“As long as I can write, each time I take these pages, I will recall the departure: a fascist officer, at the border between Switzerland and Italy, shouts at me: ’Your religion?’… an unknown red-haired girl looks at me from her corner… had she already looked at me? Is it my imagination? Each time I evoke these memories, it seems to me that I already knew what I was jumping into with all my heart.”
So speaks the narrator, a Hungarian journalist, in the New York hospital where his days are ending. He is a hunted man, because he is Jewish, who fled Europe in 1939. An inexplicable attraction, except for anxiety and loneliness, ties his fate to that of a young dancer, Edith Gaal, who fled Hungary after her father’s suicide. Their relationship turns sour when he discovers that Edith attracts men and plays with this power. Along his path, a succession of disturbing characters shakes his certainties one by one: two nightclub owners who knew Edith in Europe, a shameless emigrant to whom she is not indifferent, the Austrian doctor who treats his sick heart with disgust, the widow Hilda whom he eventually marries without suspecting anything about her past...
A drama of old age and exile, written directly in English in New York, Farewell My Heart (À cœur perdu) is Molnár’s last novel. The French translation appeared in 1946 from Éditions de la Maison française, located at Rockefeller Center, which published exiled writers such as Raymond Aron, Saint Exupéry, and Jules Romains. Although the characters in this novel are “entirely fictional”, its autobiographical content and allusions to the war in Europe serve as metaphors for the narrator’s decline, from whom the “world of yesterday” is torn away day by day.
