I Must Tell You

Imagine a wheelbarrow full of marbles and spilling all of them in your backyard, and then you have to sort them all by color using only a soup spoon. This is how I felt when I started this book, substituting my stories for the marbles and my memories for the soup spoon. Right now I am ninety years old.

I do not intend to bore you with an autobiography. It is true, however, that in many of the stories I am the main character. It is also true that many of the stories were told to me by relatives and close friends, but in either case the stories are shaped more by the circumstances. Because of my age, most of my contemporaries have passed away. But just to be on the safe side, I avoid names, recognizable locations, and dates to protect all.

The book covers twenty-two years of my life, fifteen to thirty-seven. I was thirty-five years old when we-my wife and two sons-left Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution, and went to the United States.