Watching the excellent experiences of Global Voices I know very well what an excellent mean a blog is to connect people at the far ends of the world. And Pocakos has managed to do just that. He posted an entry on an English language book titled “Sword of the Turul”. The author Catherine Eva Schandl writes about the memories of his father - Karoly William Schandl, who was a lawyer in Hungary -, about the 11 years he spent in Soviet prisons after World War II.

Pocakos started a little investigation of his own about the family as Schandl not really a well know family, but according to the book Karoly Schandl was a son of a famous politician. And Pocakos actually found lots of interesting fact about the family, but he also raised some doubts about one of the dates mentioned in the intro for the book. But that is not the truly remarkable point of the story as even from my previous notes you might know that Pocakos is indeed very good in background research.
BUT the amazing thing happened when the author herself checked in with an English language comment for the original post. [Henrik’s note: as Pocakos later told me he is not even sure how she got the info about his entry on the book. Probably some link logging is involved.] And you can read the rest of the conversation yourself there, the comments are in English.

I think these cross cultural and cross language (!) connections are so rare that each of them are great and important. [Henrik’s note: and my own blog is aimed partially at fulfilling this role in its humble little way, so I can totally relate to the excitement of Pocakos about this story.]
(The referenced entry is in Hungarian, but the comments are in English)

Tags:
Cross-culture
Book