An Exclusive Love: A Memoir

An Exclusive Love: A Memoir by Adorján, Johanna. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780393080018.

“This book tells the story of Vera and István, Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust, fled during the 1956 uprising in Budapest to Denmark and in 1991 in Copenhagen took their own lives. They were found in their bed, hand in hand. It is the story of an unusual love. The story of my grandparents."―Johanna Adorján Two people have grown old together. He is terminally ill, she doesnt want to live without him. One Sunday in autumn, they clean the apartment, leave the dog with a friend, and protect the rose-bushes against the cold of the coming winter. Then they are ready. Tactfully and affectionately, Johanna Adorján has reconstructed the day of her grandparents suicide. Vera and István were anything but ordinary. Chain-smoking and glamorous, they exuded the aura of a more elegant age. And they had a past which they did not discuss―even within the family. Decades ago they had fled disaster, started a new life in Denmark and―so it seemed―never looked back. Sixteen years after her grandparents death, Johanna Adorján sets out to fill the gaps of their story, in the process discovering unexpected things about herself and her family. Against the backdrop of the horrors of the 20th-century, she brings Vera and István back to life―a fascinating couple, peculiarly stylish, stubborn, eccentric. With an extraordinary blend of true reporting and novelistic recreation Johanna Adorján tries to understand their last and powerful act. Beautifully written, tender but never sentimental, An Exclusive Love is a brilliantly-constructed memoir and a gorgeous romance, a tale of two people who died as they lived: inseparable.