Magda Szabó — Abigail with Deborah H. Sussman

A literary icon in her native Hungary, Magda Szabó was relatively unknown to English-speaking readers until recent translations of her work opened the door to her powerful storytelling. In today’s episode we focus on her 1970 novel Abigail, which follows a headstrong teenager at an all-girls boarding school during WWII. Dangerous secrets, emotional complexity and an unexpected guardian angel add intrigue to this poignant coming-of-age tale. Our guest, Deborah H. Sussman of the ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, brings her perspective as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor to our discussion about preserving innocence in the midst of darkness.

Mentioned in this episode:

Abigail by Magda Szabó

The Door by Magda Szabó

Len Rix translations of Magda Szabó

Photos of the Dóczy High School of the Debrecen Reformed College which inspired Matula Academy

Magda Szabó Memorial House museum

“More Than a Survivor” by Deborah H. Sussman

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

The Holdovers

The Sound of Music

2015 Musical production of Abigél from Ady Teátrum

Trailer for Abigél 1978 miniseries for Hungarian television

2012 film adaptation of The Door starring Helen Mirren

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit.com and click “Become a Patron” to find out more. 

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off books by forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host Amy Helmes, and if we have any Hungarian listeners out there, they are probably rolling their eyes at the notion that today's subject, Magda Szabó, would be considered in any way lost or forgotten because after all, she is hands down that country's most famous female author.

AMY: That said, we English speakers have only just started catching on in recent decades. Thanks in large part to a handful of translations of Szabó’s works by New York Review Books. Their 2015 translation of Szabó’s The Door translated by Len Rix, sold incredibly well and opened the door, you might say, to an American interest in Szabó. That book was originally published in Hungary in 1987. 

KIM: We've got another Szabó title in mind for today's discussion, however. Abigail, first published in 1970, is probably the title that is most loved by Hungarians. It might be described as a young adult novel, but one that can be thoroughly enjoyed by any age.

AMY: The book’s setting, an all-girls boarding school, made me think of Charlotte Bronte's Villettte while I was reading it, and also Muriel Sparks’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It also kind of reminded me a little bit of that Paul Giamatti film from a few years ago, The Holdovers, complete with a much-ridiculed faculty member.

KIM: And with World War II as its backdrop, the book has some cloak-and-dagger political intrigue, and that had me thinking of the Nazi-thwarting elements of The Sound of Music. 

AMY: It's interesting that you should bring that up, Kim, because this book was adapted into a heartwarming Hungarian musical in 2008. There's really a lot to love about this book. 

KIM: Yes, and we've got a special guest who brings a deep understanding of how history, identity, and storytelling intertwine. So let's read the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today is my friend and colleague, Deborah H. Sussman, a Tempe-based writer, editor, and longtime creative writing instructor whose work ranges from book reviews in The Washington Post to art criticism in art in Art in America. She's taught at the University of Virginia, Phoenix College and Arizona State University, where she also developed a course on writing about design and art.

AMY: Deborah co-leads the beloved Changing Hands Workshop “Mothers Who Write,” contributes to The Los Angeles Review of Books blog, and is also a contributor to Barflies: True Stories from the Early Years, the anthology drawn from the popular downtown Phoenix live reading series. 

KIM: She also speaks widely about the legacy of her father, Peter M. Sussman, a Holocaust survivor, and she's organized programs and readings amplifying second generation voices. Welcome Deborah. 

DEBORAH: Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here with both of you. 

AMY: So this novel by Szabó features a spoiled and headstrong Hungarian teenager named Gina Vitay, whose father, a military general, he abruptly sends her away to this austere religious boarding school. What she doesn't realize is that her father is part of a secret resistance and he's placed her at this school to hide her from “Nazi types” who are in hot pursuit.

KIM: So when we're thinking of teenage girls during World War II, I think the most famous book that comes to mind is The Diary of Anne Frank. You wrote a wonderful 2020 essay, which we'll link to in our show notes about your father's experience as a Holocaust survivor. Can you explain a little about that for our listeners? Because I think your family history might also color your experience of reading this novel by Magda Szabó. 

DEBORAH: Yeah. Thank you. I think my family history made this book particularly meaningful because my father was a survivor. My father and his parents were rounded up. They were originally from Berlin and they were in concentration camps. And my father didn't talk about that when my brothers and I were little. And he explained later that it wasn't that he couldn't talk about it, it was that he wanted to preserve our childhood. He had not had a childhood, and so he really wanted us to have that. And so this book resonated very much with me because Gina's father is trying very, very hard to walk that line right between keeping her safe and doing what needs to be done, but also preserving some innocence. The relationship between the two of them is so lovely. You know, the book talks about how alike Gina and her father are, and they're both honest and they love each other deeply. And it's true in the beginning of the book, Gina is really headstrong and not the kind of person that you necessarily want to, you know, put in hiding, right? Because she's going to put herself at risk. And so you watched her come to terms with everything her father has been trying to protect her. And as the situation gets worse … because initially her father is part of the Hungarian resistance. By the mid forties, kind of after Abigail has been at this wonderful school for a little while, the Germans have invaded and things accelerated very, very quickly after the Germans invaded … So she has to grow up fast and Szabó does such a beautiful job of capturing what Gina's life was before she became aware of all of this darkness. And then once she knew, once she understood, that really, really resonated for me thinking about my father's experience. And you know, he was 15 when he came to the US as a refugee. So everything he, you know, kind of must have gone through. 

AMY: Okay. So even though this book has a lot of dark political circumstances swirling in the background, and Gina is caught up in this terrifying intrigue, she's also protected by this confluence of unlikely heroes, including the title “character,” and I'm using quotation marks there. Abigail is actually the name of a stone statue in the boarding school's walled garden. And school lore has it that Abigail mysteriously grants assistance to young women in distress. 

KIM: So Amy, before we get more into the plot of the book, I know you attended an all-girls Catholic high school. I've always been very jealous about my idea of what that would've been like. Um, so even though the book takes place 50 years prior to your own all girls school experience, did that part of the book feel at all familiar to you? 

AMY: Yes. I mean, minus the danger, there was no danger, obviously, but there is a distinct vibe at any all girls school, I think especially religious, all girls school. And so with the Bishop Matula Academy of the novel, I think Szabó absolutely nails it. It took me right back in time to my own high school classes. My school was a day school, so not a boarding school, but the dynamics among the girls and between the girls and their teachers also felt really familiar as too did the antics. So there's a lot of humor in the book because the girls are getting up to all kinds of crazy stuff, and I really identified with the lengths they went to to try to invent some sort of fun in a really boring environment. So Deborah, why don't you go ahead and tell our listeners about the little game that the girls in the novel play, which gets Gina into trouble almost as soon as she arrives at the Matula Academy.

DEBORAH: So the girls, as you say, are really good at finding fun in a place that's not at all about fun. Like that is not a thing they're supposed to have. You know, and what Gina learns pretty early on is that these girls, who appear very well behaved, when they're not being observed are really, really good at talking amongst themselves and coming up with, you know, things that they can do to pass the time or to make things more exciting.

And so there's like a silent period where they're all supposed to be quiet. And what they do during that silent period, and this is apparently a tradition, Gina learns, is they go to the roll on the teacher's desk and they look at everybody in the class. And remember, these are teenage girls, right? They're thinking about boys, they're thinking about marriage, they're thinking about romance. For each girl, they pick some object in the school for the girl to be, you know, quote-unquote “married to,” right? And so for the rest of the term, like this object is your beloved. And so somebody gets, you know, like a bust of a philosopher and somebody else gets a painting. And Gina is brand new and you know, she's game, but she's the last one in the list of people. And so they kind of remember her, “Oh yeah, Gina, we gotta give her something. “And, uh, you know, “You'll be married to, uh … to the empty aquarium.” 

KIM: How perfect is that? 

DEBORAH: And Gina is upset by this, right? It's perfect but Gina's like, “Well, yeah, I would play the game, but I refuse to be married to an empty aquarium.” And she causes a scene. And that scene causes the game to be discovered. So not only has she offended the girls by saying, I'm not gonna play your stupid game, but the teachers kind of figure out what's going on. And so then there's the whole question of, okay, now what? And it does begin to seem like some of the teachers are perhaps protecting the girls a little bit. It's hard to know. This is one of the beautiful things about the novel, right? Who's good, who is bad? Who can you trust, who is not trustworthy? And it's all through Gina's eyes. It's this sort of close third person. You're learning things as she does, so you're not quite sure who to trust yet. 

AMY: All right. So this idea of the fake boyfriends, which are just props at the school is hilarious. Totally something we would've done in high school, and I love it. 

DEBORAH: Yeah, they write them love letters. 

AMY: Yeah. It's a gag for the whole year. Like they commit. Yeah. So Deborah, why don't we read a little passage from that section, um, just to give readers an idea. 

DEBORAH: It became the tradition that every year each girl should be betrothed to an item in the class inventory. These inventories hung by the door in every classroom and listed everything that could be found in the room —pictures, furniture, teaching materials —all recorded against a number. The first girl in alphabetical order was given item number one, the second, item two, and so on. It was considered highly amusing to get yourself married in this way, and the teachers were, of course, totally unaware of what was going on. The director himself was included in this distribution, but only to the eighth year where he would have too many wives and he was allowed only one. Best of all was when, for whatever reason, he spoke to this wife of whose existence he was totally unaware. It was a perfect scream, though, sadly, you couldn't laugh out loud because you would never be able to explain what was so funny. But the most interesting thing of all, they told Gina, was that they all invariably ended up somehow falling in love with the husbands they had married in jest. Sometimes the school inspectors would be taken aback at how much one of them knew about some famous person or other. For example, the girl who had married the bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius and had read everything she could find about him and knew every detail of the life of the man who was now her life partner.

KIM: It is so poignant because you think about the fact that these girls are probably going to be married very soon, and so just the way that they are playing this out as a relationship is just very moving to me. 

AMY: And Kim, I don't even think it matters that they're gonna be getting married very soon because I'm going back to my own all girls school days and we're just boy crazy!

KIM: Yeah. Well there's that, too,

AMY: That brings me to, um, there's a teacher at the Bishop Matula Academy here in the book named Kalmar, who is kind of the “hottie,” and that makes me laugh because one of the most dangerous things you can probably have at an all-girls school is an attractive male teacher. Um, so quick anecdote that I will share with you guys. Um, the history teacher at my school, he wasn't even very attractive, but there weren't a lot of male teachers. 

KIM: You don't have a lot to choose from. Right. 

AMY: We don't have a lot to choose from. So you're gonna just like find the one. Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: Um, he was probably in his thirties, but my friend in the history class, she sat right next to me. She was just besotted with this man. Like she just talked about him all the time and it became a running joke. You're just all tittering in the classroom, right? And we had the brown paper wrapping on all of our textbooks and you would write and doodle all over those. Well, she had written something on the cover of her history book and we were laughing and all kind of like crowded around the book. He realizes something's going on in the back of the classroom, and he comes walking down the aisles and I knew what was on the cover and I was like, “oh no. Oh no. Oh no.” So he sees it, he blushes, he takes the cover off the textbook and he puts it in the trash and he just continues teaching. But what she had written was, “I love the way Mr. Young wears his pants.” He wore khaki pants. So it wasn't that bad, but it was just like, “I love the way he wears his pants.” 

KIM: Oh my god.

AMY: But like that's giving the vibe of what we're also getting in this novel, right? 

KIM: Completely. Oh, that's great. 

AMY: In my school, it was, I guess, Mr. Young, I was not attracted to him personally, but my friend sure was. In the novel, it's Kalmar. But then there's also a young female teacher named Susanna. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: So all of the girls are wanting these two to get together. 

KIM: Yeah. They wanna see a romance play out in front of them. 

AMY: It's like they're watching a reality show, you know? Love is Blind or something. 

KIM: Yah it’s like a soap opera and they’re like, “Are these two gonna hook up?” Yeah. 

AMY: Yeah. Um, so again, finding fun wherever they can. 

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: So although there's all of these antics happening at the school in the surrounding town, there is more serious trouble. A political dissident is plastering messages in public places to foment rebellion against the Nazis, and the authorities are enraged. They want to find out who this rogue citizen is and silence him or her. So the girls daily are taking walks out into the town or going to the church, whatever. So they're seeing this all play out. And Gina, in particular ,is very curious about all of this intrigue. 

KIM: Yeah. The school's trying to keep it a secret from them, but she wants to know what's going on. So let's talk a little bit more about Gina. She is very strong-willed. She has a hot temper. She can be petulant, and she is outraged that she's basically been locked away in this institution where nobody likes her. She had this really pampered life back in Budapest. Um, she had this handsome young guy courting her and she was ripped away from all of that really quickly. It's basically a 14 year old's worst nightmare. Deborah, what did Gina's emotional turbulence bring to mind for you? 

DEBORAH: What was so interesting to me about Gina in particular is she's so alive, right? She's so curious. She's so smart, she's paying attention, but she's also, because she's young, getting a lot of things wrong. And what I love about Szabó is she lets you sympathize with Gina and then also see how wrong Gina is, right? It's a little bit like, um, you know, Emma, where you just have this kind of like, “Oh yeah, you're gonna feel bad about that later. You really don't wanna be doing that.” And so it's very satisfying to watch Gina grow up. She's a character you really care about. She's very relatable. 

AMY: Yeah, I feel like, um, the cord of tension that runs throughout this book has to do with her natural adolescence, which is coming out, which is the stubbornness, the feistiness, and then the danger on the other side of that where it makes you nervous because you realize, “We can't afford your teenage drama right now.” The stakes are really high, but she doesn't know that, and so all of her adolescent behavior is putting her in the danger. 

KIM: Yeah. Like you said, you're watching her plan to do these things and you're like, “Oh, don't do that. Don't do that. That could actually really result in either you or someone else getting hurt.” Yeah, but teenager gonna be teenager, 

DEBORAH: Right? Teenager gonna be teenager. Then sometimes she gets, you know, an all-caps missive from Abigail, like a mysterious note that basically like, “DO NO DO THAT AGAIN.”

AMY: Uhhuh. Yeah, so basically listeners, there are these notes that get passed back and forth into a basket that the statue Abigail holds. And so you can leave a note there and then miraculously somewhere else in the school, Abigail will respond to you with a note. And so at one point Abigail sends a note back to Gina, like, “Knock it off. All of these girls are actually really cool girls if you would just take a minute.” It's like having a big sister or somebody that's trying to guide her.

DEBORAH: And the Abigail tradition goes back some years. And so, you know, girls would put a note for Abigail. Somebody was desperately, desperately homesick, you know, and their mother might turn up, right? You would basically tell Abigail what you needed, and then if Abigail could help, she would. But nobody knows who Abigail is and Gina spends all this time trying to figure out “Who is Abigail?”

KIM: It totally works. I mean, you could definitely see that as a real thing at a girl school. I feel like. 

AMY: And I'm thinking, Deborah, like you mentioned your dad was 15. You know how hard must all of that have been for obviously kids, but adolescents, too. You know, like it's just such a hard age without cataclysmic world events hitting you in the face, you know?

KIM: Yeah. 

DEBORAH: And Gina has this moment, if I could just read this one passage, this really struck me. Gina has this moment, her father has been dancing around. What is going on? And he comes to see her to basically say, look, it’s not going well, people are dying. It's not gonna be good. I may not see you again, and you can't tell anybody this. So imagine for a kid, first to understand that their father is in mortal danger all the time. Second, to understand that her life is also in danger because of what her father's doing. And then third, she can't tell anybody. 

KIM: An impossible situation. 

DEBORAH: It's an impossible situation. And they're in this lovely, lovely pastry shop when this happens. And they're sitting there with these beautiful pastries in front of them. And Gina has this moment, right, where somebody opens the door to the kitchen and…. “the delicate aromas of all the pastries, the scent of sugary cakes and cream buns. Gina's entire childhood paradise of happiness and laughter became forever fused with the moment when her father sat down beside her and told her very, very quietly, “My girl, you cannot leave the school now or at any time for as long as the war goes on.”

And then he leaves her with this giant secret. 

KIM: Yeah, I love that part of the book. And then just the imagery there. You could smell it, you could see it. You're right there. Her whole world changed … forever. 

AMY: Changed forever. And she abruptly has to grow up. 

KIM: Yep. And she does. 

AMY: It just happens in an instant. Yeah.

KIM: Yep. 

DEBORAH: And then she has to go back. Back to the school. 

KIM: Yep. 

DEBORAH: Right? And she hasn't been having an easy time at the school because when she renounced the aquarium and the girls almost got in trouble, the girls turned against her, and so she's not at a good place when that happens. She doesn't have friends there, yet.

AMY: She's physically cut off and then emotionally cut off from everyone. 

KIM: There's also the adults that are withholding information, supposedly for Gina's own good, but it also disempowers her. So do you wanna talk a little bit about this moral complexity, the idea that secrecy, it can be both protective, but it can also be oppressive.

DEBORAH: I think that's exactly right. I don't wanna go, you know, too deep into my family history because I feel like I really wanna spend time talking about the book. But it's interesting that the secrecy that kind of protected my brothers and me, and I wouldn't call it secrecy… It's interesting because there are survivors who simply don't talk about what happened. I mean, the survivors are left, right? With my father, it wasn't so much that as it was a really conscious effort to protect and shield us. Maybe this is part of why I relate so strongly to this book. I mean, for many reasons, but my brothers and I sensed. We knew there was something we weren’t being told. There was a shadow and you can’t articulate it as a kid. You don’t know. But kids are like little sponges, they pick up on everything. And so you know when there is  kind of odd disconnect between what you’re being told or not told and what you're feeling. And so I feel like that is a big part of Gina's journey and also Gina coming to understand that it's not like all the adults know what's up and the kids don't. A lot of the adults are also clueless. Like this is not an easy world.

AMY: Yeah. Maybe we should also mention that there are Jewish girls at the academy and the stakes are even higher for those characters, 

DEBORAH: And Gina becomes a really important part of saving those girls' lives. 

AMY: Mm-hmm. 

DEBORAH: Right? Because of Gina's relationship with Abigail. She doesn't know who Abigail is, right? Mm-hmm. But that's the beautiful thing about Abigail initially. Abigail is somebody that the girls can confide their woes in, and Abigail will listen. I mean, this school is a little, you know, Protestant. It's kind of like you don't cry, you don't feel sorry for yourself, right? Abigail is almost maternal. Abigail is community support. Abigail is looking out for you. Initially that starts because I think there's somebody, a girl who's in love with a boy … it's that kind of thing. 

KIM: Mm-hmm. 

DEBORAH: By the time we get to the war, Abigail is part of the resistance! 

KIM: Yeah. The stakes are so much higher. 

DEBORAH: The stakes are so much higher, and Abigail, as a figure, however real or unreal, is able to connect the few trusted people like Gina to be able to help provide forged documents for these Jewish students.

AMY: I'm just thinking of the moment towards the end of the book. How it happens through a child's game. I won't reveal any more than that, but when we compared it to The Sound of Music earlier and the like, “Hey, look over here!” while they're singing the final song, it was very similar to that moment where something fun is happening, and as the reader, you are white knuckling your way through that scene. Like, “Oh my gosh, are they gonna pull this off? Are they gonna actually pull this off?” It's so scary, right? 

DEBORAH: A hundred percent. And it makes me think of Casablanca too, right? Because it’s sort of the moral fortitude and the selflessness of these people who are trying to make it appear as if everything is fine, nothing's going on. And meanwhile, they're ferrying people to safety and they're, you know, it's sort of like the bird on the water with the feet paddling, but the, just the gliding. Mm-hmm. What you see is the gliding and how much strength it takes.

AMY: And also just Szabó's ability to tie in “teenage girl.” It’s at a dance. They're having fun and it's all frivolous and it's just girly, and so I love that. That wraps up like what the whole book is. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: They use that to save themselves. Yeah. 

DEBORAH: Yes. And that scene is so antithetical to anything that the school has been about, right? So this former student comes and is like, “We're gonna have a dance.” I just imagine, like, jazz music. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

DEBORAH: This is not what the school has been about at all. But in this moment, that's what's needed to save lives, right?

KIM: The tension throughout the book is so good. I mean, just talking about this is making me wanna go read it again because it's so good. I will be reading it multiple times. 

DEBORAH: It's so worth rereading. Mm-hmm. Because it's one of those books where once you know the whole story, once it's been revealed to you and you go back and you read it again, you're like, “Oh! Oh yes.” It's delicious to see how wrong or how right Gina is in certain moments.

AMY: But see, I would say that was my one kind of bone to pick if I had any with the novel, is that I felt like I knew right away who Abigail was. I thought it was very not subtle. 

DEBORAH: I wasn't as sure. 

AMY: Okay, okay. 

DEBORAH: I wasn't as sure I had a couple of suspects. 

KIM: Yeah, is something a red herring? Yeah. 

DEBORAH: You're just smarter, Amy.

KIM: There's still the tension so much about how she's going to react to that, you know, that that is the mystery, I think. 

AMY: Yes, and that's why I still liked it, even though I figured it out. By the time the real Abigail was in their first scene, it was like, “Oh, that's Abigail.” 

DEBORAH: Oh, you're good. 

AMY: It was everything else surrounding that that was fascinating to me. Yes, it didn't matter that I kind of knew where it was going. 

KIM: Deborah, do you wanna say anything more about Abigail or do you have a passage or something you wanna read maybe from the book? Yeah, 

DEBORAH: I mean, so this, this is really lovely, right? This is when she thinks she's gonna be leaving and so she's looking at the school through new eyes as she waited to be called in to the director’s office: 

[reads]

AMY: That just reminds me of the, um, she keeps mentioning every time she describes the school, the black-and-white checkerboard floor and that just came to me. The school is so black and white and rigid with its rules.

DEBORAH: But also how comforting in a time of like, I don't know who to trust, a world that’s black and white.

AMY: Mm-hmm. 

DEBORAH: To be in a place where there's right and wrong, there's true and false. 

KIM: Yes. Comfort in those rules and comfort in the institutional-ness of it almost. 

DEBORAH: Yes, because when institutions fail, it's scary. 

AMY: As we're finding out, sadly. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah, completely. So basically, we all loved the book so much. Do you think of it as a young adult novel? I mean, it's about a young adult, but I don't feel like it's a young adult novel. 

DEBORAH: I agree. I do not think of it as a young adult novel as somebody who used to work at Scholastic. So in educational texts and childrens literature and young adult. I feel like those categories are really developed for marketing books, selling books, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's awesome. But a book is true to itself, right? And I feel like this book is much less dark than Szabó’s The Door. So you could say, “Sure, it's better for younger readers,” but you could also say it's better for somebody who doesn't wanna feel that their guts have been torn out. You know, like to approach this subject matter in a way that is from a particular vantage point. So I could absolutely see a young adult reading this, you know? But I mean, I could also see a young adult reading Emma. I reread, you know, Harriet, the Spy, like I reread Charlotte's Web. These are fantastic novels.

KIM: Oh, yeah. Completely. 

DEBORAH: Regardless of, you know, the age that the flap copy says they should be for. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

DEBORAH: Szabó is really, really good at leaving the present moment and going into the future. I didn't wanna say what happens to the characters in Abigail because I feel like people should find out, but you do learn, right? This happens to this person. That happens to this person. So she's talking about being at the school for Christmas, because she can't leave. She literally can't leave. It's not safe for her to go anywhere. She's finally to the point where the other girls invite her home or you know, but she can’t leave. So she's sitting there and there's kind of a special feast. There's one other student who's an orphan who's also there, and she says: In her mature years, Gina often thought back to that last evening, not only because it marked the beginning of her freedom, but because her adult awareness allowed her clearly and finally, to see the two contrasting sides of the occasion: the gaiety and laughter, the flow of high spirits inside the massive walls, and the darkness outside, including the full dangers faced by a girl out on the streets who desperately needed to get to Mitzi Horn's house. 

AMY: Yeah, that whole episode where they're staying over for Christmas, that reminds me of the movie The Holdovers, as I said, because she comes to such a different understanding of the faculty by spending time with them outside of the context of school. And that was really special. I thought. 

DEBORAH: I will always see Konig as Paul Giamatti from now on, thanks to you. That's absolutely who it is.

KIM: Yeah. Um, so what was the point where you're like, I've gotta share this book with other people? 

DEBORAH: As soon as I finished. As soon as I finished, I mean, my family, um, we're all wild readers with way too many books. And my mother in particular, my mother is 89 and she's always telling me about books. So I just knew I had to give it to my mother because I felt like I was discovering … (I feel this way about so many of the books that you share) I was discovering a really important voice and an utterly individual voice. So this is a period that I'm interested in. This is a fantastic story with tension and magic and incredible stakes, and it's beautifully written. Now, you know, granted, some of that is Len Rix. I realize it's a translation, but I have to imagine that Szabó’s writing is also pretty fantastic in Hungarian, and The Door is similarly written. This is the point of view of an author who has seen it all go down, who has lived through so much and seen so much darkness, and she decides how much darkness she puts into each book. 

AMY: And it's interesting too that one of the other classmates in this novel they call Szabó, and so I was thinking, “Wait, is she inserting herself into the book?” I was curious about that when I looked up Szabó’s history, which we're gonna talk about next, the timeline doesn't quite match up with the girls in the novel. She would've been. 27 years old in 1944, the year this book's action takes place. But maybe there's a little bit of that, you know? 

DEBORAH: She certainly could have. And she's very hard on Szabó, my goodness. 

AMY: Yeah. 

DEBORAH: Poor Szabó is always getting teased.

KIM: Yeah. Oh yeah, she is. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so that's a great point to start discussing Szabó’s life in a little more detail. She was born in 1917 in the town of Debrecen in Austria-Hungary. It inspired the town of Arkod in the novel. Her father was a city council member. Her mother was a teacher who also wrote, and yes, Szabó did actually graduate from an all girls Calvinist school called the Doczy Institute for Girls. 

AMY: Yeah. Today it's still a school and there is actually a museum exhibit on the property (This is so cool) that's devoted to Szabó, including an Abigail statue, just like in the book! We're gonna link to that in our show notes. In fact, I actually found a whole slide deck of photographs of the Doczy Academy, so you can kind of look at those and line them up to what was in your imagination for the Bishop Matula Academy? It's pretty similar, right, Kim? 

KIM: Oh yeah, definitely. Gorgeous school.

AMY: But I love that they have the, the Szabó Museum at the school. That's amazing. So a portion of that museum is actually set up as Szabó’s writing room. It's almost like her space is recreated. So it's really neat. Um. At the school, she was incredibly smart, which is not a surprise. Her science teacher predicted that she would be a writer, but that was not her initial plan.She wanted to study languages; Hungarian and Latin, specifically at university. So then she did go to college and afterwards taught at another girl's school, and I think that's really telling, because clearly in Abigail we are seeing both the perspective of the pupils at an all-girls school and the faculty at an all-girls school. So she was in both positions to write about that. 

KIM: That's great. So, um, in about the late 1940s, she started taking her writing more seriously. She moved to Budapest following the war, and she was actually awarded a prestigious Hungarian literary prize for her poetry, but it was revoked by communist authorities in Hungary. I read that she was literally dressed up in her best clothes, about to go receive the award when she got a phone call saying it was being revoked. Terrible. Um, the award was instead given to a writer with close ties to the Communist Party. Wow. That sounds a little bit like what's going on today in the U.S.

AMY: Yeah, familiar.

DEBORAH: This is very much what The Door is about. 

KIM: Okay. Oh, we're gonna talk about that, too. Okay. So she was labeled an enemy to the Communist Party, Szabó, and her work was censored along with that of her husband, the writer, Tibor Szabótka. And she didn't start publishing again until the late 1950s.

AMY: So her first novel Fresco was published in 1958 and fittingly, it is about an artist who refuses to conform to what's expected of her. Szabó began to publish prolifically from that point forward. Abigail was published in 1970 and then, yeah, we're mentioning The Door…I went ahead and read that as soon as I finished Abigail, because I was curious to see what some of her other work was like. The Door is probably considered her greatest work. It's quite different from Abigail, and it's about the dynamic between an upper middle class writer, (so Szabó basically) and an older, very obstinate household servant who is, to me, one of the more unforgettable characters I have read in a really long time. This book is a masterclass in character analysis. 

DEBORAH: The Door is astonishing. I mean, it's not more of Abigail, like it's clearly the same writer, but there's a little less hope. I think some of it's because of the period that she's writing about and because it's more autobiographical. But yeah, the sort of conflict between the writer and the woman who is socially kind of beneath her, but in so many ways, just this towering figure. And the way the writer keeps (almost like Gina, because you can imagine Gina sort of growing up to be maybe the writer in The Door, right?) Um, she will sometimes respond emotionally or impetuously, right? And then this other woman who initially just seems like kind of an angry, old, disgruntled, you know, you don't know why this other woman has so many secrets. She doesn't let anybody in her house; that is a door that nobody goes past. And by the end of the novel you understand why. But initially you're like, “that seems weird,” right? And that's exactly what the writer thinks. And so it's true it parallels Abigail in that you watch the writer’s understanding of the world shift by coming to know this other person and their world. You don't have the same sense you kind of know more than Gina does, and so, you know … like with The Door you were as puzzled as the central character. You don't understand why this person would be behaving the way that she's, so it's again, there's that element of mystery. You're like, “What is going on here? Who is this person?” 

AMY: And just the way she leads you along the way. Emerence is the servant character and she is just the most disagreeable person in so many ways, and like your heart just belongs to her by the end of that novel, I mean, it is so profound. 

KIM: I need to read this. I'm jealous of you guys.

DEBORAH: I, no, I'm jealous of you. You haven't read it yet. You get to read it!

AMY: Yeah. That's true.

DEBORAH: And it's, it's fantastic. And this character has all of these sorts of code that she lives by. And as you come to know them and as you come to understand her history, your view of her and the writer view her dramatically. It's profound. 

AMY: Okay, so I believe six of Szabó’s works have now been translated into English and the New York Review Books ones are really readily available, listeners. You know, we talked about Szabó being blacklisted in her own country, but eventually her country awarded her the highest state honor for artists and academics, the Kossuth Award, that was in 1978, so eventually the government came around to her. 

KIM: I'm so glad they did that and did that, you know, while she was still around to be recognized. She continued writing well into her eighties. She passed away in 2007 at the age of 90 in her beloved hometown of Debrecen, and fittingly, she died while reading a book. Um, seems like a pretty good way to go. She remains the most translated Hungarian author. In addition to her own work, she also translated 42 books by other authors. (Wow, she was so busy.) She won 22 literary prizes, both in Hungary and internationally. And basically, like we said in the intro, she is considered a literary giant in her home country.

AMY: And Abigail was made into a stage musical in 2008, as I mentioned, and a mini-series adaptation of the book aired on Hungarian television back in 1978. You can actually find both online. They're both in Hungarian, but it's kind of fun to just give them a look to see how they did the staging and the costumes and things like that. The actress that they cast as Gina for the miniseries is pretty much exactly what I pictured her as when I was reading the book. Sort of a, a young Liz Taylor lookalike with, you know, dark hair and very pretty. 

KIM: There's also a film adaptation of The Door starring Helen Mirren. Wow. So I'm curious about that one.

AMY: Yeah, I knew that ahead of reading the door, and so I just pictured Helen Mirren as Emerence the whole time, which is perfect. Chef's Kiss. Yes. 

KIM: Okay. That's great. 

DEBORAH: Have you seen the movie, Amy? 

AMY: No, I did not, but I just, I knew she played that character, so I was like, “Okay, that's who I'm gonna picture.” She received an Oscar in my head.

KIM: Maybe we should all watch that at the same night or something. 

AMY: Yeah. Kim, you have to read the book first though. 

KIM: Yeah.

DEBORAH: You read the book. 

KIM: I just have to say, Deborah, this was wonderful getting to discuss Magda Szabó’s novel with you and also getting to do this with you because we're always talking about writing and books as colleagues, but now it's just wonderful to have you on the show with us.

DEBORAH: You have introduced me to so many incredible books, Kim. I can't thank you enough and every time Kim gives me a book, I swear, I say I have to give this to my family and then I buy it for… and oh my God, the Lolly Willowes book. I finished that one and was like, “Oh, I've never read anything like this!” And immediately purchased copies for friends and family.

KIM: That's the best compliment I could ever get. 

DEBORAH: Oh, you're doing such a cool thing here. I really, really appreciate it. 

AMY: Well, thanks for introducing us to this book and um, yeah, I love that you two get to work together and be kindred spirits in all things. 

DEBORAH: We're so lucky. And I would just like to propose a pilgrimage to, um, the Mark Szabó Museum.

AMY: Oh yeah. Once the world calms down, that would be amazing. 

DEBORAH: Once the world calms down, I think that would be really, really cool. 

AMY: Yes. 

DEBORAH: And then even if the world is not in a better place, if it's okay enough for us to travel, maybe we can put little notes in Abigail's basket like, “Hey Abigail, can you help? We need some help.”

KIM: I love that. 

AMY: Yes, exactly. Maybe Abigail… you know what? Let's ask the kids at the Doczy school to put a note in Abigail's basket to help the world right now. 

KIM: I love that. That would be great. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Listeners. Just as a reminder, Kim and I will be attending a screening of the film Bridal Suite at the ASU/FIDM Campus in downtown LA this Thursday, March 19th from 6:00 PM until 9:00 PM Bridal Suite is the only film that one of our previous lost ladies, Virginia Faulkner, got credit on when she was working in Hollywood. Faulkner's biographer, Brad Bigelow, will be on hand for a discussion and book signing, and Kim will also be discussing the film’s costumes with ASU/FIDM's museum curator, Christina Frank. So come by, say hi to Kim and I, get some wedding cake. Actually yes, we're having that. We'd love to see you there. This is a free event, but please do register in advance using the link in our show notes.

KIM: Also, we wanna give a big shout out to the members of the Lost Ladies of Lit Book Club in Alexandria, Virginia. They recently celebrated their one-year anniversary with champagne and a custom frosted Lost Ladies of Lit Cake, and a Lost Ladies of Lit musical playlist. And this was over at the Company of Book bookstore. We love you guys and are so glad you took this podcast and turned it into a community. I mean, oh my God, I could cry right now. 

AMY: Yeah, love this. The universe needs a lot more of this kind of energy. So way to go, ladies. And also, cake is becoming a running theme here. We just need to, yeah, have cake at every occasion.

KIM: I’m into it. 

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.