Love and Politics

THE STREET OF THE FISHING CAT-- Jolan Foldes--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

With an uneven novel of the Philadelphia underworld, Steps Going Down, John Mclntyre won the $4,000 prize as the U. S. entry in a complicated international literary sweepstakes known as the All-Nations Prize Novel Competition (TIME, Sept. 7, Oct. 26). Sponsored by Farrar & Rinehart, Eric Pinker & Adrienne Morrison, the Literary Guild, Warner Brothers and by publishers in ten other countries, the All-Nation's Competition carried a first prize of $19,000. This grand prize was won by a Hungarian woman, onetime secretary in the Hungarian Embassy in Egypt, with this clever, smooth novel written from a thoroughly international point of view. Chief distinction of The Street of the Fishing Cat is the ingenuity with which representatives of most of the European nations are drawn into its plot, the blistering irony with which social, political and national issues are satirized in its sentimental story.

The Street of the Fishing Cat is only two paces wide, 30 paces long, with four houses on each side, an obscure Paris cranny favored by refugees and exiles because the rent is low. There, in 1920, the Barabas family from Hungary found refuge, while Papa Barabas tried to find work in his trade as a furrier. They were an ambitious, warmhearted, restless outfit. Anna, the oldest girl, was emotional, observant, quick to understand other people's troubles but a little helpless about helping them as she wanted to. She took care of the house, did the marketing, while her mother worked in a laundry. Her young brother Jani dived into the strange world of French school life, compensating with his intellectual triumphs for the bewilderments and pain of his social failures. The youngest girl, Klari--soon so assimilated she was called Claire--was most deeply influenced by the family transplanting, becoming vigilant and wary as a child, defiant and aloof as an adolescent, practical and forthright with a surprising insight into people as she grew up.

The Barabas neighbors were responsible for most of this. There was Liiv, a Lithuanian professor who had been a socialist dictator of food supplies in a brief post-War revolution and whose friend was now Bardichinov, who had been a banker in Russia. When Primo de Rivera is in power in Spain they are joined by a gentle anarchist named Alvarez; when Rivera falls, Alvarez disappears, replaced by the courtly Spanish Prince Maura. When Mussolini takes power in Italy a cultivated minister of finance appears with his beautiful daughter. At first the refugees plot and conspire, then gradually make friends until political lions and lambs are reconciled by loneliness.

The Street of the Fishing Cat responds like a seismograph to every shift in European politics. Anna Barabas works for a dressmaker, loses her job when French and Hungarian political relations grow tense. Her scheming sweetheart is arrested in a swindle, jailed, deported to Hungary, where he becomes a movie director. Anna and her father make a desperate expedition to South America, try to return to Hungary, symbolically find work in Paris when Franco-Hungarian relations improve. Just as the small foreign colony grows stable it is disrupted again by a flood of German refugees. Anna, as divided in mind as she is in nationality, rejects her German lover, while Jani is turned down by his French sweetheart and only Klari's international affairs work out happily as she gets the man she wants.

She understood more clearly than the others: "Her generation was born on a volcano. When they were six, their fathers went to war and their mothers went to live with their parents, or sent their children to them and nursed the wounded ... or took a two-room flat instead of the old eight-room one, or moved with their children to some sordid little hotel of some little town behind the front where their husbands were in the hospital, or fled from scurrying troops, or wandered from a modest bourgeois home to the luxury of a ministerial mansion, or into exile, or into a refugee's railway carriage home. . . . This generation was born and shunted about. . . ."

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