Misplaced Pages

Mária Földes

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
Hungarian-Romanian playwright
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Mária Földes" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (September 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources.
Find sources: "Mária Földes" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2023)
The topic of this article may not meet Misplaced Pages's general notability guideline. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted.
Find sources: "Mária Földes" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
(Learn how and when to remove this message)

Mária Földes (5 September 1925 – 21 August 1976) was a Hungarian-Romanian playwright. After surviving several Nazi concentration camps during 1944-1945 in World War II, including Auschwitz, she returned to Romania, where she studied drama and theater arts. Writing several plays in Hungarian, she is also known for her memoir, The Stroll (1974), published in Hungarian and in Hebrew (1975).

Early life and education

Mária Földes was born to a Jewish Hungarian family in Arad, Romania on 5 September 1925. She grew up speaking Hungarian, Romanian, and German. From the age of ten, she studied at the Notre Dame de Sion nunnery in Satu Mare, where she studied in French. In 1940, she was forced to enlist in the newly established Jewish gymnasium in Cluj due to the numerus clausus against Jewish students in all other schools.

In May 1944, after graduating from the gymnasium, Földes at the age of 18 was interned in the Cluj ghetto, where the Nazi occupiers forced the local authorities to gather the Jews. She and her mother were deported some time during May 1944 from the ghetto to Auschwitz. Later, they were shifted to other concentration camps, such as Krakow-Plosow, Wiesau, and Langenbialau, where they were liberated by the Russians. They both survived and returned home in May 1945.

Career

After the war, Földes returned to Romania. She studied drama at the Szentgyorgy Istvan Academy of Dramatic Art in Cluj. Soon thereafter she began writing plays.

Földes wrote and published several plays, including:

  • Weekdays
  • The Demoiselle in the Barracks
  • The Accident on Street Number Nine
  • The Seventh is the Traitor
  • The Inheritance
  • Short is the Summer

With the exception of Short is the Summer, her plays were collected and published in a 1968 book titled “The Seventh is the Traitor”. In 1974, Földes published her memoir, “The Stroll”, in Hungarian in Cluj at Criterion Publishing House. That same year Földes left Romania as a dissident and rejoined both her children who lived in Israel.

Földes published a few short stories in various Israeli newspapers. In 1975, her memoir The Stroll was published in a Hebrew translation. It was adapted as a one-woman play by the same name, and received productions in Hebrew in Tel Aviv at the Habima Theatre, and a short tour in the United States.

Marriage, family, and death

After the war, Földes married her school sweetheart Bartha Gabor, a documentary director, and in 1946 gave birth to their son, Gabriel Bartha. In 1948, she divorced her first husband and married Lazlo Földes, an adjunct professor at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj. She and her husband had a daughter, Agnes Földes.

Suffering from long-term depression, Földes committed suicide in 1976. Her daughter Agnes Lev worked with the actress Baatsheva to adapt her mother's memoir for the stage. They wrote a one-woman show, starring Baatsheva, which was produced at the Habima National Theater. She received the Kinor David (David's Harp Prize for her performance.

The play toured in Yiddish and English productions. It was performed in the United States in 1977 or 1978. Földes' memoir was adapted in Hungary as a radio dramatization, produced in Budapest around 1985.

References

  1. Mária Földes, The Stroll
Categories: