Themes in Magda Szabo's novels

Started reading Magda Szabo's early (1967) novel, Katalin Street, another smart New York Review Books publication, a publishing house that has done so much to restore, resurrect, and discover great works of known and lesser-known novelists. Szabo is one of the NYRB success stories; publication of The Door got wide attention and brought both NYBR and Szabo into the awareness of discriminating readers, and NYRB followed w/ Iza's Ballad and, now, w/ Katalin Street. (They're publishing her works out of sequence, as translations - from Hungarian - become available; not sure how many more are in the line.) From the first 50 or so pp of Katalin Street a few obvious Szabo themes emerge, themes treated in each of the 3 novels available in English: nostalgia or at least vivid memories about childhood homes and villages, now long gone (destroyed in WWII, change by Soviet occupation, "modernized"), complex family relationships in which a powerful daughter dominates a more passive mother or father or both, an adult's relinquishment of power and authority to either younger family member or hired help, professional classes edged out of their profession, anti-Semitism (under Nazi domination - never under Soviet domination, Szabo had to watch her step as there was little freedom of expression in Hungary during her lifetime), the difficulty particularly among the elderly of adapting to chnaged social structures under communist rule, especially the changes in housing - communal dwellings, tight quarters, multiple generations under one roof, and, finally, the surprising prosperity of life at least for some under communist rule - better health care, eradication of lowest levels of poverty, professional opportunities esp for women (in law, medicine) - we can see why the censors allowed Szabo to publish from the 60s through the 90s, though there are also subtle critiques of Soviet rule that the censors may have been too obtuse to discern. 



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