As a four-year old, Monica Halasz (now Porter) didn't remember much of her homeland after her family fled after the 1956 abortive revolution. Here, with only a month allotted, she manages to combine a travelogue with her own encounters with her relatives and family friends willing to meet with her. Others do not. You feel the tension living in a communist regime here, even one as relatively more open (1980) than others, and I wondered how much of her story she had to leave out for fear of offending those whose conversations she could not have retold at the time of her book.

She conveys her journey in a surprisingly well-written account that often relies upon analogy and metaphor. She builds into her visit an examination of the refugee and the stateless condition--why can some adapt and others never can, once removed from their place of birth, she asks herself and other Hungarians she knows from England, where she now lives after a New York childhood.

Worthwhile for its thoughtful and evocative analysis. A month usually gives little raw material for a sustained report, but combining her travel with her own recollections and other exile accounts, Porter constructs a non-sentimental, honest, and revealing picture that opens up herself as well as Hungary to the reader.