<i>Where the Angels Lived</i>

Where the Angels Lived

Book Reviews

Sandy Eisenberg Sasso reviews Where the Angels Lived by Margaret McMullan.

Monthly reviews of books written by Indiana authors are made possible by the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Awards and Indiana Humanities. Opinions expressed in this review are solely those of the reviewer, not any affiliated entity.

What does it mean to find the name of a relative you never knew existed?  What would it take to travel to another country to piece together a picture of that person’s life?  What would compel you to upend your, your husband and son’s life to learn about a person who never even appeared in a family photo album?  In Where the Angels Lived, Margaret McMullan does just that, and we are the beneficiaries of the extraordinary and poignant account of her journey.   

The book begins with Margaret’s visit to the Israel’s Holocaust Museum where she discovers a record of a family member who was murdered by the Nazis.  The report contains a name, Richard Engel de Janosi, but nothing else. The archivist at the museum tells Margaret that being the first one to ask for the record of Richard’s name, she must now be the one to tell his story. 

Traveling to Hungry on a Fulbright fellowship, the author begins the challenging and heart-rending process of unearthing Richard’s life and recounting his death.  In the process, she finds her ancestors.  They were members of a prominent Hungarian Jewish family, patriotic and well educated, community and business leaders with connections to Sigmund Freud and other prominent intellectuals and artists of the time.  As she uncovers the antisemitism that ultimately robbed, murdered and destroyed this family, she begins to understand her assimilated Christian family’s long held secret, and why she knew little about her Jewish heritage. 

In adding names and stories to her distinguished family tree, the author documents the terrifying history of the Hungarian Holocaust, even as she personally experiences a resurgent Jewish hatred and suspicion of the other.   

This is more than a family memoir; this is a book about the importance of looking back, of remembering.  Living in the past leaves us paralyzed in time, unable to move forward. This is why Margaret’s American family chose to forget.   But living without the past leaves us rudderless, without a ground on which to stand.  Margaret finds that ground, and ultimately brings her mother back to her ancestral homeland and to a deepening of their relationship to each other.  

A Jewish legend tells of is an angel of losses who goes by the name, Yodea (knowing) and searches in the dark places to hold in memory all that has been lost.  The name Engel means “angel”.  Margaret McMullen, as descendent of the Engel de Janosi family is such an angel who searches in the Hungarian small town of Pecs, to find Richard.  She recovers the family’s loss, not just to mourn, but to rekindle the glow of a kind and courageous human being.  Now, thanks to this engaging novel which reveals one surprising revelation after another, he is inextricably bound up with all of us in the bond of life. 

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About Margaret McMullan

About Margaret McMullan

 

A recipient of a National Endowment of Arts Fellowship in literature and a Fulbright to teach and research in Hungary, Margaret McMullan is the author of nine award-winning books.

 

Margaret’s novels include When Warhol Was Still Alive, Aftermath Lounge, In My Mother’s House, a Pen/Faulkner nominee; Cashay, a Chicago Public Library Teen Book Selection; and When I Crossed No-Bob, a Parents’ Choice Silver Honor, a School Library Journal Best Book, an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, a Booklist Best Book For Young Adults, and a Mississippi Center for the Book selection at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Both When I Crossed No-Bob and How I Found the Strong won the Mississippi Arts and Letters Award for Best Fiction, the Indiana Best Young Adult Book, and they are both New York Public Library A-List Books for Teens. How I Found the Strong was also named an American Library Association Notable Social Studies Book, and a Booklist’s Top Ten First Novel for Youth. Sources of Light is an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, a Best Book of Indiana, and a Chicago Public Library Teen Selection. Margaret won the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award in 2011. In 2015, Margaret teamed up with Phillip Lopate to curate Every Father’s Daughter, an anthology of essays about fathers by great women writers such as Alice Munro, Ann Hood, and Jane Smiley. Read her newest book, a memoir based on her research in Hungary, Where The Angels Lived: One Family’s Story of Loss, Exile, and Return. 

Margaret’s work has appeared in USA Today, The Washington Post, The Hill, The Bulwark, The Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Herald, Glamour, The Millions, The Morning Consult, The Morning News, Teachers & Writers Magazine, Ploughshares, Southern Accents, Deep South Magazine, StorySouth, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, Other Voices, Boulevard, The Arkansas Review, The Montréal Review, National Geographic for Kids, Southern California Anthology, Southern Accents, and The Sun among other journals and anthologies such as Christmas Stories from the South’s Best Writers. A 2007 Eudora Welty Visiting Writer at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, Margaret has taught in the Low-Residency MFA programs at Converse College, Stony Brook Southampton Writers Conference, Eastern Kentucky University, University of Southern Indiana’s Ropewalk Writers Retreat, and at Word Theatre’s Writing Retreat in Edale, England. She was the Melvin Peterson Endowed Chair in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Evansville, where she taught for 25 years. She writes full time in Pass Christian, Mississippi, where she lives with her husband, documentary filmmaker, Patrick O’Connor, who recently co-produced and directed Look Away, Look Away, the award-winning film about a flag, and a reckoning in Mississippi, available on Apple TV, iTunes, You Tube, and Google Play.

Connect with Margaret on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Linked In.

Check out Margaret’s author page on Amazon.

 

Sandy Eisenberg Sasso

Sandy Eisenberg Sasso

Sandy Sasso has written and lectured on women and spirituality, and the discovery of the religious imagination in children. She is the author of several nationally acclaimed children’s books and is a beloved international storyteller.