Janos Nyiri

János Nyíri (9 November 193223 October 2002) was a theatre director, journalist and writer. He wrote several highly acclaimed plays and novels, including Battlefields and Playgrounds (London: Macmillan, 1990), recognized by The Observer as the most important novel written by a survivor of the Holocaust.

Early life János Nyíri was born in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary, in 1932. His parents were Tibor Nyíri and Julia Spitz, respected Hungarian Jewish writers. Nyíri's parents divorced when he was a small boy, and János went to live on his grandparents' vineyard in rural Tokaj. During World War II and the Holocaust in Hungary, he went into hiding from the Nazi SS and the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party, with his mother and his older brother, András Nyíri. While most of his family and classmates were murdered in the Auschwitz and Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camps, Nyiri survived and was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945. After his military service and officer training as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Hungarian People's Army, Nyíri completed his studies at the Színház- és Filmművészeti Főiskola, the Academy of Cinema and Dramatic Art in Budapest in 1954, and rose to fame as a theatre director, in Kecskemét, Szeged, and Budapest.

During the 1950s, Nyíri settled in Paris and started working in the theatre again, with such respected dramatists as Eugène Ionesco, Jean Anouilh and Jean Genet. Nyíri also taught at the Conservatoire and studied at the Comédie-Française. Having secured a position as assistant director to Jean-Louis Barrault at the Odéon, he met his future wife, Jenny Hippisley, the daughter of British actors Lindisfarne Hamilton and Christopher Quest, He also directed The Marriage of Figaro, Phèdre, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and his own works, all over Europe. In 1980 If Winter Comes was turned into a television film for BBC Films, starring Paul Scofield, Denis Lawson and Cherie Lunghi. was widely praised in the British press, for its depiction of the Hungarian Revolution against the Soviet occupation of the 1950s. has been published in several languages, all over the world. His third novel, Curtain Up!, is set in Spain, France and England during the 1960s. It was completed in 2002, shortly before his death.

It was his second novel, of which the Wall Street Journal wrote: "Although hardly a month passes without some new account surfacing about a writer’s childhood during the Holocaust, nothing in recent memory approaches the greatness — the narrative beauty, the sublime character portraits and the cliff-hanging tension and drama — of Battlefields and Playgrounds". The Boston Globe praised the book as: "a panorama of historic events, a cross-section of society’s attitudes at the point of an ultimate test of its values, an exploration of a growing child’s consciousness, a story of a family’s struggle to survive, a dramatic novel of suspense, is also, perhaps most importantly, a treatise on the nature and limits of liberty… At the same time, it is a gigantic portion of what we all… secretly dream of finding in any novel: a riveting story, an engaging protagonist, an enthralling narrative, a convincing portrayal of a human predicament". Battlefields and Playgrounds was also Book of the Year in the Financial Times and chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of 1995 in the USA.

Legacy János Nyíri is survived by his wife, Jenny, a brother and sister, a son and daughter and six grandchildren.

Works The Imaginary Invalid (theatre production), Vaudeville Theatre, London, 1968 Le Ciel est en bas (theatre production), L'Athénée, Paris, 1970 If Winter Comes (film), BBC, London, 1980 Ha már itt a tél (film), Magyar Televízió/MaFilm, Budapest, 1985 "A Chilly Spring in Budapest" (magazine article), New Statesman, London, 8 June 1973 Streets (book), London: Wildwood House, 1979 Battlefields and Playgrounds (book), London: Macmillan, 1989; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992. Review: Madárország (book), Budapest: Makkábi Könyvkiadó-Téka Könyvkiadó, 1990; Budapest: Corvina Kiadó, 2014 Awakening The Day (כוכבים של יום) (book), Tel Aviv, 1998 Die Juden-Schule (book), Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1992; Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 2018

Other reading

(János Nyíri's son) Books by Janos Nyiri, Amazon.com Die Juden-Schule, S. Fischer Verlag, 2018