Bøger af Pál Závada

A novel exploring the descent of superficially decent people into vindictive killers.   What could bring people to form a mob and attack others? What circumstances could provoke a thirst for blood at the market square? Who will gang up to batter their neighbor, improbably returned from deportation? How can a person be swept up among lynchers? Pál Závada's novel examines and analyses the anti-Semitic mass hysteria and political opportunism surrounding the pogroms in Hungary that followed World War II and the Holocaust. In May 1946, at the village market, Mária Csóka witnessed a group of women set upon and beat to death a Jewish egg seller. The wife of a schoolteacher accused of anti-Semitic incitement, and daughter of a respected shopkeeper, Mária fears for her husband's life yet cannot ignore the victims. The murderous fury spreads through the neighborhood like wildfire, dragging out women, children, and the elderly alike. Mária's notes from the bloody day at the village market and from the subsequent trial in Budapest testify to a state of human relations that is intimately complex and irreparably scarred.

En torvedag udspiller sig i 1946 og bygger på virkelige begivenheder. Hovedscenen er sat i den ungarske landsby Kunvadas, hvortil hundrede lokaler jøder er vendt hjem efter Anden Verdenskrigs afslutning.Ved et tilfælde overværer en kvinde et overfald på en jødisk æggehandler, der får fatale konsekvenser. Ikke blot for æggehandleren, men også for øjenvidnet og hendes mand, der er under anklage for at have indtaget en tvivlsom position under krigen. I de følgende dage breder et voldsomt massehysteri sig som en løbeild, hvor ingen kan vide sig sikre. For krigens mistro og had trækker spor langt ind i fredstid.En torvedag giver et væsentligt indblik i en del af den europæiske efterkrigshistorie, som ikke er almindelig kendt, men som ikke desto mindre skitserer nogle vigtige erfaringer, der synes højaktuelle og relevante at fremdrage den dag i dag.