I knew very little about my Hungarian-American grandfather, Frances Kalnay (“Ferko”) when I was young except, that he lived in Mexico and wrote best-selling children’s books.  Ferko was estranged from both my mother and my grandmother and was rarely mentioned by either of them. 

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Imagine my surprise when I received a letter from a researcher in Austria in 2015 saying that Ferko had been a high-level spy for the United States in WWII.  The shock was compounded three years later when I learned for the first time that my mother’s entire family was Jewish.

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These secrets motivated me to begin investigating my Hungarian ancestors and to write Family Declassified: Uncovering My Grandfather’s Journey from Spy to Children’s Book Author. The book is available in multiple formats.

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The research revealed that, not only is our family Jewish, but my mother’s aunt and cousin were murdered in the Hungarian Holocaust.  A happier discovery was that, before her death, my great aunt Boriska Notiné Kálnay was an accomplished painter.  Like many Jewish women artists in Central Europe she was subsequently excluded from art history.  In my next book project, The Lost Paintings of Budapest: A Woman’s Art, Erasure and the Hungarian Holocaust I will use Boriska as a case study.

The family stories described above and many more are highlighted in the documentary film The Storyteller with segments filmed in New York, Mexico and Hungary, and illustrations of the work of Kalnay relatives in Argentina.