The Paul Street Boys

Előszó

During this summer I stopped for lunch in a small Ital-
ian town and the elderly waiter found out during our
conversation that I was Hungarian. "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 Hungarian communities of the English speak-
ing countries, especially from America, asking me why
Molnar's book has been out of print for decades, im-
possible to find even in antiquarian bookshops, and
how much they would like their children to read their
favourite childhood story, which would also give them
the taste of the time and age of their great-grand-
fathers. Perhaps the publishers felt that a novel written
in 1907 in a somewhat dated 1927 translation would
not appeal to the teenagers of our computer age. The
sad truth is that some 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 play-
ground, 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 novel for young people. The Paul Street Boys
(1907), which insured his lasting popularity. Translated
into English in 1927 and here updated, the novel about
two gangs of boys fighting a war for a piece of land, a
derelict building site which to them is a cherished sym-
bol 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 Indian 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 exam-
ples 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