Last Flight of Poxl West (Torday)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—near Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Kenyon College; M.F.A., Syracuse University
• Currently—lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania


Daniel Torday is the Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College. An author and former editor at Esquire magazine, Torday currently serves as an editor at The Kenyon Review. His short stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Glimmer Train, Harper Perennial's Fifty-Two Stories, Harvard Review, The New York Times and The Kenyon Review. Torday's novella, The Sensualist, won the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction. (From the publisher.)

An introduction to an interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air:

Torday pulled from his own family's experiences to write about the war [in The Last Flight of Poxl West]—his father was born in Hungary two years after World War II ended. He says, "My grandfather falsified papers to make himself appear to not be Jewish anymore and that was how they were able to live out the war in Hungary."

Seven years after the war, Torday's grandparents moved to a Hungarian community on Long Island, N.Y.—but they still kept their secrets.

My grandmother died in the early '90s without ever once admitting that she was Jewish, to me or to anybody else," Torday says. "My grandfather, actually, after her funeral, admitted to the rest of the family that he was Jewish and then wanted to tell those stories for the next decade of his life." —March 17,2015