The Eighth Tribe, 1980 (7. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1980-07-01 / 7. szám
July, 1980 THE EIGHTH TRIBE Page 5 ketful of milk every day,” said Ziri, “the fattest, most delicious milk. One evening when I tried to sit down on the milking stool next to the cow, she acted very strange. She kicked and jumped back and forth while I had a terrible time to get even one quart of milk out of her. We were surprised to notice that instead of the high-quality milk we had milked the day before, the liquid in the pail was anything but milk—it was more like bluish water. We immediately knew what had happened; our milk was being consumed in “her” house over there.” She pointed with her finger in the direction of the woman they accused of having switched the milk from their own cow to that of the “witch.” Ziri’s old mother now joined in the conversation and said, “They had double the amount of milk now and we had nothing.” As she lowered her voice to almost a whisper she continued with Ziri’s story: “There is only one way to get your own milk back from the witch’s cow. One had to go to the witch’s house and steal some kind of food from her kitchen. The best choice is a slice of bread. One then has to soak it in some of the ‘bluish water’ milked from your own cow. This mixture has to be fed to your cow, thus taking away the spell and restoring the milk. As in our case, I walked over to the Trudd’s house and asked to borrow some money from her. I knew she had to go to the front room to get the money, but in the meantime I would have a chance to find something like bread or other type of food and hide it under my apron. But the old witch knew exactly why I had come. She removed from the kitchen the bread and other food stuff, before she walked into the front room to get the money.” I was more than surprised to find the old-time superstitution still very much alive in Seiden. I also learned that today, as in my childhood, it is a bad omen if the “Tshouvick”1 2 3 4 calls at night from the chimney. Someone in the house will die soon, they say. People still believe in this bad omen and are afraid of the owl. 1 The peasants addressed each other as “Gefadder” (women) or “Gefatter” (men) if they were involved in the christening of the same child. 2 Midwife. 3 Trudden: persons, men or women, who had the power of witchcraft. 4 Tshouvick: screech owl. The 1980 Bethlen Naptár 248 pages. Some of the church reports are in English. Price is $4.00. Can be purchased through the Bethlen Home or the Bethlen Press. M. TAKÁCS BARBOE: Eugene Wigner’s talk on “The Beginning of the Atomic Age” — (Az Atomkor kezdete) Dr. Jenő Wigner, Princeton University professor emeritus of mathematics-physics, spoke (in Hungarian) to a group of about seventy people. His lecture was presented under the auspices of the Hungarian Alumni As80ciation-György Bessenyei Circle, whose members are in process of gathering material as in an oral history regarding real-life experiences of reknowned Hungarians. This project is slated for possible publication sometime in the future, according to the preliminary remarks of Dr. Károly Nagy, who also gave introductory comments of the Nobel laureate and honored speaker for the evening. Dr. Wigner began with a brief biographical sketch and explained how he became interested in physics—making up his mind to pursue that field of study mainly from talking with his father when the former was around fifteen years old. After relating the acquisition of his early professional positions, Dr. Wigner launched into discussion of the start of the atomic era in the 1930s, mentioning the views and contacts of such highlyregarded individuals as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, John Neumann, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, etc. He told about his involvement among others in composing the specific letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt regarding the possibility of creating an atomic bomb—Einstein having dictated it in the German language and Wigner translating the letter into English for subsequent transmittal. Dr. Wigner went on to say that after Pearl Harbor (1941), he became immersed with building atomic reactors and worked in consultation with others in various regions of the United States, such as at Chicago and Oak Ridge, Tenn.
