Journey by Moonlight

Antal Szerb (1901–1945) was a Hungarian literary scholar and novelist. His 1937 novel Utas és holdvilág, variously translated as The Traveler (1994), Journey by Moonlight (2001), and Traveler and the Moonlight (2016), endures as a pioneering contribution to the modernist literary canon. Hargitai’s Journey by Moonlight celebrates its first English-language publication and honors the memory of Antal Szerb whose life was cut short in a Nazi labor camp. Three months before the war’s end, on January 27, 1945, his guards beat him to death and tossed him into an anonymous mass grave. It would take fifty years for his name to appear on a memorial when the novel’s American translator and his university students had the name of Antal Szerb inscribed into the Holocaust Memorial wall in the City of Miami Beach.