The Summer My Father Died

Yudit Kiss has grown up a Communist, sponged up her father’s ideology unquestioningly. So as a child she is puzzled when others refer to her as Jewish, all she knows is that her family don’t believe in a God. How can they? As her father lies dying, Yudit and her sisters take it upon themselves to write the story of their father. His communist ideology, where it came from, and the enigma surrounding his family’s past are all wisps of a family history story that have never been explored in his lifetime. Learning more and more about her father’s tragic history, how his Jewish family was almost completely annihilated during the Second World War, how in order to save him his mother was compelled to give him up to an orphanage, a slow awakening is kindled within her. Yudit is confronted with the contradictions and lies that make up her countries – and family’s life. Throughout this tender and painful discovery she is reunited with members of her father’s family that he had rejected – just as he himself had been left feeling rejected by them. Lyrical, poetic and pierced with black humour, The Summer My Father Died is a stunning and achingly beautiful memoir..