Baron Pal Podmaniczky and the Norwegian Bible | Page 4

talent for story telling. Please continue to write!" Nice words, aren’t they?
> A librarian colleague in the Hungarian National Library: "It’s a new fresh librarian writer. Don’t you want to join our new founded International Reading Association? Our first meeting will be on March 29th."
> An old English speaking uncle from the U.S.A. He emigrated there seventy years ago with his parents. After getting my Christmas card he posted an English Bible: a copy of the Revised English Bible (Oxford, 1989) immediately by courier post. I got it in three days time. I think he thought: "My poor niece, she has no Bible to read, that’s why she has to steal one."
> Perhaps the same idea occurred to one of our Finnish friends, an otolaryngologist, because he sent me a tri-lingual (Finnish-Swedish-English) New Testament.
> Another otolaryngologist, an excellent professor, very intelligent, who has got a good sense of humour, sent a message. I like him very much. He falls too into the circle with whom I cultivate friendships through exchanging greeting cards on Feasts of Tabernacles. He operated on my ear: he did an ear drum transplant on my left ear. During my operation he sang a Protestant psalm for me that I could hear through the veil of the partial sedation of the anesthesia. He cured my ear, so it became waterproof again. I wrote him a grateful card after finishing the Lake Balaton cross-swimming competition where I could cover the five kilometer without a swimming cap and earplugs. His remark on my book was the following: "Why didn’t you steal it? It is not a sin to steal flowers, kisses and books."
> An old country woman, our godson’s grandmother. Her name is Pap Lászlóné Pap Emma. "Pap" means minister in Hungarian and both her maiden name and husband’s name is "Pap". She wrote me: "Dear Iluska, although I am the daughter of a minister and the wife of a minister at the same time, I can not write such a nice short story. Congratulations."
> The last one in this list, another otolaryngologist, the fourth laryngologist, but the most important among them for me was my husband, a fifty-four year old marathon runner. He never praises me. The red bunch of roses, mentioned later, was the only one, the only time he presented me with flowers in my life. After eating my Sunday dinner, which I cooked first of all for his taste, he never says: "it was marvellous", but he says: "it was edible". But he inspires me with his negative approval. His opinion about the short story: "Don’t believe yourself to be a writer. It is the second novel or short story which makes the writer a real writer, because the first book is on his or her life--and everyone has a life. To discover the second story is the art. So I am waiting for your second short story."
At the end of my essay I would like to write about a lost Norwegian Bible and one that was never sent.
As I mentioned before, it was our assignment in the second year Russian teacher’s retraining course to write a short story then to write a literary analysis on our own work. It is nice, interesting homework, isn’t it?
All of the students in our group wrote interesting stories, then we read them aloud during the next lesson. We had to hand in the stories and the analyses to our professor who promised to correct them and give us a mark for them at the end of the semester. And besides all of these to give the stories to a jury consisting of teachers who were native speakers. The best three would be published in a library bulletin of the Teacher’s Training College. At the last lesson of the semester she gave all of us the best marks and said, "Good bye". At that time we thought she had not even read our work and was not interested in our analyses and that nothing would come of the short-story-writing competition.
In February I found an essay-writing competition in England, so I thought I needed my analysis because I wanted to collect materials connected with "The Norwegian Bible". I admit I am very untidy and disorderly. I found only the first page of my manuscript among my papers in the drawer. So I went to this professor to ask for my analysis if she did not need it. She told me that she had needed it because she gave it to one of the foreign professors but she did not remember to whom. I asked her to get it back so that I would be able to copy it. The week after, she said perhaps she had not given my papers to anybody as they did not remember it. The next