Erzsébet Kádár (1901-1946) is often called the "writer of cruelty" after her short story Cruelty. It is true that he digs into wounds and objectively, although empathetically, presents difficult female fates or ruined lives - but all this must be nuanced. It was not him who was cruel, but the world in which his short stories were written: Hungary in the first half of the twentieth century, which suffered a series of traumas from the First World War through Trianon to the Emergency.
Erzsébet Kádár showed with sure writing skills how a woman lived this half century. Although her literary work, which consists of a few short stories, is autobiographically inspired, she not only wrote about her own fate, but also about her mother's generation and her poor ladies, single women and maids, and even about women trying to make a living as artists. Lonely, emotionally robbed, self-sacrificing women: Erzsébet Kádár, the heroes of the writer with an endlessly painful fate.
The slim volume of short stories - which is the most complete selection to date - makes it even richer: there are not many writers in Hungarian literature who articulate the women's reading of the world so precisely - and in this way, who are so current from the point of view of contemporary world literary processes.