Great Escape Great Escape

This is the story of the many Hungarian scientists and artists, all Jews, who started life in a briefly glamorous and golden Budapest, and then fled its fascist takeover in the 20s and 30s, and subsequently escaped from the Nazis. Budapest's decline was almost as sudden as its explosive growth. Caught on the losing side in World War I, the victors reduced Hungary to a small Eastern European backwater, stripping two thirds of its territory and one third of its population. Hungary now turned nationalistic and anti Semitic. Jews were no longer welcome in post World War I Hungary. Refugees in an age of refugees, they survived. They lived lives of glamour and excitement. Yet, beneath the surface, each contained a sadness and a deep well of pessimism. Though they reinvented themselves as famous and successful Americans (or, in Korda's and Koestler's case, Englishmen) they never again felt the same connection to a place which they had, briefly, to Budapest. Magic in Their Pockets is a story of loss: home, identity, familiarity. It is a universal story and Marton tells it with humour, passion and commitment.

Kati Marton is the author of True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy; Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World; Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History; Wallenberg; The Polk Conspiracy; and A Death in Jerusalem. She is an award-winning former NPR and ABC News correspondent. She was born in Hungary and lives in New York City.