Background
Heltai was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1871.
Heltai was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1871.
He interrupted his law studies at Budapest University and turned to journalism, joining the daily Magyar Hirlap.
His first volume of poetry, "Modern Songs" (1892), caused a minor scandal and was declared immoral. He offended the prudery of contemporary society with his light, tongue-in-cheek verses, whose single theme was carnal love. The frivolity of the tone was unusual, in the style of the French chanson and novel, in the sense that he presented the new type of young urban man and woman. The old type of patriarchal upper middle-class ideal was replaced by the irresponsible, irreverent, but likeable bohemian who ironically shrugged off the vicissitues of daily life.
Heltai spent several years in Vienna, Paris, London, Berlin, and Constantinople and translated plays and novels from English, French, and German. In recognition of his excellent translations from French literature, he was admitted to the "Legion of Honor" (1927). For a time he was president of the Hungarian PEN club.
From 1900 he became increasingly involved with the theater and directed several leading Budapest theaters. In 1916, he became president of the Association of Hungarian Playwrights.
Heltai’s short stories and novels are set in the same congenial atomosphere as his poetry. They are peopled by such easy-going characters as "Jaguar" (1914), a struggling reporter, or the hero of another novel modeled on Ferenc Molnar in "The Last of the Bohemians" (1911). His “serious” novel "House of Dreams" (1929) was an ambitious attempt to portray post-war Budapest and shows the influence of Freud.
Heltai was a very successful playwright. In his writings for the theater he retained the basic recipe: a touch of sentimentality mixed with a large dose of cynicism. In "The Tuenderlaki Girls" (1914), he relates the fate of three sisters of an upper-class family, “two of whom are respectable; the third falls into disgrace,” for which she is despised, but it is this youngest daughter who sacrifices her reputation to secure the happy marriage of her sisters. Heltai wrote several plays in verse, in which he revived the comedies of past epochs in his own romantic-ironical style; particularly successful was "The Silent Knight" (1936; English translation, 1937). A number of his plys and novels were translated into German, English, French, and Hebrew.
Heltai converted to Christianity in 1919 but returned to the Jewish fold when the Jewish law of 1938 was promulgated. He participated in the activities of the OMIKE (National Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association), which from 1939 until the Nazi invasion of 1944 maintained a theater that became the home of Jewish actors, musicians, and other artists prevented from appearing elsewhere.