"Never before published in English, Azarel almost disappeared forever, along with its author, into the flames of Hitler's Holocaust. Nearly sixty-five years after its first publication, this realistic and powerful novel by one of Hungary's finest writers may at last claim the modern masterpiece status it so richly deserves. Gyuri is the son of a rabbi in a modern Jewish sect living in rural Hungary at the start of the twentieth century.

Papa Jeremiah, Gyuri's paternal grandfather and an Orthodox fanatic, believes that by consorting and living with "pagans" his son and his followers are helping to "melt the Jewish people in the furnaces of exile" - prophetic and haunting language for a book published in 1937. The father, rigid and respectable, expects filial obedience and Judaic devotion from his son, but gets something quite different.

The boy is furious at Judaism and at his father for trying to make him believe in a God he has little use for."--BOOK JACKET.