The Eighth Tribe, 1977 (4. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1977-02-01 / 2. szám
February, 1977 THE EIGHTH TRIBE Page 3 OUR HUNGARIAN IDENTITY Some years ago, at the beginning of the semester, when I looked at the class-roll, a name caught my eyes:— Juhasz, Judith. It was undoubtedly a Hungarian name. On the very first day of classes, I made a point of finding the owner of the name. A pretty brown-eyed, brown-haired young lady stood up in the middle of the class-room when I called out the name. “Which part of Hungary did your parents come from, Miss Juhasz?” I asked. The face of the pretty young girl turned dark. “I don’t know and I don’t care”, she snapped. “I am American!” With these words she sat down. Since I did not want to discuss the matter further in public, I asked her to see me in my office after class. Reluctantly, she did so. “Yes, Professor?” she asked, coldly, from the threshold. I offered her a chair across the desk. She sat down. “Do you speak Hungarian?” I posed the question in our native tongue. Her face grew red. “I told you I am an American”, she answered almost angrily. “Of course you are”, I tried to soften her up a bit. “Hungarian American.” She shook her head. “Just American, American, American!” I laughed. “You mean you are a Cherokee? Or a Seminole? Only the Indians are American Americans, you know. Everybody else came from somewhere. And since your name does not sound English, nor French, not even German, I must assume that you are a Hungarian American. .. .” Reluctantly she admitted that her parents came from Hungary in the early fifties. She was born in America, though, and since her father was a mechanical engineer, she grew up in an English-speaking middle class neighborhood, in one of our big North- Eastern cities. With both of her parents working, she never had the opportunity to learn their language, except for a few words. In Iter English-speaking surroundings the Hungarian name, the Hungarian origin, seemed a handicap, marking her and separating her from the other children, in kindergarten as well as through elementary school. Since she knew nothing more about the Hungarian homeland and the Hungarian history than she had learned from the American school books, her knowledge of her homeland was distorted. She had learned that Hungary was a feudalistic country, that they sided with Hitler during the war, and that the Hungarians had oppressed all the other nationalities for centuries. Therefore, she could not find anything to make her proud to be Hungarian, quite the contrary, her heritage seemed embarrassing. So she tried to rid herself of it as quickly as possible. During her high school years she had tried to play the role of the Anglo-American, but without success. Her name, her appearance, separated her from the Anglo-Saxons. She felt resentment and bitterness, and a deep hostility toward everything Hungarian, and toward the entire world which seemed to have burdened her with this unfair handicap. That day she spent a half hour in my office. I talked to her of the origin of the Hungarian people, and of the new research which is being pursued these days in this field. I spoke about our glorious past, about our early civilization, our literature, and our art, and when I mentioned that we were the first nation in Europe to pass a law on religious freedom, her eyes grew big. “I didn’t know that!” she stammered. “Nobody has ever told me these things!” I loaned her a Hungarian history book in English, and a few paperbacks dealing with Hungarian history and culture, and from that day on Judith Juhasz became a changed person. She was open and friendly, and her popularity increased on campus. She had found her identity. She had found herself, her place in the world, and her roots in humanity. She became aware of her heritage:— that certain invisible mental and spiritual heritage which derives from the consciousness of a respectable past, and serves an individual as a springboard into the world. This unexpectedly discovered heritage made her suddenly equal to those she used to envy for their origin. Her inferiority complex was gone. The knowledge of the value of her Hungarian heritage filled the vacuum caused in her soul by the educational shortcomings of her childhood, a vacuum which almost ruined her entire life. Albert Wass Reprinted from the October, 1974 issue of The Eighth Tribe.
