In a post I wrote earlier this week, I mentioned I will spend Christmas in a small town in southern Hungary close to the region where I set the first part of my novel. The town is called Bonyhád and - knowing next to nothing about the place - I did a little light research into it online. The first two hits my browser pulled up were Wikipedia links - one in English; the other in Hungarian.
The English Wikipedia page dedicated to Bonyhád provides cursory information about the town's current mayor and some of the settlement's facilities, but the rest of the page focuses exclusively on the tragic history of Bonyhád's Jewish population, most of whom were deported to Auschwitz during the Second World War. The remaining information on the page details the fate of Bonyhád's surviving Jews who remained in the town until 1956, after which most decided to flee to America or Israel. The English Wikipedia page ends by citing Bonyhád's last remaining Jewish resident - a woman named Mrs. Sári Warum - who died in 2013.
The Hungarian Wikipedia page about Bonyhád is far more thorough and comprehensive. It expansively chronicles the settlement's establishment in the fourteenth century and even makes note of traces of earlier possible Celtic settlements in the same location. The page then moves through the centuries, making concise stops at a few key historic dates in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The Jewish population is acknowledged in passing in a segment reporting on the town's religious and ethnic composition, but no mention is made of the deportations to Auschwitz. Instead, the page dedicates a few sentences to the Danube-Swabians and other ethnic Germans who were persecuted, dispossessed, and expelled from the town after the Second World War.
The English page focuses almost entirely Bonyhád's Jews to the exclusion of practically everything else while the Hungarian page concentrates on everything else and barely mentions Bonyhád's Jews.
Talk about two solitudes.
The English Wikipedia page dedicated to Bonyhád provides cursory information about the town's current mayor and some of the settlement's facilities, but the rest of the page focuses exclusively on the tragic history of Bonyhád's Jewish population, most of whom were deported to Auschwitz during the Second World War. The remaining information on the page details the fate of Bonyhád's surviving Jews who remained in the town until 1956, after which most decided to flee to America or Israel. The English Wikipedia page ends by citing Bonyhád's last remaining Jewish resident - a woman named Mrs. Sári Warum - who died in 2013.
The Hungarian Wikipedia page about Bonyhád is far more thorough and comprehensive. It expansively chronicles the settlement's establishment in the fourteenth century and even makes note of traces of earlier possible Celtic settlements in the same location. The page then moves through the centuries, making concise stops at a few key historic dates in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The Jewish population is acknowledged in passing in a segment reporting on the town's religious and ethnic composition, but no mention is made of the deportations to Auschwitz. Instead, the page dedicates a few sentences to the Danube-Swabians and other ethnic Germans who were persecuted, dispossessed, and expelled from the town after the Second World War.
The English page focuses almost entirely Bonyhád's Jews to the exclusion of practically everything else while the Hungarian page concentrates on everything else and barely mentions Bonyhád's Jews.
Talk about two solitudes.
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