Bán Zsófia: Alétheia él

Aletheia Silberstein's life is special, not just her name. She is one of the narrators and protagonists of Zsófia Bán's mosaic family novel. It is no coincidence that her father, a classical philologist, gave her this name in 1924, only to discover several times in her long life that the truth is a tricky thing. Because that is literally what it is called: the Silverstone Truth. Or, as he himself writes in one of his stories, "Truth is not pretty, but there is nothing to make it pretty." And Aletheia - Ali to her few friends and even fewer relatives - doesn't sugarcoat it when she tells her story. In her direct, intimate and ironic stories of objects and sensual memories, she brings to life the life and tragedy of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Budapest.

The concrete and mental map of the capital and Hungarian history from the perspective of an intellectual woman from the 1930s to the Tsovid epidemic is revealed. But Aletheia is also a book of silence that lives alongside speech. Of life and survival. It is a powerful proof that families are held together not only by the stories they tell, but also by the very secrets they keep. And also that every family novel is a family novel in its own way. And so the book's other protagonist - and reader - becomes Aletheia's grandson, who in the present day encounters his grandmother's legacy and confronts the swirling past of his family and his own life.