An Exclusive Love

Johanna Adorjan

An Exclusive Love
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Text Publishing Co
Country
Australia
Published
30 August 2010
Pages
192
ISBN
9781921656569

An Exclusive Love

Johanna Adorjan

She is a healthy seventy-one-year-old woman. He is a dying eighty-two-year-old man. This couple, who have been united through the horrors of twentieth-century Europe, and through the joys of love and family, cannot live up to the vows they made nearly fifty years ago to stay together ‘until death do us part’: they will die as one, never to be parted. On 13 October 1991 they take their own lives, together.

Sixteen years later, their granddaughter Johanna Adorjan digs through her family history to piece together the puzzle of the exotic and mysterious couple she knew only in fragments. She dares to give voice to her grandparents’ experiences as Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust, which her family has always labelled ‘something we don’t talk about’. She learns, too, how these experiences have shaped her family and the person she is today.

Not only a Holocaust memoir, An Exclusive Love is both a love story and a journey of self-understanding; beautifully told, vividly depicted and emotionally exquisite.

Review

An Exclusive Love is the type of exquisite book one reads and finishes in the one sitting. It is the type of story that opens up discussions around dinner tables because of the affirmative portrayal of assisted suicide. However, this is not a book about death. Johanna Adorján has written here, in her first book, an ode to enduring love.

The story is about her healthy 71-year-old grandma and her dying 82-year-old grandfather. This dignified cultural Hungarian couple, who have lived through the horrors of twentieth-century Europe, decide to take their own lives, together. Later, Adorján pieces together the enigma of her grandparents’ last day, and by doing so unravels their untold experiences as Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust, and their arrival as migrants in 1956 Denmark.

Told with such respect for their decision and for the way they lived their lives, An Exclusive Love becomes both a celebration of Adorján’s grandparent’s full lives – but also, powerfully, a reflection of hers. This is an important story for us all because it allows us to reflex on our fragility and of those around us.

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