Czardas by Diane Pearson

Czardas

By Diane Pearson

1976

Corgi books

Only half a century separates today’s   totalitarian state of Hungary from the glittering world of coming- out balls and feudal estates, elegance and culture, of which the Ferenc sisters – the enchanting Ferenc sisters – are the pampered darlings in the opening chapters of Diane Pearson’s dramatic epic CSARDAS.

Their world has now gone with the wind as surely as that of Scarlett O’Hara (which it much resembled): handsome, over-bred young men danced attendance on lovely, frivolous belles, and life was one long dream of parties and picnics, until the shot that killed Franz Ferdinand in 1914 burst the beautiful bubble.

The dashing gallants galloped off to war and, as they returned, maimed and broken in spirit, the new Hungary began to emerge like an ugly grub from its chrysalis. Poverty, hardship, and growing anti-semitism threatened and scattered the half-Jewish Ferenc famnily as Nazi influence gripped the country fromn one side and Communism spread underground from the other like the tentacles of ground-elder.
Only the shattered remnants of a once-powerful family lived through the 1g39-45 holocaust, but with phoenix-like vitality the new generation began to dapt and bend, don camouflage and survive Phylida Hart-Davis Sunday Telegraph