I fell in love with Kati Marton’s book Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America. Marton was born in 1949 in Budapest, Hungary. Her parents were journalists working for the American press in the 1950s. The author, an accomplished correspondent and prolific writer, chronicles her family’s hardships living in Communist Hungary: the trials of everyday life, the betrayal of friends and the arrest and imprisonment of her parents for allegedly spying for the U.S. Ultimately, the family is able to leave Hungary and move to America.
This is indeed a poignant and compelling story and I wasn’t able to put it down. I have great respect and admiration for this journalist/writer’s brave journey of discovery.
I read about Marton’s book in the New York Times book section in November just as my own memoir – also about Cold War betrayals – was being published. I knew right away that I wanted to read her book and immediately felt a kinship to her story
Like her parents, mine never wanted to look back and so I could never have written my memoir while they were alive. Like her, I had an all-consuming need to know the truth and in my research made painful discoveries. I resonated to the passion with which she pursued the truth even though warned that to do so would mean opening a Pandora’s box. And I imagine that for her as for me, telling the family secrets was a profoundly freeing experience.
