Where the Angels Lived

4.1/5 ( ratings)

“Margaret McMullan has written a beautiful and heartrending account of her pilgrimage to Pécs, Hungary in the hope of retrieving what she can of the story of a distant relative, lost in the Holocaust. Written with her usual vividly realized, emotionally engaging prose, in which Margaret emerges as a protagonist with whom the reader identifies, Where the Angels Lived is a powerful testament of familial mourning as well as a vision of 20th century European history that is both searing and uplifting.” -Joyce Carol Oates “An absolutely riveting story by an utterly engaging narrator–a triumphant blend of honesty, insight, research and imagination. The lethal, irrational hostility of one people towards another is movingly conveyed in all its appalling vividness, at the same time as a vein of humor and delight in discovering and recovering the past animates the prose. McMullan’s best book.” -Phillip Lopate “Into this terrifying moment of severe intolerance in America, arrives this meticulously researched, soul-driven account of the generational trauma caused by another country that turned on and gave up its own. Margaret McMullan did not ask for the assignment that sent her and her family to Hungary to mourn an unknown family member lost to the Holocaust, but her radical courage, determination and stamina in the face of that assignment is breathtaking, insisting we pay attention, to the crimes of the past and our actions in the present, because, of course, it can happen here.” -Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek “McMullan brings us along on a fascinating journey to discover the history of her once influential and industrious family – the Engel de Jánosi….They are entrepreneurs, musicians, lovers, builders and fighters, who, without the author’s painstaking research, would have been erased from history forever.” -Eleni Kounalakis, Lt. Governor of California & U.S. Ambassador to Hungary