Lajos Hatvany

Born into an ennobled industrial and banking family in Budapest, Lajos Hatvany was a novelist, poet, playwright, and patron of literary modernism. A liberal, he supported the unsuccessful bourgeois revolution that followed World War I and then went into exile in Germany and Austria. He was jailed for nine months after he returned in 1927. In 1938, he left Hungary again and lived first in Paris and then in Oxford. He returned to Hungary in 1947 and taught at the University of Budapest. He was a radical assimilationist, openly promoting conversion and intermarriage, and was himself baptized. In the 1920s, however, as integration into Hungarian society became ever more difficult, he modified his views. His most important novel, the semiautobiographical Urak és emberek (1927), the first part of which was translated into English as Bondy Jr. (1931), describes the pitfalls and failures of the Jewish entry into Hungarian society.