she would pick me up and hug me

About the Book

This is the story of Rózsi/Rose, the mother, and Béni/Ben, the youngest of her six children. They made their way to the United States just before the horrors of W.W.II, and the   Holocaust, swept over their native Hungary. It’s about her happy girlhood and marriage prior to W.W.I and then her tremendous struggle to bring up her children single-handedly while her husband was institutionalized for the rest of his life.  In this country she became an integral part of a Negro college in the South. The son, a machinist over there, served in the American Army in the Pacific during W.W.II, married an Army Nurse, and then gained international recognition as an engineer, teacher and inventor.

Upon reading the mother’s writings (translated from Hungarian by the son) this is what the historian John Lukacs, author BUDAPEST 1900, had to say:

“It breathed much of the essence of the lives and of the culture of  a - now almost extinct- bourgeois class of people in Budapest whose contributions to the culture of Hungary have been very great, indeed, greater than people even now are able to gauge. That wonderful, and life-giving, combination of cultivation and courage seems to have marked the life of your mother. Yes, she belonged to a period, a period which brought about characters that we shall not see for a long time, perhaps never again.”

About the Author

J. Benjamin Horvay, a graduate of University of Cincinnati and of University of Louisville, spent
37 years with General Electric Company in various engineering and managerial positions. He also served as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of
Louisville. After retirement, he did international consulting for various business and volunteer
organizations, including the World Bank, on Global Warming related issues. He is a Distinguished
Alumnus of the University of Cincinnati, a recipient of General Electric’s  Steinmetz Award, a
Fulbright Scholar, and is credited with 44 US Patents.