Title: Fényudvar
First published: 1996
Description: The volume contains two short novels.

A girl is born in Budapest, Hungary in the 1970s, the socialist era, into freedom (no obligatory, crippling religion) and into safety (everyone has a job). When she is 24, she writes this novel based on her personal memories and that of her parents’ and grandparent’s. WWII, 1956, the 1960s appear embedded into her photographs about Budapest – in associative order. We learn how she become a pioneer, learnt Russian, how she discovered vaginal pleasures (yes, that is what women call sex in Hungary), boys, men, love, how she got fascinated with Russian culture and how she experienced the wind of change – which was believed to be the wind of hope once. 

The other girl witnesses her old district being torn down, people loosing their jobs and her favorite places in the city getting old and derelict. Then she goes into the Budapest night, fascinated: it is men, again, who mean a real comfort to her in a world where she has to admit: network marketing strategies and religious indoctrination are very similar to the Marxist-socialist eyewash she had to put up with when she was a child. 

The title Fényudvar refers to a German-Hungarian word „lichthof” which literally mean „a yard of light” a special constructional phenomenon present only in Budapest and Vienna – a little yard between big city houses standing very close to each other to let some light and air in, especially into apartments on the lower floors. It also has a symbolic meaning: it means a short era in history, when people grow up in peace and enjoy they freedom between the burned out, sooty walls of wars. The title of the other novel „Lunapark” speaks for itself. A memory of youth, freedom and happiness.
Subjects: Eastern Europe, history, female sexuality, realism, socialism, religion
Places: Budapest, Moscow
People: János Kádár, Jesus Christ, Miklós Fenyő
Time periods: 1941-1991
LC classification: MLCM 97/13964 (P)