They both were born in Hungary. They both escaped the Holocaust. They both now live in San Francisco.
And now both women have written memoirs — which both will read from and discuss during the next Odd Mondays event at Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco, set for Monday, Feb. 21 at 7:30 p.m.
Authors Agnes Biro Rothblatt and Agatha Hoff were asked to participate in the event by Judith Levy-Sender, who started the Odd Mondays series a decade ago with her husband, Ramon Sender. It’s a community-based speakers series that meets two or three times a month, depending on how many odd-numbered Mondays there are on the calendar.
In the past 10 years, Levy-Sender has booked a wide range of speakers, such as musicians, artists, writers, politicians and seekers of spirituality.
In explaining the upcoming booking, she said, “I am intrigued by the whole question of Jewish identity, and I am especially interested in memoirs involving wars and displacement. Though both these authors are writing about their families, their stories are quite different.”
Rothblatt, 78, wrote “A Journey from the Chain Bridge to the Golden Gate,” published last June. It tells how her family survived the Nazi regime, how someone got Christian identification papers for them and how someone else gave them an apartment.
“I will dedicate my reading to the people who saved our lives,” she said.
“My book is about Jewish identity,” she added. “I grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Budapest, and my family was always very careful to tell us children that we were Jewish. Later, I remember becoming frightened because we were Jewish, and I also remember the sewing on of the yellow star, being marked as Jewish.”
The Chain Bridge in the title refers to the suspension bridge that spans the Danube River, connecting Buda and Pest. “I chose that title to reflect my Hungarian pride mixed with my San Francisco pride,” she said.
A retired social worker, Rothblatt also worked in public health and founded a research company. She lives with her husband, Isaiah, in San Francisco, where the couple settled in 1959. They dedicated the book to their three sons, and they also have two grandchildren.
As to why she wrote her book, Rothblatt said, “My generation is dying out, and we must tell our stories while we can.”
Hoff, 74, had a slightly different inspiration for writing “Burning Horses: A Hungarian Life Turned Upside Down,” which also was published last June. It occurred when her granddaughter told her that her eighth-grade history textbook stopped at World War II.
“I decided she should at least know her grandmother’s history,” Hoff said. “The book served as an eye-opener for my granddaughter, who was a toddler when my mother died.”
Hoff’s book is a fictionalized biography of her mother, Eva Leopold Badics, who was baptized at birth after her parents converted from Judaism to Catholicism.
“She hadn’t given much thought to her Jewish ancestry until she was ordered, as a Jew, to report to a football stadium,” Hoff said. “Instead, my mother went into hiding.”
The book’s title comes from an unsettling experience during Hoff’s youth. “During the siege of Budapest, we were living in an apartment house. The German army had commandeered the first floor and stabled their cavalry unit there,” she said. “The building was hit by a bomb — we were safe in the shelter below ground — and the army couldn’t get the horses out.”
Hoff, who came to the United States at 13, is a retired attorney who still writes a column, “Tales from the Bench,” for the San Francisco Bar Association’s quarterly magazine. She lives with her husband, Irwin, in San Francisco, and they have six children and seven grandchildren.
Odd Monday, 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 21 at Noe Valley Ministry, 1020 Sanchez St., S.F. Free. Pre-event no-host dinner at nearby pizza restaurant, 6 p.m. Information: www.oddmondays.com.
“Burning Horses: A Hungarian Life Turned Upside Down” by Agatha Hoff (200 pages, Sweet Earth Flying Press, $24.95)
“A Journey from the Chain Bridge to the Golden Gate” by Agnes Biro Rothblatt (312 pages, Small Batch Books, $18)