Becoming pesti at the Turn of the Century

This chapter discusses several short stories, novels and one essay which thematize the experiences of becoming pesti in the early years of the twentieth century. Budapest opens on Koronaherceg Street, a small street that was home to many tailors, and which lay between the main shopping street, Vaci Street, and Budapest city hall. The personification of Koronaherceg Street is the novel's twenty-something heroine, Eva Dermak, the eldest of three children living with their widowed mother. Budapest presents an environment that conditions its characters, and which operates one law for the rich and another for the poor. The elusive morality of Budapest was also a recurrent theme for Sandor Brody (1863-1924), who was born in Eger to a Jewish merchant family and moved to Budapest in the 1870s. Ferenc Molnar (1878-1952) was born Ferenc Neumann into a German-speaking Jewish family in Jozsefvaros, the eighth district of Pest, and attended the local Calvinist grammar school on Lonyai Street.