Dr. Katherine Gatto’s “American Voices, Hungarian Hearts: Hungarian Immigrants and Their Cultural Manifestations” discusses the three major waves of Hungarian immigration to the United States via samples of their cultural output representative of each wave’s different character. Terez D. Stibran’s novel, The Streets Are Not Paved with Gold (publ.1961), represents the values and Weltanschauung of the great 1890-1920 immigration. Karikázó [Round Dance], the poetry of Dr. György István Gyékényesi (publ. 1972), represents the displaced persons generation: immigrants from the aftermath of World War II. Finally, the film An American Rhapsody, written and directed by Éva Gardos in 2001, reflects the worldview of refugees from the Revolution of 1956. In each case, Dr. Gatto discusses the reasons (push and pull) for each immigration wave, the origins and descriptions of the immigrants, their challenges and successes in the process of immigration and assimilation into American life, and their cultural values as reflected in their artistic output. Noteworthy in its broad perspective, its examination of the working-class component of the first immigrant wave illuminates a cohort heretofore studied more for its sociographic composition than for its cultural products.
Dr. Teodóra Dömötör, in “The Dilemma of In-Betweenness: Sándor Márai’s Internal and External Exiles,” observes the renowned author through a lens unfamiliar to most readers and scholars outside Hungary. Expatriation has profound consequences on behavior and mental health. Though the new environment may be stimulating initially, the emigrant eventually must face the strains of displacement. Márai, who lived much of his life in exile in both Europe and the United States, documented the complications of daily life abroad, coupled with personal issues which drove him into periods of desolation. His moods had several distinct phases, and his emotional transitions relate to the stages of his cultural (un)immersion. Expatriate depression is the fundamental message in his texts written especially in or about New York City. Repeatedly decrying US society, he voices his inability to develop a sense of belonging there. Yet, while dwelling in his memories of his lost homeland and writing only in Hungarian, he denounces the drift of Hungary’s history and politics and adamantly refuses to consider returning home. Investigating the concept of in-betweenness, referring to a duality between place of origin and place of residence, Dömötör identifies a distinct space that Márai ended up occupying, focusing on the central questions of ‘where we are’ and ‘who we are’ concerning his understanding of identity.
In “The Native Tongue in Exile: The Experiences of György Faludy and Sándor Márai,” Dr. Peter Czipott contrasts the attitudes to one’s native tongue in alien environments via two poetic odes to Hungarian. Faludy (1910-2006) left Hungary’s growing anti-Semitism and closeness to Nazi Germany in 1938, settling in Paris. As related in his memoir, My Happy Days in Hell, he completed his “Ode to the Hungarian Tongue” in 1940 on the very day that the German Army began to occupy Paris, fleeing just in time to make it to Morocco and thence to New York. Márai (1900-89) chose exile over any accommodation with the imminent Soviet-style Hungarian regime in 1948, first settling near Naples where he wrote his “Funeral Oration,” which became a touchstone for the postwar Hungarian émigré community. Both poems have entered the Hungarian canon. The two display radically different assessments of the role and fate of the Hungarian language in exile, one celebrating its persistence and the other lamenting its decay. Each in its way celebrates the uniqueness of Hungarian, a linguistic isolate both at home and abroad. Close readings of the two poems demonstrate how the celebration can be both joyous and melancholy, the latter reinforcing a stereotype of the Hungarian psyche as expressed in the byword, “the Magyar makes merry in mourning.”
The presentations examine understudied aspects of Hungarian literature in exile, differentiating between the literatures of successive generations of immigrant populations, illuminating the psychological and literary effects of exile on an author who attained world renown only posthumously, and illustrating contrasting attitudes to the experience of one’s native tongue when it is a small linguistic isolate afloat on (or submerged in) alien seas.
Each speaker receives 14 minutes, ensuring half an hour for ensuing discussion.