I wrote this book because I am a Central European, and in spite of its severe faults I love Central Europe.

To be precise, I am a Central European, but not quite. I was born in Prague, by coincidence. I am not quite a Czech, though I do hold a Czech passport (as well as Canadian). My parents survived the Holocaust in Budapest, using false names and forged documents to convince police and collaborators that they were not Jewish. Neither my father nor my mother was quite a Hungarian. He was born in Slovakia, where Jews were not considered quite Slovak. She was a Budapest girl, but her father came from some place in the Habsburg province of Galicia that no one remembers. The family called it Poland, though today it may well be Ukraine. Although my grandfather was not quite Polish, his origins caused problems for my mother's folks. They suffered discrimination by Hungarians, including Budapest Jews. The ‘modern’ Jews there had contempt for the ‘Eastern Jews’, as they called the Orthodox Jews from the eastern regions of the Habsburg Empire. They would have been surprised to hear, in what I say in this book is postwar terminology, that they themselves were ‘Eastern European’. My father, who had studied medicine in Bratislava before being expelled as a Jew, married my mother when the war was over, and they moved to continue his studies in Prague. He graduated after I was born there, and was drafted into the Czechoslovak army. On the whim of a chance military regulation, they sent him to where he was born: the largely Hungarian-speaking border town of Komárno, in Slovakia. In fact, my father had grown up in a more purely Slovak environment, in another town some 50 miles to the north. But to be sent to Komárno pleased my parents, as it gave my mother a chance to speak Hungarian, and for all of us to travel to the exciting big city of Budapest, whenever the communist authorities allowed us to cross the bridge over the Danube into Hungary