by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Timing is always a tricky thing. Earlier this summer, Andrew Princz, a 36-year-old Montrealer and the son of Hungarian immigrants, was planning on travelling to Budapest to launch his book in time for the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising against the Soviet occupation.

His book, Bridging the Divide, tells some very human stories that came out of the three tumultuous weeks in October and November of 1956 by interviewing siblings and relatives who had been separated by headline-grabbing events, and what became of them afterwards. The book was launched at the “Canada Salutes Hungary” gala at the Budapest Palace of Arts (Canada took in 40,000 Hungarian “56ers,” including this reporter’s father) last month.

But then the goulash hit the fan. Since mid-September, Hungary has been in an uproar, sparked by the current Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany’s candid remarks that the administration lied through its teeth to get re-elected. Solemn remembrance ceremonies were overshadowed by brand new street riots. What should have been an opportunity to look back at the courage of the ordinary men and women who faced Soviet tanks became an international embarrassment.

“The recent events are just the symptoms of an extremely polarized society,” Princz writes in an e-mail from Budapest. “Each segment of society is disappointed for their own reasons, since membership in the EU has been no panacea for the country’s economic woes. While the systemic changes in Hungary were bloodless, the result has left a good deal of acrimony among different segments of society.”

Bridging the Divide is, above all, a book about memory. Princz, who edits Ontheglobe.com, a travel and culture Web site out of his NDG home, criss-crossed Canada to interview 56ers, and travelled to Hungary to interview the relatives they left behind. The book catches up with over 30 individuals on both sides of the Atlantic and tells their stories in parallel, and from different perspectives. Details often differ depending on who is telling the story. And not all of them have happy endings. “There was a lot of pain, and lots of them broke into tears,” he told the Mirror in an interview this summer. “There’s a lot of emotion for a lot of people.”

While he tried to keep his subjects’ voices their own, he did notice discrepancies and inaccuracies. He had a historian go over the material, but by and large he tried to “keep away from dates.”

Time has a way of embellishing things, he discovered. “Fifty years has a way of turning stories into, you know, stories,” he said. “There was a lot of guilt, and a lot of memories that were adapted to the circumstances and the choices they made. These were choices they made in two seconds, and they affected the rest of their lives.”

Still, even while he was conducting his research, he noticed how the guardianship of the memory of 1956 is fought over. “The revolution has been over-politicized,” he said. That was a fact he encountered in Budapest.

“I am very disappointed about the violence that took place during the 1956 commemorations,” he writes. “Surprised, maybe not. Hungary is deeply divided, as it has been for many years. It is really too bad that at this time, when Hungary could have found commonality to move on in a positive vein, infighting has taken over. Right now, the country needs to find some commonality, since they have very important economic reforms that will require consensus. The latter, however, is a hard to find commodity here.”