, including the Kossuth Prize (2003), the Artisjus Prize (2008), the Prima (2015) and the Aegon Prize (2016). Oravecz started publishing poetry in 1962. From the 1960s until the regime change, he defected from communist Hungary to Western Europe and to the US several times. Since 1995, he has been a lecturer at the Péter Pázmány Catholic University, teaching German literature and Native American culture. His latest novels published by Magvető are a trilogy about the disintegration of the Hungarian village.
Photo © Lenke Szilágyi
The Ditch of Ondrok
California Quail
The Ol’ Country
In this story of three generations in a Hungarian village, Oravecz records the history of the disintegration of rural culture. In the author’s native Szajla, a village that has gained almost mythic proportions thanks to Oravecz, we follow the Árvai family, from a grandfather who had fought in the War of Independence against the Habsburgs in 1848 to a grandson who becomes ‘unfaithful to the land’ and leaves the country in hope of a better fortune. A lost world comes alive as Oravecz depicts the life of peasants in stunning detail – everyday life and festivities, birth and death, love and loneliness, as well as the dilemma of staying or leaving.
Oravecz’s novel tells the story of Steve Arvai, the son of Hungarian farmers who had emigrated to America around the turn of the 20th century. A native of California, Steve loses his job during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and decides to try his luck in Hungary, his parents’ old country. Though initially Steve’s American know-how and free spirit help him become a successful farmer in Hungary, with the passage of time, moving to the old country turns out to have been a mistake: though Steve’s farm manages to survive the hardships of the war economy of the 1940s, it is dealt a fatal blow by the communist regime that follows. The novel ends with Steve and his family crossing the Hungary-Austria border after the Russian invasion that followed the 1956 revolution.
Around the turn of the century, masses of poor Hungarians set off to America with the hope of making a fortune in the New World. István Árvai, his wife and two children are among them. They leave Hungary with the intention to make some money, then return and buy some land. However, the world they had left behind will be lost forever, ravaged by World War I and the Treaty of Trianon which left Hungary with roughly one-third of its pre-war territory and two-thirds of its population. Thus, István Árvai and his family (like Oravecz’s grandparents) eventually decide not to return to their homeland. Imre Oravecz spent years in the US in the 1970s, travelling back and forth between the US and Hungary, before eventually returning to settle in his native village, Szajla. He did extensive research about the life of Hungarian communities of workers on oil rigs in Toledo, Ohio and Southern California to produce this pageturner of a novel which narrates the life of these unsung people, hovering between homesickness and the desire to make a new home in the New World.
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