Episode 4
George Szirtes reads his award-winning memoir about his mother, and her hidden history. Tender and profoundly moving, it’s a life told backwards.
George Szirtes reads his award-winning memoir about his mother, Magda. Her turbulent life reflects the drama of the 20th century.
She survived incarceration in two different concentration camps during the Second World War and then settled in Hungary - but fled with her family in 1956. Arriving as a refugee in London, serious illness forced her to abandon professional work and to live at home as a housewife, where she began the process of “Englishing” her family.
The Photographer at Sixteen reveals a life told backwards, from the depths of Magda’s final days to her girlhood as an ambitious photographer in Budapest. The woman who emerges is beautiful, energetic, direct, warm and passionate. It is a book born of curiosity, of guilt, and of love.
In this fourth episode, George Szirtes uncovers the painful history of his mother’s time in the concentration camps.
After the War, she returns to her home city of Cluj in Romania to try to find her family; but discovers that her old neighbours don’t want to know her.
“Returning home was not a simple matter. Magda’s real bitterness was not evident in the immediate aftermath of the camps but followed the discovery that all her family had perished, and that their perishing was greeted by either indifference or pleasure by those who had previously seemed good-natured and neighbourly.”
George Szirtes is a poet and translator who escaped to Britain with his family after the 1956 Hungarian uprising. He’s the author of some 25 books of poetry. The Photographer at Sixteen won the 2020 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.
Read by the author, George Szirtes
Abridged and produced by Elizabeth Burke
A Loftus Media production for ±«Óătv Radio 4
Last on
Broadcasts
- Thu 18 Mar 2021 09:45±«Óătv Radio 4 FM
- Fri 19 Mar 2021 00:30±«Óătv Radio 4