John Hughes
speaker
199 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 4 Jun
John Hughes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He often sort of claimed, for example, that the father had been some sort of high-ranking military officer.
But in truth, he was a Jewish businessman, a failed businessman really, who later became mentally ill and was institutionalized.
And Roth never really came to terms with that.
It was not a detail which he confided really to anyone in his lifetime.
At any rate, he did get away from Brodie eventually.
He studied first in Lviv and then transferred to Vienna before his studies were interrupted by the First World War, the outbreak of war.
Yes, he attended the gymnasium, so the sort of grammar school in Brodie, excelled really academically, although by all accounts was something of a loner.
From an early age, enjoyed literature, German literature in particular.
This was at the tail end of when German was one of the teaching languages, actually, in Brody.
And shortly after he completed his secondary education, I think the language of instruction switched almost entirely to Polish.
So it was changing really during his lifetime.
He'd served in the war, although not on the front line.
We don't think he served in front line combat, although he, again, it's something he claimed various things to the contrary later in life.
So he finished the war, demobbed really from the army, returning to Vienna.
Brody, his hometown from 1919, became part of the new Polish Republic and so really was not really recognisable as the place in which he'd grown up and with which he had identified.
German was no longer one of the languages spoken there, not a recognised one.
For a time, I think then he...
He was ready to embrace the post-war world.
He was quite open to the opportunities that might be offered by the new democracies that were emerging.
But that gradually started to change during the course of the next decade or so.
Showing 21–40 of 199 · page 2 of 10
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