The Restless Hungarian

The Restless Hungarian is the saga of an extraordinary life set against the history of the rise of modernism, the Jewish Diaspora, and the Cold War. A Hungarian Jew whose inquiring spirit helped him to escape the Holocaust, Paul Weidlinger became one of the most creative structural engineers of the twentieth century. As a young architect, he broke ranks with the great modernists with his radical idea of the “Joy of Space.” As an engineer, he created the strength behind the beauty in mid-century modern skyscrapers, churches, museums, and he gave concrete form to the eccentric monumental sculptures of Pablo Picasso, Isamu Noguchi, and Jean Dubuffet.
In his private life, he was a divided man, living behind a wall of denial as he lost his family to war, mental illness, and suicide. In telling his father’s story, the author sifts meaning from the inspiring and contradictory narratives of a life: a motherless child and a captain of industry, a clandestine communist who designed silos for the world’s deadliest weapons during the Cold War, a Jewish refugee who denied he was a Jew, a husband who was terrified of his wife’s madness, and a man whose personal saints were artists.

Tom Weidlinger is an independent filmmaker who has been writing, directing, and producing documentary films for thirty-five years. Many of his films have won festival awards, and twenty-one have aired nationally on public television. Concerned with themes of social justice, his work deals with a broad range of topics, from the dilemmas of humanitarian aid in the Congo to the struggles of high school students with learning differences. After a lifetime of city dwelling and global travel, Weidlinger moved to the rural foothills of the Sierras. He and his wife, Sharon, live in a straw-bale house on twenty acres of land forested with oak and manzanita. When he is not writing or working on a film in his editing room, he volunteers at a community center, helping teenagers find their voice through filmmaking. He loves to snowshoe and hike in the mountains with Sharon, and takes special pleasure in close observation of natural world just outside his front door.