The Eighth Tribe, 1976 (3. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1976-11-01 / 11. szám

November, 1976

THE EIGHTH TRIBE

Page 9

Book Review:

By S. B. Vardy, Ph.D.

Duquesne University

Hungarian Minorities in Rumania

In this age of rising national consciousness, the problem of the treatment of national and religious minorities has become one of the most acute questions of our times. Be they Jewish minorities in Soviet Russia, Catholics in Northern Ireland, Basques in Spain, or Croats in Yugoslavia, they are all clamoring for equality, and they are all beginning to use ever more radical means to make their voices heard.

One of the few exceptions to this general rule are the Hungarians in Rumanian ruled Transylvania. Although their number is over two and one half million, and thereby they constitute the largest single national minority in Europe; and although the unabashed denationalization policy of the Ceausescu Regime makes their life difficult, their protest is still low-keyed. Their situation, however, is becoming ever more hard to bear — as pointed out recently by such international publications as The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Financial Times of London, the German Der Spiegel, and others.

The officially sanctioned policy of Rumanianization of the Hungarians in Transylvania appears in many shapes and forms. It would be impossible to list all of them within the confines of a short book review. But those who are interested in this question, may find much of the documentation in the Congressional Records of the past decade or so.

Because of the emotional nature of the Transylvanian Hungarian problem, one is hard put to find a relatively detached treatment of this question. There are, of course, exceptions, such as the book under review. Although a brief work of only eighty-five pages, Julia Nánay’s Transylvania: The Hungarian Minority in Rumania (Astor, Florida: Danubian Press, Inc., 1976; printed by Bethlen Press, Ligonier, Pa.) is a fair and dispassionate assessment of this question up to the early 1970’s.

Originally prepared as a thesis at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, Nánay’s Transylvania deals both with the theoretical aspects of nationalism and the national minority question, as well as with their practical manifestations in today’s Rumanian controlled Transylvania. Thus, after a brief discussion of nationalism, the author concentrates on the problems of the Hungarian minorities in interwar Transylvania, following the acquisition of that province by Rumania. This is followed by a discussion of the Soviet (Marxist) approach to the national minority question, and how it affected the position of the Hungarian minorities after 1945. The author points out that Soviet presence in Rumania meant first of all “Bolshevization.” But, however disliked by the Transylvanian Hungarians, Soviet presence still made the “chauvinistic persecution of the non-Rumanian minority ... a criminal offence,” and thus in retrospect many of them still preferred it to the aggressive Rumanianization that followed the withdrawal of the Red Army in 1958. This withdrawal was promptly followed by the rise of an intolerant chauvinism and by the methodical destruction of the institutional basis of Magyar life in that ancient land of Hungarian culture.

Nánay’s Transylvania is a detached, scholarly and very

readable work. One does wonder why she did not take the effort to bring her narrative up to 1976, but stopped in 1971. This is all the more so, as much has happened in this area since the latter date, which could have been treated by the simple addition of a few more pages. Should there be a second edition of this work, such an updating would be essential.

All in all, Nánay’s Transylvania is an important addition to the list of scholarly works on the Transylvanian- Hungarian question, and it should be read by everyone who is interested in the minority problems of that once significant part of the European continent.

* * •

Kossuth and the Hungarians in the

Mississippi Valley:

Two Books about Hungarian in America

The study of the history of the Hungarians in the United States and Canada has generally been a stepchild of “Hungarian Studies” on both sides of the Atlantic. True, there were a number of professional historians and self-trained authors who have devoted at least some of their attention to this question. But the professional scholars would deal with it only passingly, and the self-trained authors were not always equipped to deal with the mostly unexplored past of the Magyars in America. This was all the more so, as the absence of source collections and the lack of basic monographic studies made it impossible to undertake the writing of major summarizing works with reasonable hope of success. Thus, while we do have a number of pioneering works by such scholars and authors as Sándor Márki, Jenő Piványi, Sándor Fest, Géza Kende, Edmund Vasváry and others, not until recently did we witness the birth of a concerted effort to reconstruct the Hungarian-American past, and to save the sources of this past from total annihilation.

This effort, which was undertaken partly in consequence of the “ethnic revolution” of the past few years, is on a much larger scale than ever before. It involves a number of historians, literary scholars and social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, and it is already showing some results. It was also speeded up by the American Bicentennial, which produced a flurry of activities. True, some of the results of this work still carry on them the signs of hastily produced studies, and there are still too many self-trained authors in the field. But at least the subject is being accepted as a legitimate field of study, and there are an ever-growing number of professional scholars who are entering the field.

While the American Bicentennial came too soon for major overviews on the history and culture of Hungarians in America, a number of less comprehensive works on aspects of that history and culture did appear in time. Among the more worthy of these we find the two books under review, more specifically Leslie Könnyü’s ACACIAS: HUNGARIANS IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY (1976), and Joseph Széplaki’s LOUIS KOSSUTH: “THE NATION’S GUEST” (1976). Both of these were published by the Bethlen Press of Ligonier, Pennsylvania, a publishing house which is heavily committed to the area of Hungarian and ethnic American studies.

Of the two authors Könnyű has been publishing on Hungarian-American topics ever since the early 1950’s. He is not a professional historian, but as a teacher, cartographer