Hungarian Heritage Review, 1991 (20. évfolyam, 1-11. szám)
1991-02-01 / 2. szám
vacuum cleaner salesman in Queens but gave it up when, asked for a demonstration by a prospective client, he couldn't get the contraption to work. Eventually, Zwack worked his way up to Connecticut Salesmanager for a national dratüfíng firm, married a WASP and had five children. "I was not one who was wallowing in homesickness," Zwack recalls. "I had absolutely no intention to come back to Hungary." Those sentiments were echoed by the Hungarian Communists, against whom the Zwacks filed suit after the government continued producing Unicum under the Zwack name. After years, the Zwacks won, and the family was paid royalties out of Hungarian government assets that had been frozen after the war. But although Zwack called his family and the Communists "the deadliest of deadly enemies", fate and glasnost were working to bring them back together. In 1970, Peter Zwack moved to Milan to run the family's Italian liqueur operations. He also divorced, married an Englishwoman named Anne Marshall and produced two more children, a son, now 15, and a daughter, 13. Zwack still called the Communists 'gangsters" but when they invited him home in 1988, he agreed, gambling rightly that Hungary was about to usher in a new era. Last year, during President Bush's visit, Zwack signed a million-dollar joint venture with the Hungarian state distilling firm to produce Unicum. Zwack and the German distilling firm Unterberg each contributed $500,000 for a share of 25% apiece. The state distillery got 46%-paying for most of it with equipment from Zwack's original factory. A bank and an export ftorrvfDQBtapP&l tlÄBh1 contributed 2W "We bought back what was stolen from us", Zwack says somewhat heatedly over a lunch of salad and espresso at a posh Western-style hotel where the waiters all know him by name. "Perhaps you'd better not say that", urges his wife, who is a bit more of a diplomat. Monetary details aside, the Hungarians welcomed back the original Unicum like a longlost cultural icon. In some ways, it had never left. Zwack says that during the hard Stalinist years, the famous Unicum poster-showing an ugly, bearded man, adrift at sea, who grins demoniacally when a bottle of Unicum bobs by to save himbecame a sort of symbol of resistance. "In the villages, it was a poster of hope, a sort of samizdat (underground letter) that said, We won't go under,' * Zwack explains. The brand name also played a modest role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when freedom fighters filled empty Unicum bottles with gasoline, added wicks, lit them and lobbed them at Russian tanks. And last summer, when then-Communist Party boss Karoly Grosz was foundering under the accelerating pace of reforms, a well-respected economic weekly replaced the man in the poster with a caricature of Grosz alongside the caption "Not even Unicum will save Grosz now.” Today, Zwack employs 70 people in a Budapest factory and has installed new equipment. Sales of the original Unicum continue to mount, with Zwack profiting from the growing number of tourists who want to lug back authentic Hungarian souvenirs. "The problem we had in Italy was one of identity", Zwack says. "It's an enormous plus to be back in your homeland." Zwack, who also holds U.S. citizenship, says he distributes 10,000 bottles a year in the United States and plans a marketing campaign this fall to try to turn Urúcum-into arv"in drink". small but* loyal following, say« Peter Matt, president of Winebow Inc. in New York, the nation's only importer of Unicum. ,0e\ r ni aniged Bgsa erIT "Your customers are people who are sophisticated, who have some understanding of the product. It's like fine wines," Matt says of the spicy Bquer, which fetches $22 for a 24-ounce bottle. But Zwack himself admits that Unicum-a digestive with many of the same herbs as Campari, a kind of bitters-is an acquired taste. "Many Americans I know, the first time they try it, it's a disaster. The second time, they're hooked." When not running his own firm, Zwack is busy as chairman of the Foundation for Development of Small and Middle Companies, which doles out loans to fledgling firms and teaches Western business skills in former Soviet barracks vacated by departing troops. "I'm not the ugly capitalist, but the socially thinking free-enterpriser," says Zwack, who without any embarrassment calls himself "one of the most popular guys in Hungary." He also scotches rumors that he may play a role in the new government, dominated by a right-of-center party called the Hungarian National Forum; he says he has no aspirations for office "at this time." For now, Zwack and his wife keep a home in Milan and an apartment in Budapest's hilly castle district overlooking the Danube, just two doors down from the former Zwack family homewhich now houses the Turkish Embassy. But despite his confidence in the new government, Zwack says he plans to keep open his Italian operations, which produce 1 million bottles annually. The man who fled Hungary on foot 42 years ago leans forward to explain: "As a safety valve." T10 J ,>lnhb len 3ß 90S' jfl9 ioq ß otni bevlove a :ßf1 (TIL 9V£ 3rl ferlf Sep nerlo erlf tc ) Iodm\ 16 HUNGARIAN HERITAGE REVIEW FEBRUARY 1991
