A mosoly országai. Harsányi Zimra sok élete
The Lands of Smile: the Multiple Lives of Zimra Harsányi

Summary/Abstract: Zimra Harsányi’s personal life was connected to several countries: born in Romania as a Hungarian Jew, escaped from Communist Romania through Hungary and Germany to France where she died. During her writing career she used the names Ana Novac, Novák Anna, Harsányi Zimra, writing in three languages and three genres (drama, a holocaust diary and fiction). She became a successful author and then was immediately banned during the late 1950s. The paper discusses the author’s works connected to many languages, geographical spaces and genres, examining her fluid identity construction, playing with names and dates of birth, and also finally playing hide and seek with the Romanian secret police. Zimra Harsányi was a woman of amazing wit, playfulness and extraordinary capacity to survive very different systems, her smile being a trademark image on most of her visual representations. The paper places Harsányi’s works in a context of cross-cultural transgression, signalling also the consequences of this transgression within the reception of Harsányi/Novák/Novac’s works.

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