Before I discovered András Koerner’s quartet of books about the vanished world of Hungarian Jews, I knew only of their mass deportations and deaths in 1944. Born in 1940, Koerner was a child living in Budapest during the war; as a writer, the Shoah has been of less interest to him than assiduously reconstructing ordinary Jewish lives before the horrific events that no one among the Hungarian Jews could have anticipated. His extraordinary project, an epic act of loving memory, is dedicated to reminding us of their lives through concrete details: recipe by recipe, one moving photograph and artifact after another. As we say in Jewish prayer, he has brought the dead to life. You can read it here: https://bit.ly/346nUlj//