Book Migration

Back, oh, some five or six years ago, my brother Baldy asked if I could lay my hands on some books in Hungarian. He had met a Hungarian Benedictine monk  at St. Benedict’s Abbey in Atchison, KS who liked to read in his mother tongue. I managed to find two or three and sent them off. Then, later, I chanced across yet more—and once more a recycled Amazon container took them on its way to Brother Peter. And thus, one or two at a time, ever since a intervals.

Little did I realize just how many such books I had in my great forest of volumes. Now what with unpacking still steadily moving forward, I unearthed another dozen or so—but with some twelve or so boxes still unopened, there may be more yet.

The initial books I’d sent were actually some that I had been reading, off and on, either for content or for reference in preparing our family history—our great transition from Europe to America (see this link here). The current batch includes a gardening book, a cookbook (it contains several quite elaborate recipes for preparing snails), a book on traditional weaving and embroidering, the elaborate and highly scholarly yearbook for a Museum, a photographic work titled Storm-beaten Castles, an essay collection by Dezső Szabó (1879-1945) titled Kill! and dated 1922, and two volumes titled Diary by Sándor Márai (1900-1989) extending from 1945 to 1967.

Márai’s life to some extent carries an aura of our own transition. He was a poet, writer, and journalist who was both passionately patriotic but yet, oddly (but this is normal if you live it) also much attached to the greater multi-ethnic unity that the Austro-Hungarian monarchy represented. He much mourned its passing—and hated the communist regime that followed Hungary’s independence so that that country ejected him. He then lived in Italy for a while and ended up in—San Diego. Life for some Hungarians during the twentieth century. Great change, great disruptions, and strange feelings for cultures dying and emergent.

Now these books—which managed somehow to migrate from Hungary to Kansas City, to Washington, Minneapolis, and finally to Detroit—are once more on the verge of another trip across the country, to Atchison, KS. Not a bad place to end their life, in a Benedictine abbey. That may be the genuine future which will emerge from the present turmoil of modernity.

Pilgrimages

Thann longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

  [Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales: Prologue]

The image I show was taken on September 16—yes, of 2012. It comes from one of our ancestral cradles, one yet to be documented on Ghulf Genes; it is Sümeg, in Hungary, where the paternal side of my family had its seat for many generations. The occasion of this pilgrimage was the September 15 celebration of Our Lady of Sorrows. The picture was part of the lead story in Sümeg és Vidéke (Sümeg and its Region), a monthly. The story was titled “Prayer and song on pilgrimage,” and subtitled “Faith unites a community, strengthen the soul, points the way.” We’ve strayed a long ways from our roots, of course. Such a story, on the front page, is quite unthinkable in Grosse Pointe News (a weekly) or Grosse Pointe Magazine (a slick bimonthly).

I got a copy of Sümeg és Vidéke in the modern way, as a PDF delivered by e-mail, from my brother, Baldy, who visited there recently. He and my cousin, Tibor, who is a Canadian these days, visited Sümeg during a recent vacation, and while there, also spent some time in the Darnay Múzeum. It was founded by a great-uncle of ours, Kálmán, and later named after him. It is filled with historical and literary materials, portraits,  and collections of the emerging technology of its time, the late nineteenth century, including weaponry. Baldy and Tibor had their picture taken there, flanking the statue of Kálmán—and the magazine also included that visit as one of its stories in this issue.

The strong impression produced in me, looking at these stories, but particularly the story of that here-and-now pilgrimage reaching Sümeg from the region but also including large numbers of foreigners, is the deep layering of culture. There is a fundamental grounding present in all culture; it may change but never really disappears. And where modern culture thins out somewhat, thus in so-called backward regions, traditional culture is still green and full of bloom and moisture. It is, like nature, tenacious and persistent. It is not only alive but thriving in another of our cradles, Tirschenreuth in Northern Bavaria—indeed in that region generally; Pope Benedict XVI hails from the Altötting region, Southern Bavaria; and, of course, one can find living patches of it all over Europe. (In the image, Baldy, Kálmán, and Tibor.)

At the same time, wouldn’t you know it, there are also ads. One, offered by the Mobil Bazár, made me smile. Here you can buy Mobiltelefonokat (használt és új), Headset-eket, Laminálast, and more— respectively mobile phones (used and new), headsets, and lamination services. Other ads, however, sell pre-chopped heating-wood in gigantic crates, heavy construction equipment, socks, and car services featuring automated auto-diagnosis, among many others. Life, in other words, goes on—on many levels.

The Body of Culture

I was born in Budapest and have lived in many places, but by the chance of war and the clock’s rotation the Bavarian town of Tirschenreuth became my home town. I lived there during crucially formative years (8 to 13); there is more on Tirschenreuth here on this blog. I show the photo featured on Wikipedia (link); everybody always uses the same view and for a good reason. It combines in one image the two places where in ancient times the collective life of humanity took place: the market and the church. I also show the city’s crest; at its founding it came under the sway of the Abbey of Waldsassen, and the abbot ruled. Tirschenreuth is a county seat and has a population just under 10,000. However tempting to continue—such are my feeling for this place—my subject today is the body, thus the institutional expression, of collective life. I begin with Tirschenreuth because there, in the period 1944-1949, I actually experienced what life in medieval times might have been like. The “body of culture” there was the church; it organized collective life and structured time.

I got to thinking yesterday about the three layers of personal and collective life: the physical, cultural, and the transcending. It occurred to me that the middle level in this triad has drastically changed since my childhood. At my birth in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe, the market had its usual role—indeed in virtually every settlement of meaningful size there was a large market, either permanent or organized once or twice a week. The cultural level was decisively secular; in Hungary, which was roughly evenly divided between Catholic and Protestant regions, culture expressed itself in such institutions as theater, orchestra, opera and the intellectual life. Parents introduced their children to these realms with conscious effort. We were taken to concerts and the theater much as we were taken to church—and the experience was much the same one. The two lower layers were still unified, as it were. The topmost had already parted into at least three separate domains. The country wasn’t unified at the level of faith. Some were Catholics, some Protestant, and a minority (to which my maternal grandfather and Mother belonged) decidedly humanist. He was a Mason (in Europe that meant atheist). My Mother’s religion was High Art, a kind of amalgam of music and of literature.

The point that I would emphasize here is that culture still meant one thing, and something one acquired, couldn’t simply buy. The concept of pop culture hadn’t formed yet. My reflections yesterday yielded the notion that this middle layer has become transformed so that culture as we used to think of it has become a life-style choice, not a collective experience; it has been replaced by politics and pop culture—movies, TV, “music,” and increasingly social networking. Indeed the distinction between politics and pop culture has also begun to blur. Communications media have changed politics and merged it with entertainment; leaders have become pop stars. A single “body” has emerged in consequence and now represents culture—it organizes collective life and structures time: the media. That amalgamation of institutions is altogether dominated by commercial motives. It is itself being transformed from what used to be a print into a visual medium, signaled to us by the drastic decline in newspapers, inwardly (read content) as well as outwardly.

Having jotted down some notes, I went on to thin our Japanese Knotweed. My notes contained no reference to Tirschenreuth. But this morning, waking with some dread of what is to come today in the media, awareness of my home town was suddenly quite large and an addendum to my reflections present. It was that in Tirschenreuth, when we arrived there as refugees in 1944, an earlier order yet had still prevailed. This somewhat backward pocket of Catholicism in Bavaria still retained an order that Hungary had already left behind. Here everything still remained strongly rooted in the old time religion. I’ve always been very grateful for having had the experience. It helps me face the rising flood with equanimity.

Hungarian Wikipedia

I noticed today a banner appearing above Wikipedia pages with the following message:

Thank you to all who helped write 200,000 articles on Hungarian Wikipedia

Click here to help us change the world

I clicked. A page in Hungarian appeared. It gives thanks to all who made possible the creation of the Hungarian version of Wikipedia. The producers feature a few statistics. Evidently the volunteers who made this resource possible compiled more than 10 million drafts over an eight-year period—out of which 200,000 fully-qualified Wikipedia articles were fashioned by more than 179,000 registered Wikipedia editors—helped by countless other commentators, helpers, and readers. There will be a celebration of the appearance of the last of these articles on October 1 in the city of Győr.

Well done indeed! Hungary has just a shade more than 10 million inhabitants. According to the English-language Wikipedia, 16 million speakers of the Hungarian language exist across the globe. The Hungarian Wikipedia has its own article on this subject and is more exact. It puts Hungarian-speakers at 10.64 million in Hungary and at 16.71 million world-wide (1980). Nice to have more detail. But having a national version of this free on-line dictionary also brings additional benefits. The image I am showing, from the Hungarian site (here), is a page from the first book ever published entirely in the Hungarian language (in 1533). Its spelling is as strange and antiquated as that of any document that is as old. Hungary must have been as proud of that book, late although it was appearing, as they are proud today to have their own Wikipedia!

To be part of a very tiny group on this globe gives a person odd perspectives, odd moments of pride. People living in Hungary itself represent 0.15 percent of the global population, all Hungarian-speakers 0.25 percent. A hundred-thousand of those 16.71 million individuals (thus 0.6% of that number) live in the United States. I am one of them.

Deep Memory of Quince

We planted a quince bush in our garden, a Father’s Day gift—one that surprised and specially delighted me. I encountered quince when I was five in the gardens of a vast, cold, impossible-to-heat old house we moved into on one of my Father’s frequent transfers. But summers there were like Paradise. The yellow, pear-shaped quince, and especially what Mother made of it, remained sharply imprinted on my memory. When Monique and John, entirely on their own, discovered quince and bought their own bush, my enthusiasm was evident. And they decided that I should have my own.

Soon after we planted ours, I went to the Village Market. It is a small but very potent store in walking distance of our house. I had a talk with the manager there—we often talk—and asked him if anyone produced quince jelly. Schmuckers had done so long ago, no longer. The Village Market’s manager had learned his trade at the knees of his grandfather. In my opinion he is the most knowledgeable grocer certainly in Detroit and environs. He said at once that the Trappist Monks in Massachusetts sold it; then he also found another outfit in his huge printouts. Trappist sounded good to me. Friday last I picked up our jars at the market. They’d arrived from St. Joseph’s Abbey, Spencer, MA (founded in 1950; the order itself goes back to 1098 in France). Now I’ll tell you honestly: This was just a pious gesture because I know what a jelly is. But what I remember eating 70 years ago was not a jelly but something you could slice. But what it was and might be called was buried too deep in memory.

I had some of that jelly for breakfast today. “It’s all sugar, mostly,” I told Brigitte. “Lord. I wish I could remember what it was Mother used to make back in Cegléd. Too bad we can’t just call Heaven by cell phone.” Brigitte also remembered something you could cut and, just sitting there, she invented a recipe she thought would work when, finally, our bush produces fruit. I said: “I’ll just go and try to find out what quince is in Hungarian. We live in the age of the Internet now.” Before I went I made my second cup of coffee. As I was stirring the cup, suddenly into my mind came the word birsalma. (The s is sounded as sh, the a as in awl.) And no sooner had this thought arrived than came a combination: birsalma sajt. Sajt means cheese. I knew at once that now I had it! Yes! Birsalma meant quince. And the solid something I remembered eating was called a cheese. Just calmly stirring my coffee, my memory finally brought the words—or my Mother got the call in Heaven and whispered the answer; no need for cell phones in such communications.

The rest was easy. Soon I had a recipe for birsalma sajt in Hungarian. Then I discovered that the phrase translates into English directly. Quince cheese is a well-known product to those in the know. Therefore soon I had multiple recipes, Spanish-style, Turkish-style, Hungarian-style, all in English, too. And one site, this one, also brought me a picture that confirmed it all visually. Yes, sir! That’s what it looked like. Quince is yellow on the outside but red inside. And quince cheese is quite firm, easy to slice, and lasts for a long time. Seventy years ago…

Melting Pots Old and New

Back in the (mercifully brief) Nazi days in Hungary, all people employed by the state—beginning, I suppose, with a certain rank—had to present proof-positive using birth registry extracts, three generations back, that they had no Jewish blood. That gave the country’s registrars a bit of a work-out. By happenstance all of the papers my family had to file (my father being an officer in the army) eventually ended up in my hands. They filled a rather large box and turned out to be a treasure showing the lineage of my family. Some of these records were carefully notarized extracts from church registries—and in the earliest of these records I recognized no name at all. My father, of course, had to account for his wife as well: an officer married to a Jewess could not be trusted to be reliable. Therefore more than forty birth certificates were in this archive. Twenty-eight would have satisfied the strict requirements, but some of the people (like my grandfather) had married twice, and under the rules subsequent spouses, even if their “blood” had not entered the stream, had to be accounted for—presumably because their ideas and influence could nevertheless corrupt the succeeding generations. Insanity is not something we’ve invented recently.

But my topic is melting pots, not collective aberrations. These record showed that a phenomenon we associate with America is and has been alive and well in Europe—and everywhere else, for that matter, as far back as memory can be traced. My family originated in the Duchy of Württemberg in the southwestern part of Germany. My forebears, called Dorner, were immigrants to the Austrian Empire, which then encompassed Hungary. This happened sometime in the nineteenth century. They were enticed by incentives. Austria was attempting to attract industry, and we were in the iron business (foundries and the like)—indeed, parts of my family still were, even in my day, although the rich part of the family had long since diversified into all kinds of other businesses as well.

Now what I found fascinating, studying the deposit of documents from the bad-old Nazi days, was how persistently my family, extending backwards, had always and only married into other German families. Every name was German until the twentieth century. The family was evidently too wealthy to mingle with the lower orders of the native population—but not rich enough to marry into the nobility. That finally happened when my great-grandfather married into a genuinely Hungarian family—not in trade, they, no! Landed aristocracy—to be sure of the lower sort. But they were the real thing: lots and lots of land and going back lots of generations too! And my father, in turn, married a woman who came from a Slavic line (Gluzek, they were called—but renamed themselves Gyulafia (“Son of Gyula”) to erase the Slavic traces as Nationalism rose but before it married Socialism). That line had reached prominence through the professions—and a great uncle of mine, the towering figure in that family, had had charge of all psychiatric hospitals in a country unapologetically operating a centralized, state-run medical system.

Melting pots all over the place—just less obviously visible. And here I hasten to note that Brigitte’s family has an identical history, different only in minor details. Her family had settled in Poland, attracted there by Poland’s own desire for industry. And the industry was textiles, not iron. Her family’s was a somewhat later exodus. Like Swedish Finns, they didn’t speak Polish much—whereas my family, longer in residence, spoke Hungarian. They too were all expanding by marrying into other German families, also all resident in Poland. But had mayhem and war not unpleasantly intruded, and thus caused some more bubbling in that pot, Brigitte might have ended up marrying a stalwart Polish duke rather than me.

March Thematic

A good one might be “Search for Sanity”—and that because March, in a sense, is dedicated to madness. Is that because Spring comes, at last, late in the month—and by that time we’ve lost our sanity to Winter? Yes, come to think of it, Spring must have something to do with it. I’m told that the phrase “Mad as a March Hare” goes all the way back to the mid-sixteenth century. As the weather turns mild, we expect to see squirrels behaving madly here. The Mad Hatter is closely associated with that famous hare. March Madness comes this month, the NCAA basketball championship. Hiding behind the furnace, I can mutter madly that frenzy over basketball is madness anytime, but never mind. We also live just a short canoe-ride from Canada across Lake Saint Claire, and in that country March is a mad month because it is the last one in Canada’s fiscal year. Frantic budget battles break out.

In my country of birth, humble little Hungary, Március tizenötödike, March 15th, thus the day right smack in the middle of the month, is the national holiday. It is Hungary’s independence day. Its first celebration took place in 1848. Now I submit that a little country like Hungary is mad to imagine that it can be independent for very long. Hungary’s independence lasted until 1849. Then came Russian troops (much as they also came later, in another revolution, in 1956, that one also crushed), but that first time the Russians came at the behest of Austria’s Franz Joseph. And so on it’s gone ever since, with brief and troubled periods of token, quasi, and actual independence. Sheer madness to aspire. But the aspiration alone, the Search for Sanity, is itself worthy of national celebration.

Budapest

Budapest formed on the eastern bank of the Danube around the slopes of what is now called Gellért hill, the highest point in the region. The hill takes its name from St. Gerard, Hungary’s first bishop, martyred by being thrown off the cliffs there. From Gellért it is easy to look across the river, which here flows North to South, in order to scan the East—whence came wave upon wave of nomadic peoples who, for the locals, were always a threat. Here rose one fortification after the other, not least the Castle of Buda, and as that name implies, this settlement was called Buda after the Magyars, who were one of those dangerous invaders, renamed the place after one of their leaders. In later times, as population grew, it eventually spilled across the water. The city across the way was Pest. And, again in due time (1872), the two settlements united to form Budapest, the capital of Hungary.

The city was originally built by the Celts. Yes. If you’re a Central European, you’re a bit of an Irishman, and not just on St. Patrick’s day. The Celts called the settlement Ak-Ink (abundant water). After the Roman expansion eastward eventually incorporated the region (Pannonia) into the Empire, the Romans transformed that name into Aquincum. The Magyars came in the ninth century of our era. Throughout its history, Budapest was, in a quite genuine sense, a border between West and East, the Danube itself a natural line on the map of successive cultures. But in the center of Budapest, which is the river, there is an island which, as it were, makes the center of the center. It is called St. Margaret’s Island. And it was on that island, poised between two worlds, betwixt the East and the West, Catholicism and Protestantism, the traditional and the modern, in the border zone, as it were, that my mother gave birth to her first child seventy-three years ago today. My father, a Catholic and a professional soldier, was stationed in Budapest at the time; the Army maintained a military hospital on St. Margaret’s Island which my mother, a Protestant, was therefore privileged to use. This explains the circumstances of my birth. Or was there something else afoot?—such as, for instance, that this island, in pagan times, had been known as The Island of the Rabbits? It’s true. And I just learned this important fact today, delighted—delighted because I’m a great fan of the rabbits and, on my walks, always count them and consider myself very lucky if I see thirteen or more…

Yes. Budapest is another cradle of Ghulf genes. The coat of arms that kicks things off today is that of Budapest, of course, incorporating in its image the crown of Hungary with its characteristic leaning cross, two castles, Buda’s and Pest’s, separated by the Danube’s azure. As one discovers in delving into heraldry and ancient artifacts, universes of controversy open. The cross was most likely tilted in an accident, but one finds dozens of conflicting stories. The lions, I assume, were presciently chosen because the heralds of the nineteenth century knew that I’d be born under the sign of Leo. Alternatively, the winged lion was part of the original seal of Buda; Pest’s own coat-of-arms bore a griffin, not a lion. In combining the two, the high council responsible for this matter, later, after long and heated debates, eventually replaced the griffin with another, if wing-less, lion for better balance.

The photographs show St. Margaret’s Island. In the first the island is the green mass touched by the bridge in the foreground (St. Margaret’s Bridge). The island’s lovely water tower—at its foot is a grand outdoor theater—is the only visible structure. The second bridge, in the distance, is Árpád Bridge, named after the Magyar chieftain who founded Hungary. The view is from Pest, thus from the East looking North. Behind us on the eastern shore is the Parliament. Across the way and roughly equidistant is Buda Castle. The second photo shows one of the fountains in one of the parks of this large island. The hospital where I was born has long since been transformed into a health resort.