Convictions: My Life with a Good Communist

Jo Langer was an idealistic teenager in 1940s Hungary when she began a correspondence course in Marxism. Her tutor was Oskar Langer, a committed young communist from the former Czechoslovakia. They eventually met and married, and Jo left her bourgeois upbringing behind to become part of the new Socialist future in Bratislavia. But when Oskar, a respected economist and party-member, was arrested and imprisoned, Jo was immediately stripped of her home and her job. She spent the next ten years eking out a life for herself and her two daughters in near-impossible conditions. Convictions is Jo's compelling memoir of that time, told without sensationalism, but with candour and wit. It is the story of an immensely courageous, resourceful young woman, a portrait of a marriage, and a tale of survival in a totalitarian state. At its heart it is a demand for people to come before politics, and a protest against the terrible human consequences of unquestioning convictions and blind faith. Read more