F ROM S HOWBIZ TO THE C ONCENTRATION C AMP : THE FABULOUS, FREAKISH LIFE OF HUNGARIAN JEWISH “DWARF” PERFORMERS, ZOLI HIRSCH AND THE OVITZ FAMILY ANNA KÉRCHY The specificity of the cultural history of early- and mid- twentieth century Central-Eastern European popular entertainment industry resides in the fact that besides inventive impresarios, ingenious performers and changing audience-demands it has been primarily shaped by traumatic historical events that all add retrospectively a certain melancholic undertone to past amusements. The advent of the First World War casts a shadow on the refined festivities in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’s Orpheums, the Second World War and Nazi occupation brought about the bombarding of circuses and the deportation of artists (many of them Jewish), the communist dictatorship closed down Budapest English Funpark’s (Városligeti Vurstli) vaudeville theatres as unwanted loci of aristocratic, capitalist leisure, humiliating working classes. Unfortunately, we only have fragmentary records and suspiciously fictionalized anecdotal evidence of many fabulous and freakish life stories from the heyday of Hungarian show business, mostly by courtesy of the books of by György Szilágyi 1 —doyen of Hungarian circus history and Jewish humour—which commemorate legendary but largely forgotten figures like Succi, the Fasting Artist whose livelihood was lost in times of war as the increasing number of hungry people found starvation no longer an amazing feat but a daily struggle, or like trapeze artist Leila, the Oddity who was rescued from a concentration camp by an SS officer falling for her strange charms, or like stunt-man Genghis Kohn’s hippopotamus called Tsores (“trouble” 1 György Szilágyi, Komédia nagyban és kicsiben (Budapest: Lapkiadó Vállalat, 1978); Dzsingisz Kohn Córeszban, avagy volt egyszer egy vurstli... (Budapest: Gabbiano Print, 2006.)