Background
János Kemény"s mother, the actress Ida Berenice Mitchell (1871-1956), lost her husband, István Kemény, shortly after János was born and could not afford to support her four children.
János Kemény"s mother, the actress Ida Berenice Mitchell (1871-1956), lost her husband, István Kemény, shortly after János was born and could not afford to support her four children.
János attended the Reformed College (denominational high school) in Kolozsvár/Cluj (now Cluj-Napoca, and then enrolled in the fall of 1921 at the College of Land Cultivation in Vienna.
In 1926, János Kemény and Aladár Kuncz organized a literary conference of Transylvanian Hungarians at Kemény"s estate in Brâncoveneşti, Mureş (Marosvécs) County. The conference led to the formation of the Helikon community, which from 1928 published the influential Hungarian literary periodical Erdélyi Helikon. In 1930, Kemény was awarded the Corvina Wreath by the Hungarian government. decoration.
Foreign ten years from 1931, he headed the Hungarian Thália Theater in Cluj (Kolozsvár)and also published literary work.
Then from 1945 to 1952 he was among the founding organizers of the Székely theatre in Târgu Mureş (Marosvásárhely). However, he was obliged to do manual work in the communist period, before later finding a job in the library of Târgu Mureş (Marosvásárhely) art college and working on the Hungarian-language magazine Új élet in the same city.
