THE RELUCTANT REFUGEE

A man lovingly renders his journey from war-torn Budapest to lean, uncertain times in England in this memoir.

This book starts with a bit of a MacGuffin. Decsy, told that his biological father was close to death, resolved to travel back to Hungary to find this man he had never met. But the bulk of the work then covers the author’s experiences before this revelation. After briefly establishing his life in 1989 when he got the news, showing the colorful but sad character his mother, Gita, had become and his work in a radio store, Decsy chronicles his childhood. As a boy, he was taught to love Stalin and the Red Army for defeating the Nazis and spreading Communist ideals. The author became a Little Drummer, part of a youth organization that encouraged loyalty to Stalin and gathered information on possible traitors. The boy soon learned to question those duties when he saw Gita and his stepfather, Julius, acting furtively and discovered the resistance. The Red Army was at first pushed out of Budapest but then returned to crush the city, forcing the author’s family to escape without Julius. In England, Decsy learned a new language and adjusted to British culture, never fully understanding why he had to leave the world he loved. He and his brother and sister got bounced around and were sometimes taken care of by the Roman Catholic Church. The narrative skips to his search for his biological father in the last 62 pages, finding him questioning the comfortable life he had established with his partner, Phoebe, and daughter, Petra, on the trip to Hungary. Decsy describes his experiences in rich detail: the layout of houses he lived in, how a priest he met while gazing at a stained glass window smelled, the skirts of the older woman who lived with his family in Budapest, how the members of a band he encountered resembled Hitler. He is honest about his failings and provides quite a bit of humor in what could have been a bleak account. The major thing lacking is his self-reflection about the trek to see his father. He doesn’t explore his compulsion to make the odyssey and devotes only a few pages to it before the engaging memoir abruptly ends with the dissolution of his relationship with Phoebe.

Despite a few flaws, this work tells a captivating refugee story.