I was born in Budapest in1905, my religion is Greek Orthodox.

My father, the late Áron József emigrated when I was three years old and I was given to foster parents to the town of Öcsöd by the National Children’s Protection Agency. I lived there until I was seven. Like other poor village children I already started working at that time, as a swineherd. When I was seven years old my mother - the late Borbála Pőcze - brought me back to Budapest and enrolled me in the second grade. My mother supported me and my two sisters by washing and cleaning. She worked at houses from morning till night, and, being without parental supervision, I was skipping school and getting into trouble. But in the third grade in a book I found interesting stories about Attila, the Hun, so I threw myself into reading. I didn't only like the tales about the Hun king because my name was Attila, but also because my foster parents in Öcsöd insisted on calling me Steve. After a discussion with the neighbors they stated that there is no such name as Attila. I was horrified. I felt that the existence of my very being was questioned. I believe, that the discovery of the tales about Attila, the Hun, this experience lead me to literature, made me a thinking person, one who respects the opinions of others, but examines them carefully in his own mind; one who answers to the name of Steve until it's proven what he has known all along, that his name is Attila.

I was nine when the World War broke out. Our situation worsened. I took my share in standing in lines in font of food stores; it happened sometimes that I joined the queue waiting in font of a food plant at nine in the evening just to be told at half past seven in the morning when it got to be my turn that they were out of lard. I helped my mother the way I could. I sold water at the Világ cinema. I stole coal and firewood from the Ferencváros railway station to have something to heat with. I made pinwheels from colored paper and sold them to children who were better off.

I carried baskets, bags, packages in the market hall, etc. In the summer of 1918 I went to a vacation to Abbazia by favor of the King Karl Children's Vacation Fund.

My mother was already sick at that time, she was suffering from tumor of the uterus. Then I myself asked for help from the National Children’s Protective Agency and was sent to Monor for a brief period of time. When I was back in Budapest I sold newspapers, postage stamps, blue and white banknotes, like a little banker. During the Romanian occupation I worked as a bread boy at Café Emke while attending secondary school, after five years of elementary education.

My mother died at Christmas in 1919. My brother-in-law, the recently deceased Dr. Makai was appointed as my legal guardian. I spent the spring and the summer working on the tugboats Vihar, Török and Tatar of the Atlantica Shipping Company while completing my fourth grade examinations as a private student. After this, my guardian and Dr. Sándor Giesswein sent me to a seminary of the Salesian Order at Nyergesújfalu. I spent only two weeks there as I am, after all, a Greek Orthodox and not a Roman Catholic by religion.

I went to Makó from here, to the Demke boarding school, where I was soon granted free tuition. In the summers I was tutoring students in Mezőhegyes for accommodation and boarding. I finished my sixth grade in the gymnasium with straight As, despite several suicide attempts probably triggered by problems in adolescence, as neither then nor before that time did I ever have a helping friend beside me.

My first poems were published already; some poems I wrote at the age of 17 were published by the literary periodical Nyugat. I was thought to be a child prodigy; yet, I was only an orphan.

After completing the sixth grade in the gymnasium I left the boarding school because I felt idle in my seclusion: I stopped studying, because I learnt the lessons merely by listening to the lectures as my superior grade reports attest. I went to Kiszombor to work as a cornfield watchman and farm-hand and I did some tutoring as well.

On the advice of two of my beloved teachers I decided in favor of graduating. I passed all examinations of the seventh and eighth grade and graduated a year ahead of my former classmates. I had only three months to prepare, this is why I received only straight “good”-s for the seventh grade and a straight “satisfactory”-s for the eight. My final examination grades were actually better: I received a “satisfactory” only from Hungarian and History.

By then I was accused of blasphemy because of one of my poems. I was acquitted by the court.

After this I was a book salesmen in Budapest for a while and during the inflation I was a clerk at the Mauthner private bank. Following the introduction of the Hintz system I was given a position at the accounting department and soon after much for the annoyance of my senior colleagues I was assigned to supervise the currency values that were to be paid. My enthusiasm was undermined by my senior colleagues who assigned me to do some of their works too, who actually never missed a chance to make me angry because of my poems that were published in periodicals. “I used to write poems when I was your age” - they said. Later the bank went bankrupt.

I finally decided to become a writer and to acquire a position closely related to literature. I registered for courses in Hungarian and French literature and philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities at the Szeged University. I attended 52 hours and received excellent marks out of 20. There were days when I did not have anything to eat; I paid my rent from the honorariums of my poems. I was very proud when Lajos Dezsi, one of my professors found me eligible for independent research. However, all my hopes were dashed when professor Antal Horger, my examiner in Hungarian linguistics summoned me and in the presence of two witnesses - I can still recall their names, they are teachers now – declared that as long as he is around I will never be a high school teacher, as, “a person who writes this kind of poetry” – and he held up a copy of the Szeged periodical – “can not be entrusted with the education of the future generation”

One can talk about the irony of fate and this is a true example: this poem of mine entitled “With Pure Hear” became quite famed, seven articles were written about it. Lajos Hatvany repeatedly declared it the manifestation of the entire postwar generation for future ones to be savored. And Ignotus “murmured, hummed, fondled, caressed, cherished this beautiful poem in his soul” – as he wrote it in the Nyugat journal. He placed this poem in his “Ars Poetica” as the model of new poetry.

The following year – I was twenty then – I went to Vienna, enrolled at the university and made a living on selling newspapers at the entrance of the Rathaus Keller and on cleaning the quarters of the Hungarian Academy in Vienna. When the director, Antal Lábán heard it, he put an end to this, provided me with meals at Collegium Hungaricum and found me pupils: I tutored the two sons of Zoltán Hajdu, director of the English-Austrian Bank. From a horrible slum in Vienna, where I had no bed sheets for four months I became a guest of the Hatvany castle. The lady of the house, Mrs. Albert Hirsch, provided me with travel expenses and I went to Paris at the end of the summer. There I enrolled to Sorbonne University. I spent the next summer at the seaside in a fishing village in southern France.

After that I returned to Budapest. I completed two semesters at the university there. Yet, I didn't take my teacher's examination, because of Antal Horger's threats I didn't think I could find a job as a teacher.

When the Foreign Trade Institute was founded I was hired as a Hungarian - French correspondent. I assume my former supervisor, Mr. Sándor Kóródi would be happy to provide a reference on me. At that time I suffered a series of unexpected setbacks and no matter how life had toughened me by that time I could not go on. The OTI Health Service referred me to a sanitarium first and later to sick leave with neurasthenia gravis. I resigned from my position because I realized that I could not be a burden on a newly created institute. Since then I am making a living on my writings. I work as an editor of Szép Szó, a literary and critical periodical. Besides my mother tongue, Hungarian I write and read in French and German, I do Hungarian and French correspondence. I'm a good typist, I used to do shorthand - all I need is a month's practice. I am familiar with printing techniques, I can express myself clearly. I consider myself honest; I believe I am perceptive and persistent in work.

1937

(translated by Gábor G. Gyukits)