Oprah Winfrey's recent selection of Elie Wiesel's "Night" for her book club will introduce millions of Americans to Holocaust literature and give the entire genre a big readership boost.

I hope this means thousands more will read Eugene Pogany's marvelous family saga, "In My Brother's Image: Twin Brothers Separated by Faith After the Holocaust."

Almost every writer has a personal reason for choosing a subject. Pogany told me in a telephone interview that he wanted "to probe the silences in my family story ? I wanted to fathom the religious differences in the family.

"Both Wiesel's and Pogany's books deal with the lives of Hungarian Jews sent in the early 1940s to concentration camps where they suffered incredible mistreatment. Wiesel, in fact, describes the Pogany book on its cover as "power-packed and poignant...highly readable and deeply moving."

And for me, moving it was. I read the book over three days, including 45 minutes on a treadmill at the Jewish Community Center, and another hour drinking coffee at Starbucks. I think I generated enough tears ? though as a macho man I tried to hide them ? to inspire concern from others in both locations. My heart and soul were touched.

Pogany's grandparents were born Jewish and converted to Catholicism after they married in 1912. The grandfather converted in order to qualify for a veterinary job in the civil service; the grandmother was attracted to the spirit of her new faith.

The author's father, Miklos, and his twin brother, Gyuri, were born and circumcised as Jews before their parents converted. But both were later baptized and were not unhappy to be part of the awe and majesty of the church.

When war came, being a Jewish convert to Catholicism provided no shelter from the concentration camps. The author's parents, Miklos and Muci, barely survived. During their ordeal, they cast off Catholicism and sincerely reclaimed their Jewish identity before finally settling in the United States.

Twin brother Gyuri, however, became a Catholic priest and, through a lucky turn of events, spent the war years in a rural Italian monastery, untouched by the war.

The brothers reunited after the war but could not bridge the emotional issues aroused by the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. The priest never inquired of his twin brother's concentration camp experience. Perhaps, says Pogany, he simply was unable to look beyond the Catholic Church's party line that all that was done to save the Jews was all that could be done.

The book opens with the grandparents' marriage in January 1912. It ends in 1996 when the author and his 84 year-old father return to Hungary, walk the area where the family home once stood, and find the gravesites of their forebears.


In between is a well-written tale of a family beset with religious doubts and dilemmas, living in one of the worst countries in the world during the worst ten years in modern Jewish history.

The conflicts and confrontations, the questions and answers, the baring of soul and spirit, the sober assessment of the Catholic Church ? both its attraction as a saving faith and its shameful complicity with Nazi and Hungarian fascism ? will keep you glued to the pages.

The final question I asked the author was whether the research and writing of the book has influenced his practice of psychotherapy.

Dr. Pogany replied: "It underscored how important unresolved grief is in our lives and how it can be transmitted from generation to generation. Parents and children need to reconcile before death takes away the opportunity; we need to say the unsaid before someone dies."

Pogany, a Newton-based psychoanalyst, will speak at Temple Sinai, Marblehead, on February 12, at 4:30 p.m.