The Red Magician

The Red Magician is the tale of Kicsi, a young girl in a backwoods Eastern European village in the early 1940's, a hamlet so isolated that the villagers know nothing of the brewing war - have no hint of the future save for ominous dreams. Into this village comes Voros, a redheaded wanderer, a juggler and magician, to disrupt their lives and antagonize the local rabbi...with whom he must fight a cabbalistic duel to which Kicsi is a secret witness. Then the Nazis arrive, and the world changes. Kicsi is first imprisoned, then must journey with Voros back to what remains of her village, for a climactic battle between the old world and the new. The Red Magician is a notable work of Holocaust literature, a distinguished work of fiction, and a marvelously entertaining fantasy - as Philip K. Dick remarked upon its first publication, "nourishment for the mind and the soul."