Miklós Vajda's 'essay-memoir', Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame, is a deceptively modest masterwork. Modest, because it stays within the frame of its seemingly limited objective, while giving the reader so much more than the title and the genre promise. Reflected in the portrayed mother's eyes, as in a convex mirror within the depths of a Flemish Renaissance painting, the reader discerns a faithful miniature portrait of the author himself. In addition to painting a moving portrait of his mother, a rara avis, one of the last representatives of a vanishing species, Vajda also sketches, with deft strokes, significant outlines of his own Vita, while touching upon certain central issues of twentieth-century Hungarian identity. We are given intimate glimpses of the author's mother that sparkle as exquisite close-ups, details of an implied panorama that spans decades and continents, in a magic act of literary art joining the outer, objective world to the inner, subjective one.
The first third of this work has appeared in the pages of The Hungarian Quarterly

(No. 191), in George Szirtes' fine translation, and one hopes the entire text of the memoir will soon become available in English. Miklós Vajda's vast experience as editor and literary translator combine to inform a narrative viewpoint that makes this memoir uniquely attractive for the Anglophone reading audience.
The fine edge of guilt that sharpens the focus of these recollections is surely the inheritance of every mother's son trying to create a just portrait of, and in the process, do justice to, a mother inevitably resented, rejected or rebelled against at various times. And how revealing, of the portraitist's own vanities and follies at various stages of youth and mid-life, the painstaking account of these guilt-provoking instants! It takes a searing honesty to look this hard and this close. The layers of guilt lie thick and varied: at one time (the late 1940's, Hungary's hardcore, early Stalinist years), Vajda was even "deeply and genuinely ashamed" of the aristocratic origins of his mother's side of the family.