Finding Home (Hungary, 1945)—The Little-Known Postwar Jewish Experience, with Dean Cycon

Dean Cycon’s debut novel, Finding Home (Hungary, 1945), explores the complex emotional, moral, and economic dynamics facing Jewish concentration camp survivors trying to return to their hometowns after liberation. As the six surviving Jews of Laszlo, Hungary, return home, they seek to restart their lives while struggling to face their former neighbors and friends who became perpetrators, enablers, and bystanders. Their loved ones were all murdered, and their spirits and bodies were brutalized in Auschwitz. Still, they retain the hope of recapturing a semblance of normalcy in the town they called home—only to discover that everything they once possessed has been taken from them in their absence. 

Join us at the Yiddish Book Center for the Finding Home Reading Tour, a literary and performance experience featuring author Dean Cycon and Jewish music practitioners Bea Carlson (accordion/vocals) and Jason Ditzian (clarinet). This hour-long engagement takes audiences on a journey through several passages of Finding Home, read by Cycon and scored with live klezmer and Hungarian folk music by Carlson and Ditzian. Following the performance there will be a book signing.  

About the presenters: 

Dean Cycon is an author, lawyer, human rights advocate, and social entrepreneur who has lived and worked in over sixty countries. A passionate explorer of culture and history, Dean seeks out unexamined corners that illuminate the human condition. He has previously published “Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee,” which was awarded the gold medal for best travel essay by the Independent Publishers Association and has been translated into Chinese, Korean, and Spanish. Finding Home (Hungary, 1945) is his first novel. Dean lives in western Massachusetts, USA. 

Bea Maxwell Carlson (they/them) is a western Massachusetts musician, composer/arranger, writer, linguist, media enthusiast, and curator/managing editor for Klezmer.com. Bea studied linguistics at the University of New Hampshire with a focus on languages in contact and diasporic languages, including Yiddish and Romani, as an expansion of their musical interests.  

Jason Ditzian (he/him) is a wind instrumentalist who has composed and performed numerous works for dance, movie, and theater. He is clarinetist/leader of California-based klezmer ensemble Kugelplex and western Massachusetts–based klezmer ensemble Myrtle Street Klezmer. Jason has performed, recorded, and toured internationally with artists such as Charming Hostess, Oakland Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Dohee Lee, Joan Baez, Frank London, inkBoat, Kitka, San Francisco Mime Troupe, and many others. Jason founded nonprofit arts consulting firm Narluga Arts in 2019 to further the field of socially engaged nonprofit arts.