Kata - the first year

Since September 2024, when Open Books Hungary published my biographical novel #Kata - Karady the rebel diva, the book has been in the stores. Reviewed here by Hanna Zelma Horanyi https://hlo.hu/review/male-violence-and-the-femme-fatale-who-fought.htm

We launched it at the Budapest International Book Festival in September, and by the end of 2024 the publisher had already sold more than a thousand copies. I returned in June 2025 for the Budapest Book Week and had two important events. In the Bayor Gizi Actors Museum, that also features in the book as a setting, I had a discussion with Dr. Tamas Gajdo about my inspirations and research. It was a wonderful feeling to be talking about the story in the same room where Kata and so many of the characters lived and breathed during the darkly sparkling years of WWII and Stalinism. Dr Gajdo created a presentation illustrated with film clips and photos, remembering this star and legend.

The next day, we moved on and celebrated #Bloomsday in #Szombathely. We screened my 2007 documentary, The Bloom Mystery, in the Szavaria Cinema, followed by a talk with Renátó Fehér, poet, discussing the Hungarian connection in Joyce's Ulysses. Kata's connection with Szombathely is poignant. She gave her last concert in Hungary at the Hotel Kovacs (later Szavaria), before sneaking through the border, twenty kilometres away from the city, in 1951. All this happened just a week after the death and funeral of Gizi Bayor, the most celebrated theatre actor of her generation, and her husband Tibor German, a double suicide, we believe now, under the pressure of the Stalinist regime. Kata, this resilient woman, who had been attacked by the far right, then captured and tortured by the Gestapo, was the saviour of countless Jews. She found a way to save herself, escape and emigrate. Her later life was less eventful, but just as interesting - an Odyssey in Europe and South America, until she settled in the US in New York. For the rest of her life, although she gave a few concerts, she worked as a sales assistant in a hat salon run by her lifelong friend, Irma Frank, on Madison Avenue. Worth exploring as we agreed with Dr Gajdo...

photocredit @Livankha