Sándor Bródy

Sándor Bródy was born in Eger in the Hungarian kingdom of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Hungary). His family, who was traditionally observant but also oriented toward assimilation into Hungarian national culture, ensured Bródy received a Hungarian education. The family moved to Budapest and Bródy became one of the rapidly growing city’s premiere literary chroniclers. In Nyomor (1884), his first book of collected stories, Bródy introduced a naturalist, gritty portrayal of the urban middle class to the Hungarian public; the work became very popular with a liberal audience. Bródy went on to a fruitful literary career. Understanding himself as a Hungarian writer rather than a Jewish one, he published in countless Hungarian journals, but avoided overtly Jewish papers; this did not prevent some Hungarian readers and critics from seeing his work, like “Judapest” itself, as somehow more Jewish than Hungarian. As his 1915 “Zidokrol” (About Jews) makes clear, Bródy’s own relationship to Jewish identity grew more complicated as the Jewish Question retained a stubborn salience in Hungarian public life. Hungary’s Sándor Bródy Prize is named in his honor.