Yolanda Foldes

Hungarian novelist Yolanda Foldes was born Jolan Foldes in Kenderas, Hungary, in 1902. Her father was a pharmacist. She was educated in Hungary, and when she graduated high school she left for Paris, France, to study English and French at the Sorbonne. They failed to hold her interest, however, so she dropped them for sociology and psychology. She wrote a few papers on sociological problems and, to her amazement, found them published in serious journals. She began to work in Paris as a reader and translator--she spoke Hungarian, English and French--and before long she had written and published a novel, "Prelude to Love", which won a French literary prize. Other novels followed. She became involved in politics, and was a vociferous anti-Nazi and anti-fascist (which did not go over well with the right-wing Hungarian government of Adm. Miklós Horthy, which was allied with Nazi Germany). Foldes soon moved to England, and lived there until October of 1963, when she died in London.