78 Spring Street (Tavasz Utca 78)

Book excerpt: The apartment building where I grew up had peeling paint and unkempt trees and bushes. Perhaps the twenty families living in nineteen apartments didnt even notice that it was not only the walls of the building that were chipping away little by little simply because they were glad that they had a roof above their heads. As I was growing up, each family represented its own soap opera to me. As a child, I became fascinated and, as a teenager, was appalled by the people, the tenants, who lived there and the hypocrisy that surrounded my family and me in our everyday life. One could only imagine how deeply they came to be part of my life with good but, most of the time, bad intentions. After all these years, those memories are as fresh as a harvested bouquet of flowers that still had the morning dew on its buds. I had to write about them; I needed to write about them. Why? Because I owe them a great deal. For what? you may ask. The answer lies in the stories that took place at 78 Spring Street: Tavasz Utca 78.