Before John Lorinc’s family left Hungary for Canada in late 1956, they experienced unimaginable trauma. No Jews Live Here (Coach House) is about their unique family history, but also the broader context of events that rocked Hungary for much of the twentieth century. The highs and lows of life for this Hungarian Jewish family makes for fascinating and often devastating reading. During a period of national cosmopolitan flourishing, the Jewish community was given access to more professions and obtained more legal rights than in many other European countries. But this did not last; Lorinc’s grandparents’ generation benefited, but then lost everything in WWII, the Soviet occupation, and the failure of the 1956 revolution. Eventually his parents embarked on a somewhat unlikely and perilous journey, jumping off a train at the Austrian border with few possessions, and petitioning the Canadian embassy, where refugees were allowed to wait inside, rather than on the freezing street outside the American embassy. Each book I read that touches on the Holocaust contains fresh stories of hell and tragedy. In this one, it is the story of Lorinc’s father’s sale as a slave to work in a Serbian copper mine, where he toiled with around six thousand other young Hungarian Jewish men. He was a lucky survivor, liberated by Yugoslavian partisans. There is perhaps a little bit too much secondary history here because, though this framework is interesting and often essential, what is so exceptional about the book is this one particular family’s story. Lorinc captures the complex personalities of his surviving family members, especially his grandmother, Ilona. Their stories are told with care and precision, and the result is enthralling. —Kristina Rothstein

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