Hungarian Studies Newsletter, 1998 (15. évfolyam, 51-54. szám)

1998 / 53-54. szám

millions of others deprived of the most elemental human rights. The Revolution of 1956 opens the door to the West and he escapes to Austria with his family.

Kosztarab starts a new life in the USA. He obtains his Ph.D. in entomology and gets a teaching position at Virginia Tech, among the beautiful mountains of Virginia, where he now has retired with his wife after a life of extensive travels and 30 years of teaching and research.

His book is, however, testimony to his eternal love for Transylvania, it is always there in his flashbacks and his self-definition. This is an excellent book to give as a gift to our friends who have an interest in finding out more about Hungarians and East Central Europe. Tibor Cseh

Lang, George. NOBODY KNOWS THE TRUFFLES I'VE SEEN.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. ISBN 0-67945094-7, $28.95

George Lang, a recipient of the American Hungarian Foundation's George Washington Award, writes an absorbing and entertaining autobiography. His reminiscences provide a fascinating linkage between his personal existence and the major developments of our century from World War II to the present. This autobiography is a product of a storyteller who relishes life and the challenges it provides. Reviewers of his book have all been unrestrained in their praise of its witty handling of a life put to the test. It is indeed the self-portrait of a survivor who has not been broken but enhanced by all he has encountered. Forty-two photographs and five line drawings provide the book with a strong visual sense of both the personal, but also the public person. The first half of the autobiography is devoted to his twenty-two years of life in Hungary. From the childhood horrors in his Nazi-occupied homeland and his loss of family, name, and country we follow him on his career of 40 years in the American "hospitality industry" as a restaurant mogul who helps to define the way we think about food. Lang, the author of four food-related books, including the The Cuisine of Hungary, demonstrates that he is also a first-rate memoirist. He weaves his personal insights and experiences into the woof and warp of adventures in the overhauling of Gundel in his native Hungary, the success of designing the restaurants of the luxury cruise ship SS Danae, and more importantly, his role as Chef owner of Café des Artistes and the Four Seasons in New York City. This is all spiced with the lighthearted celebration of good friends and famous people who have been served at his tables. Lang’s colorful stories about Luciano Pavarotti, lames Beard, Pope lohn Paul II, and Madonna are a continuation of his philosophy, as Martha Stewart points out in Harper's Bazaar, "that restaurants...|are] not only a good investment but an extraordinarily agreeable form of entertainment." Furthermore, Lang is a great embodiment of dual loyalties, while he celebrates America, he does not forget his Hungarian roots. At the same time, as George Soros points out: "You don't need to be Hungarian to enjoy this book." a.l.

BOOKS (Continued)

Mazsu, János THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE HUNGARIAN INTELLIGENTSIA, 1825-1914. Boulder and New York: Atlantic Research and Publications, Social Sciences Monographs, Columbia University, 1997. Pp. 221.

Although the period encompassed by the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries constitutes the most studied period in

Hungarian history, there are still a number of areas where basic research is sparse and sporadic. One of these areas concerns the role and development of the Hungarian intelligentsia. This is precisely the topic that is tackled in this book by János Mazsu of the Kossuth University of Debrecen. The result is an enviable scholarly work, which in addition to a synthetic assessment of this question supplies us with a plethora of statistical tables and graphs that encompass virtually all possible aspects of contemporary Hungarian society. And this holds particularly true for the period of Austro-Hungarian Dualism (1867-1914).

The book is divided into six chapters and a conclusion, followed by sixteen appendices (containing multiple statistical tables, graphs, and a map of nineteenth century Hungary), as well as a name and a place index. Moreover, within the text one also finds nearly ninety graphs and statistical tables, divided into thirty-six categories.

Professor Mazsu’s examination of the role of the Hungarian intelligentsia led him to conclude that in the period between the midnineteenth century and World War I, this "social class” underwent a significant transformation. Within those six decades it increased its numbers over fivefold, changed its role by assuming more social functions, altered its occupational structure in the direction of professionalization, rearranged the relative importance of its various social class components, and simultaneously opened its ranks to the influx of hitherto unrepresented social classes. Because of its rapid growth, and because the traditional intelligentsia could not reproduce itself fast enough to supply the needs of a rapidly modernizing mass society, the recruitment of its members shifted from the so-called "historic classes” (i.e., the various levels of the nontitled nobility) to the urban bourgeoisie. As a result, by the turn of the century, the traditional bourgeoisie, along with the first and second generation members of that class, provided the "decisive fraction of the intelligentsia's supply line." (P.221). At the same time the role of the "historic classes" was reduced to only ten per cent, while the peasantry - in spite of its overwhelming numbers - supplied only five per cent.

János Mazsu has produced an excellent and most useful work on the Hungarian intelligentsia that will serve as a source for other studies for many years to come. It is particularly significant that this work is now available in English. Steven Béla Várdy

Perlman, Robert. BRIDGING THREE WORLDS: HUNGARIANJEWISH AMERICANS, 1848-1914. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. pp.1-302. ISBN 87023 0-468-4

“The sounds of the places, spoken in the soft, lilting Hungarian of my grandparents, have remained in my ears: Sharoshpottock...Mishcolts, Ooey-hey. It was many years before I saw those towns on a map as Sárospatak, Miskolc, and Újhely. None of my four grandparents said much of their youth in those strange-sounding places or their arrival in America about 1880. Their reticence and my ignorance pulled me first into a search for the story of my own family and then, though I am not a professional historian, into this history of the Hungarian lews who came to this country.”

This humble introduction is followed by a review of the history of Jews in Hungary. Perlman characterizes the existence and life of Jews in Hungary as both unique and instructive, particularly their emancipation, rapid economic, social, and cultural integration. Perlman estimates that approximately 100,000 Jews emigrated to the United States from Hungary - mainly from the north-eastern

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NO. 53-54, AUTUMN-WINTER, 1998-99, HUNGARIAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER