Blog about Heroes Don't Cry

Finally:

There is a lot to celebrate and a lot to worry about.

After close to thirty years of constant rewritings the book is finally done and at a printer. It will be on the open market in possibly less than three weeks. The final and second proof is in my hands and it looks good and professional.

Why shouldn’t it look good and professional, you ask?

Because it is all done by us. The family. I wrote it, and although the writer’s group critiqued it and work-shopped it to death in the last several years, the final product was edited by Leslie the cover was designed both by Peter and I, and the format, including the pictures, the choice and size of fonts were of the common work of Leslie’s and me. And it was Peter, who turned the whole thing into a pdf file, that made the book printable by Booksurge, a Print of Demand Company, a subsidiary of Amazon.com.

But why would I choose to go this way instead of getting it published the traditional way? Wouldn’t a big publishing company be interested in my story? After all, my father’s book about the Hungarian Revolution and the following secret trial of its leaders was published by several of them, in several languages and deemed to be an important work.

True enough, but when I kept sending it out to major agents and publishing houses they kept returning it with a comment, that it is a historical event that is no longer an interest to the average North American reader and they would have difficulty finding a readership for it.

In 2006, the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution Grove publishing in New York showed interest in reprinting my father’s book, but I guess it was merely a half-hearted effort. First of all they began the process a few short months before October, the actual time of the event. Then, when they found out that the copyright changed hands and after my father’s death in 2001 I became the sole proprietor, which meant that they would have to make a new agreement with me, they decided to drop the project, even though they already advertised it’s publishing date on Amazon for the spring of 2007. The new version would have included the original forward written by George Jonas and the Translators’ Preface by Daniel and Judy Stoffman, and they graciously agreed to include my prologue that concluded my father’s life story to the very end.

I originally offered to give them a chance to update the book with some newly found material about his prison years, but they showed no interest.

I bet, they thought that they could make a cheap rerun of the book and make an easy profit without investing time and effort into it.

The joke however is still on us, as this version is still advertised on Amazon.com, with the comment that the book is no longer available. It reads: In the name of the working class: Budapest Police Chief During the Hungarian revolution Extraordinary and Terrible Story of 1956 (Paperback) by Guido Crepax,(Author) Sandor Kopacsi (Author) Daniel Stoffman (Translator).(Currently not available)

Now you can ask: who the heck is Guido Crepax? And what does he have to do with my father’s book? I took the trouble to google the dear (already departed) soul, and it turns out that Guido Crepax was one of the greatest masters of the comic strip genre, who died in July 31st 2003 in Milan, Italy. His fame came from illustrating mostly classic erotic stories.

Knowing my father’s sense of humour he might have been tickled pink about having his name associated with such distinguished artist, but somehow the connection still eludes me. Could he have anything to do with the title graphics? Since the book didn’t happen by Grove (thank God) we might never know the answer to that.

But all in all this gave me the incentive to go for the Print-On-Demand road and to begin with I’m launching my memoir, which is really the story of how the family, and of course me my father’s only child survived the good and the bad times. I consider this book an adventure story narrating the seemingly impossible task of rescuing my parents from the clutches of the evil Soviet Empire.

So, here it goes. My English book titled Heroes Don’t Cry, a much extended English version of the original Hungarian, goes to test the market. We either float or sink, but as we used to say during the Adlerian trainings: we have the courage to fail.