ZEND, Robert

I lost everything but my accent, Robert Zend once noted, with reference to escaping from his native Hungary during the 1956 Revolution and arriving in Toronto. What he gained in the process was a fresh start in life, art, outlook, and language. In Budapest, he had worked as a humorist and columnist; in Toronto, employed as an arts producer for CBC Radio’s Ideas, he wrote reams of imaginative and fanciful poems—some in English (mostly in print) and some in Hungarian...