The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus are the first and the second novels by Hungarian writer Gabor Schein. Published together in one volume, they comprise the first in Seagull Books s new Hungarian List series. Both novels trace the legacy of the Holocaust in Hungary. The Book of Mordechai tells the story of three generations in a Hungarian Jewish family, interwoven with the biblical narrative of Esther. Lazarus relates the relationship between a son, growing up in the in the final decades of late-communist Hungary, and his father, who survived the depredations of Hungarian fascists during the Second World War. Mordechai is an act of recovery an attempt to seize a coherent story from a historical maelstrom. By contrast, Lazarus , like Kafka s unsent letter to his own father, is an act of defiance. Against his father s wish to never be the subject of his son s writing, the narrator goes on to place his father at the center of his story.

Together, both novels speak to a contemporary Hungarian society which remains all too silent towards the crimes of the past.".