Fatelessness

The wartime Budapest of a fifteen-year-old boy who is marked, taken and deported in the summer of 1944. The map holds the ordinary points of his last free weeks, a Pest flat, an apprentice job across the river at Csepel, and the brickyard on the northern edge where a stopped bus ends the ordinary. From there the novel travels out of the frame to the camps and, at the last, returns to a city that has changed while he was gone.

György Köves

The Köves family flat, Pest

Chapter 1

The book opens on an ordinary domestic evening: the boy's father is being sent to a forced-labour service, and the family gathers for a last meal before he goes. The scene belongs to Jewish Budapest in 1944, a life of yellow stars, curfews and permits that still looks, from the inside, like normal life.

Chapter 1

inferred The novel does not give the family an address; it places them in a Jewish household in wartime Budapest, so this marks Erzsébetváros, the historic Jewish quarter of Pest and the heart of the district later sealed as a ghetto.

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