Agnes Arany was born in Hungary
in the last year of WWII and grew up in a country faced with the
difficulties of rebuilding on every level, human and economic. She
witnessed firsthand the heaviest oppression of the communist era, when
people regularly disappeared overnight, never to be seen again, and
where every kind of exploitation and injury to human dignity was
commonplace. The regime wanted people’s souls as well, forcing atheism
on them. In this hostile world full of lies, the family was the only
source of love and understanding, but equally importantly, the only
source of truth, which she has been searching for ever since.
Her present collection of short stories first appeared in Hungarian in 2003 in Budapest.
Her
longest story, the semi-autobiographical “Love Me Black or Love Me
White,” describes the hypocrisy of the communist regime as well as the
state of mind of the world around her, which saw only skin color instead
of human beings.
A Russian major at the University of Budapest, she
worked as an interpreter in the Soviet Union in order to see the actual
“roots” of communism. This is the source of the autobiographical
“Violations,” a true story with nothing added or omitted. The author’s
further fate is told in this story. Leaving her native country, she
moved to West Germany, where she graduated at Eberhard-Karls University
in Tübingen with an M.A. in Slavic and American studies.
She traveled
widely, which is why each story takes place in a different country. She
spent years in Singapore and in Hong Kong, where she was a lecturer of
German at Hong Kong Baptist University. In 1988, she married Dr. Adam
Makkai, a professor of Linguistics and a poet, and after his retirement
they moved from Chicago to Hawaii, where they now live.
The author is
a keen observer of reality around her, with deep and genuine sympathy
for the world’s downtrodden. The stories “Wives Are Best When Thrashed,”
“The Old Hindu” and “Palm Branch and Typhoon” were inspired by actual
events the author witnessed. She describes the world as she sees it,
with her conviction that life is the greatest storyteller. She also
happens to believe in reincarnation, which is not tied to nationality,
gender, or race.
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