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I've won an award! Firebird Book award under The Holocaust genre
Rita Bozi
RITA IS FASCINATED BY AND INTERESTED IN EVERYTHING.
About me
Raised by Hungarian refugees, Rita is a Somatic Relational trauma and psychedelic-informed Facilitator, a multidisciplinary creator, playwright and retired professional actor and dancer. For 25 years, her co-written play 52 Pick Up was staged in Canada, the US, England, Australia, France, Iceland and New Zealand and translated into French and Icelandic. Rita has been published in The New Quarterly, FFWD Weekly, WritingRaw.com, and Unlikely 2.0. THIS Magazine awarded her 3rd Prize in their Great Canadian Literary Hunt in 2012. Her travel stories have been broadcast on CBC Radio Calgary. She is an Alumna of The Humber School for Writers and a graduate of The National Ballet School. Her life practice is kindness and her life partner is Ken Cameron.
When I was better
Goethe 2022 Finalist for Late Historical Fiction
“Meticulously researched and brilliantly executed, this is a stunner.”
– BookView
“Rita Bozi is a brilliant storyteller and writer.”
– Thomas Riddell
“Rita Bozi’s ability to capture not just the history and milieu of the times, but the life and passions of those who live it is a sterling example of what sets an extraordinary read apart from a mundane narration of circumstance and history.”
Few other books about immigrant experience hold the descriptive power of When I Was Better:
“Her world had transformed into a place of gestures and facial expressions, making her feel more vigilant now than she had ever been under Communism. No one understood her but Zolti. Already she ached for her language and the family she left behind.”
– D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
“It’s difficult to produce enough adjectives to describe the exceptional body of work Rita Bozi has produced in this stellar novel, When I Was Better.”
– Feathered Quill
Both dark and humorous, the novel’s title is taken from a Hungarian saying, “When I was better, I didn’t brag.” When I Was Better, set in Hungary and Canada, chronicles the twenty-year relationship of István and Teréza, from the Nazi invasion, the Soviet occupation and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 to their reunion in Winnipeg in 1964.
On the cold, winter day István leaves his wife and infant son in western Hungary, Soviet tanks have crushed the Revolution and the spirit of the people. He is of the last of two hundred thousand refugees fleeing to Austria. His wife Etelka, traumatized by the war and violence of the occupation, is left to fend for herself and her baby after an act of desperation forces her husband to abandon his young family and choose self-preservation over duty.
Battered by private betrayals and public humiliations, the young couple learns that laughing at the absurd is a saving grace until a seven-year separation tests their endurance and their love. Moving between Budapest and Winnipeg, the novel explores the moral dilemmas that leave a legacy of secrecy, shame, isolation and relational ruptures. It shows how an autocracy corrupts its citizens by reviling truth and making survival with dignity a transgressive act. It is a moving chronicle of a refugee crisis from a different time.
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