Children's plays in literature and other observations re Szabo

Trying to keep the characters and relationships straight as I read further into Magda Szabo's Katalin Street (1967); the first section gives the characters and their lives present-day (i.e. late 60s), w/ Iren divorced from Balit and married to another doctor and a parent of 2 (?), Blanka living on a Greek island and married to a Greek man, Henrietta visiting Blanka on the island, and that's all I can remember. Then we move back in time, to 1934, when Julietta, then a child of about 5, and her parents - the Helds, father a successful dentist - move to the eponymous street and are welcomed by their neighbors into a very close-knit social circle. Their bing Jewish does not seem, at that time, to have been a factor. Neighbors include the Elekes (?) family, with the father the headmaster of a school, which is two daughters, Iren, the "good" daughter and top student, and the absent-minded but kind-hearted Blanka, both attend. The children, "directed" by Mr. Elekes, put on an original play to celebrate the achievements and valor of another neighbor, the Major, who has had a military career - unbeknownst to others he wishes he had been able to enter another field rather than the military. This impromptu children's play seems to have been a European tradition: I remember the conclusion of Atonement with an original play, also the beginning of Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly - these children's plays reveal to readers/viewers something about the family and the society and also about the inter-relations and power relations among the children. It seems that Szabo will re-vist the street and these neighbors at 10-year intervals over the course of the novel, through which we will see the effect of the WWII on Hungarian families, particularly Jewish families, and later perhaps the affect of the arrival of communism and Soviet domination, though Szabo had to play her hand carefully in this regard, writing from Hungary in the 1960s.
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