This book is by the Hungarian writer Magda Szabo. I read and reviewed her novel The Door last year and it was one of the best books I read that year and any year. This book is twenty or so years older than that and one is quite different because of this. She was about 50 when this book was published and 70 when The Door was, and so age certainly had some role in the differences, but not the only differences, or even the primary ones. Instead, the 20 years history in Hungary make the biggest difference. Both deal with the fallout of war and the new world and new regime that rose from those ashes, but The Door is more about being removed by some time, and Katalin Street is about the lingering effects within the sphere of time.
This novel about is a small street of houses in a small villages. There are several families nestled and intertwined together, and their connections do not get strained until the arrival of the German forces in 1944. Then, the age of the boys, the age of the girls, and especially one of the family’s being Jewish come to bear.
As the novel then moves beyond 1944 to later years–1951, 1955, 1968, the longer term effects as the children becomes adults and still interact, they continue to understand and not understand their relationships.
This is a very beautifully written, dreamy kind of a novel, where relationships are not explicitly argued and defined, but are extraordinarily known.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Katalin-Street-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1681371529/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549369873&sr=8-1&keywords=katalin+street+by+magda+szabo)