The Paul Street Boys

Előszó

During this summer I stopped for lunch in a small Italian town and the elderly waiter found out during our conversation that I was Hungárián. "Oh, you come from the country of The Paul Street Boys," he enthused. "I read it as a teenager and I remember every chapter." When I told him that I happened to be the grandson of the author, he shuffled back to the kitchen and doubled the portion. Indeed, this book is a true world classic of its kind and it has been translated into fourteen languages up to date. I was bombarded with letters from the large expatriate Hungárián communities of the English speaking countries, especially from America, asking me why Molnár's book has been out of print for decades, impossible to find even in antiquarian bookshops, and how much they would like their children to read their favourite childhood story, which would alsó give them the taste of the time and age of their great-grandfathers. Perhaps the publishers felt that a növel written in 1907 in a somewhat dated 1927 translation would not appeal to the teenagers of our computer age. The sad truth is that somé of the juvenile classics I re-read had lost their old magic, at least for me. But not this one. The Paul Street Boys is still the same fascinating story of two gangs of boys fighting a war for a piece of land, a derelict building site, a temporary storage place for timber, which is their beloved adventure playground, to them a cherished symbol of freedom. Vissza

Fülszöveg

Ferenc Molnár (1878-1952) is perhaps best known in the world for his brilliant drawing room comedies such as The Swan and The Guardsman. But in Hungary it was his növel for young people, The Paul Street Boys (1907), which insured his lasting popularity. Translated into English in 1927 and here updated, the növel about two gangs of boys fighting a war for a piece of land, a derelict building site which to them is a cherished symbol of freedom, is still the same fascinating story it was nearly a century ago. "At the time Ferenc Molnár wrote The Paul Street Boys, Cooper's Indián war-stories were extremely popular in Hungary and there is the flavour of their morality in this book/' writes Mátyás Sárközi, Molnár's grandson, in his Preface to the present edition. "There are examples of good cameraderie, loyalty, idealism, but Molnár always manages to save himself from being just a shade too sentimental. Like Mark Twain he has the wit and the good writer's sense to mix the grotesque with the pathetic." A true world classic of its kind, The Paul Street Boys, which has been out of print for decades, is a juvenile classic that has lost none of its magic. Vissza