What follows herein are excerpts from my autobiography, leading in chronological
sequence of chapters from my childhood to old age. In most cases, in the events
described here, my role has been central, as with the establishment of the
Hungarian-Canadian Authors’ Association (in Ottawa, 1966-1972), generating
bibliographic sources for Hungarian studies in Canada and for ethnic Canadian
literature (began in Lethbridge, 1972-1983 and completed in Ottawa 1983-1992.)
I've also researched the accomplishments of Hungarians in Canada while in
Victoria, between 1992 and 2006.
A Hungarian version of my memoirs is also in the process of being
completed, excerpts of which are included on this web site. It differs from the
English version in style and scope, offering anecdotal stories of the trials and
tribulations of a language group integrating into the mainstream of Canadian
society. It is hoped that the two versions of the autobiography, along with some
of my selected short stories and essays, journalistic writings and interviews
featured on this forum represent a slice of Hungarica Canadiana.
The Cradle
(Nyírbéltek, 1932-1949)
I was born on January 20, 1932, in Nyírbéltek, a medieval town of 3000
in south-eastern Hungary, near the Romanian border. Its Roman Catholic Church,
where I often served as an altar boy, was erected in 1222. The town had some
trying times over the centuries. There were occasions such as the Mongolian and
the Turkish invasions when the place became close to depopulated, even the
survivors often leaving, searching for relative safety of larger towns nearby.
They were replaced by newcomers such as Ruthenians, Little Russians, as
Ukrainians were called, Romanians and Serbs. At the time I was born, the Spanish
Civil War was still going on, but nearer a more ominous event was taking place.
A year after my birth Hitler emerged from obscurity to become dictator of
Germany before I turned three. Hungary was still reeling from the previous war,
where it fought on the losing side. Although at war’s end there were no foreign
troops on Hungarian soil, after the Hungarian army was disarmed the country was
hit by several blows. One of these was a communist takeover in 1919 with
devastating consequences. This was followed by invasion of the country by
neighbouring states and the Treaty of Trianon, where the victors of Versailles
had given away two-thirds of Hungary’s territory and close to three quarters of
its resources. In addition, millions of Hungarians found themselves in foreign
countries, others in artificially created ones. When I was growing up, the
wounds were still fresh and I remember how the grown-ups when visiting our place
were talking with nostalgic memories about the great historical times when our
nation was strong, being able to defend itself and the western world of foreign
invasions.
My parents, Mihály and Terézia Miska (née Kovács), were independent
smallholders, owning 11 hectares of land. They also managed a small grocery
store which, by the time I was growing up, has become a prosperous undertaking.
My father came from a modest background. His dad, died of pneumonia at the age
of forty-four and, in the conditions of the times, left my father – then an
eight-year old boy – in the role of being “the man of the house,” thrust to be
in charge of a family of two siblings, my Aunt Eszter and Uncle George, and my
infirm grandmother (Borbála Vaszicsku), to look after as best as he could. Kids
had to grow up fast in my father’s days, and it was not uncommon to see a child
do a man’s work. My mother, on the other hand, came from a prosperous family. My
grandfather, Pál Kovács, had spent seven years in America before and during the
Great War and returned home to purchase some sixty hectares of land, making him
a well-to-do agriculturist.
I had four siblings: Emma, Sándor, Antal and Károly, in that order. Emma
or Emike, as we called her affectionately, after marrying a local fellow, Vince
Dobos, had moved to Budapest, where she was employed as a quality inspector of
produce in a large factory. Sándor, the second child, had died as an infant
before I was born. Sanyika (or “little Sándor”), was referred to in our
childhood as our little guardian angel in heaven. My second name, as I was
surprised to learn in Canada upon receipt of my birth certificate, was Sándor
and not Pál as I had thought. Antal was the third, Károly, my only sibling alive
today, was the fourth. He and his wife Margitka live in Fót, a city near
Budapest. They own a bakery and are doing very well. Karcsi, as we called him,
grew up civic minded and has served for years as a member of the Fót city
council.
Ours was a productive and happy childhood. Although we were better off
than some of our neighbours as we had some land, in reality we were poor.
Although our house contained three rooms we lived in only one, to save the
heating costs of the others. Hungary is famous for its fertile lands but the far
eastern region of the plains, where we lived, the soil, too, was poor. Survival
took cooperative effort on subsistence farms, and the children were expected to
chip in wherever and whenever able. From early childhood on we were expected to
carry out field work, like seeding, hoeing, harvesting, gathering hay, and other
regular chores around the house in addition to that. We were feeding the
animals, cutting wood for the wood stove, carrying drinking water from the
community well located in centre town. I have vivid memories of a lively
communal life. Our home was favoured by relatives, neighbours, friends and
customers. Some of my short stories are a living testimony to that boisterous
life, full of imaginative, larger-than-life characters.
I attended the Greek Catholic parochial school and graduated after
completing grade six, the end of compulsory education in those days. Our school
system was based on long established traditional scholastic methods of learning
which consisted, for the most part, of memorizing long texts and historical
names and dates, as well as memorizing mathematical and chemical formulae. We
were subjected to strict discipline. The sight of the occasional child crying
his/her way to school in the morning was not uncommon. My first teacher was Mrs.
Margit Varga-Jaeger, who also taught my parents a few decades before. She was a
strict one for maintaining discipline. I was a reasonably good student, the
second best in the class. I could have done better, had I applied myself a
little harder. My sister Emike was a superior student. She could recite the
whole textbook without missing a syllable or a diacritical mark. Her report
cards were full of the most laudatory comments, never before heard in our parts,
such as példás, ernyedetlen
and kitűnő: exemplary, unflailing and outstanding. These were
considered top grades in conduct, effort, and academic achievement. She was just
as industrious at serving in the grocery store. Her head hardly reached up to
the top of the counter but she was able to accommodate even the most difficult
customers, whereas my parents would not let me near the counter, let alone the
cash register! Initially, my parents were hoping to have male children mainly,
as boys were considered to be more useful on a farm. How delighted they were
when after our sister, a succession of boys were coming along! Yet now Emike was
the apple of their eyes.
This was a time of war. Three regiments of the Royal Hungarian Armed
Forces stationed in Nyírbéltek, on the ready to reoccupy the northern part of
Transylvania from the Rumanians, in accordance with the Viennese Arbitration
Award Agreement. At first, those were eventful and happy times for us, boys. We
found great enjoyment in watching the soldiers marching in endless straight
columns, singing and drilling and tending their fine horses. My favourite
soldier who stationed at my grandparents’ place was János Melkó, a fellow from a
neigbouring town. János soldier practically adopted me. I was hanging around him
all day. He had been issued two mess tins, and carried home the fine military
food in the second just for me! Later, the war was anything but fun. At the very
least, it meant hard work.
My parents leased a 50-hectare estate from the local church. This was a
large tract of land. Agricultural labour was hard to find, due to the escalating
war. As a result, we, the family, ended up doing almost all of the heavy farm
work. Apart from that, the war years were quite prosperous for the farming
people. Our agricultural produce found easy markets in the Allied Countries of
Germany and Italy. My parents had purchased an acre of orchard from a Jewish
neighbour, Mr. Ferenc Schwartz. My mother, who proved to be an enterprising
person, made a small fortune herself by selling fruits to the neighbours and the
military. I recall the sight of tired soldiers, uniforms and faces covered with
dust, hopping out of the columns, putting money on the small table, while my
mother filled their caps with apricots, pears, and plums. The prosperity did not
last long.
In grade 6 I was selected as one of 17 students from the region to be
sent for an aptitude test at the gymnasium of Kisvárda. The three-day tests were
difficult, but I passed with flying colours both the written and the oral exams
in mathematics, social science, history and literature. I was among the top ten
accepted for enrollment. Alas, it was all for naught. In 1944 the Soviet Red
Army arrived in our town, not to leave for almost half a century. Their
appearance was ushered in by the arrival of the first partisans, riding on
speedy horses that appeared at our place on October 22. The retreating German
soldiers – who set up machine guns in front of our house - advised my parents to
vacate our place, which was situated at the curve of the highway and in danger
of being hit by enemy fire. We sought shelter with relatives in the outskirts of
town.
Soon I was to witness the ugly side of war. While we were gone, drunk
Russian soldiers, finding a prosperous property vacant, looted our grocery
store, smashed furniture and slaughtered the 200 kg pig our father raised in
partial payment for the lease of the church estate. We were not alone suffering
loss of property and unimaginable hardship. With the coming of the Russians the
looting and even the raping of innocent women were widespread. After the front
line had moved on, we returned to our house, finding it needed major repair. We
gathered up whatever was left of our belongings and moved temporarily into a
vacant home owned by our Jewish friends, the Weisz family, whose house remained
intact. We felt helpless and humiliated.
My father hoped that, as the eldest son, I would one day take over the
farm. In reality, there was little hope for anything else for me to do. Sending
me to the city to further my education was out of the question. The family
couldn’t afford it. Besides, I did enjoy work around the house and out on the
fields. I knew how to load the heavy equipment on the cart, and how to handle
the cows while doing the plowing or the more intricate chores such as hoeing
with machinery, when every step depended on precision in order to avoid
destroying the delicate plants. Our performance resembled a Swiss watch maker’s
work, everything had to be, and was, in perfect order. My father taught me how
to keep the tools in perfect order, the plough, and the hoes and picks and the
scythe sharpened and in tip-top shape ready to use in spring time. I repaired
the fences along the house and planted nice flowers and trees on the property.
But my observant mother was sensitive to the unlikely outcome of my
becoming a farmer. She knew there was no future for me in that profession. And
she knew that my imagination lay somewhere beyond the sandy soils of Nyírbéltek.
In my spare time I wrote stories and poems. I wanted to write compelling books
telling about the life of our people in the villages. Soon after the war a way
opened up form me and my generation.
Earlier that year, a well executed Nazi putsch took place, prepared by
the likewise swift German invasion of Hungary, which began at dawn on March 19.
Previous governments, under the regency of Admiral Miklós Horthy were already
influenced by the Germans, resulting in a number of restrictive laws against
Jews, enacted to appease the Germans. Still, no Jew was killed in Hungary and
Jews from neighbouring countries were seeking relative shelter there. Until the
Nazi takeover Jews were defined by religion, not race, and all religious
denominations were busy converting Jews to Christianity to protect them from the
persecution. Now the gloves came off. With Horthy forced to resign and already
in German “protective custody” (he had tried to extricate the country from the
war), and the fascist Szálasi in power, on March 29th the opposition parties
were dissolved, their leaders jailed, the media of the day seized. The rounding
up of the Jews which have already been ongoing in the German-occupied countries
for sometime, began in earnest then in Hungary as well.
What a heartbreaking experience it was for us to watch as innocent
people who had lived in Nyírbéltek for centuries were herded about and driven
away on horse-drawn wagons by the Nazi authorities, never to return home! Led to
believe that they were merely taken to work camps, the Jews, and our town in
general, offered no resistance The propaganda of the day warned: “He who
protects a Jew will be considered to be a Jew and treated as one.” Yet the loss
to the village was keenly felt. After those people were taken, our town was
never the same again. How we missed those wonderful neighbours and friends who
shared life with us in good times and in bad! I often wonder what had happened
to my beloved buddy, Jóska Klein, whose unorthodox father, a tailor, was himself
a frequent visitor at our home Friday evenings, rolling his cigarettes one after
another. I often think with nostalgia of the very pretty and always smiling Irén
Gottlieb with raven black hair and Mona Lisa-like soft features, and her equally
gentle brother, Bucsi. Whenever I come across names such as Wieder, Háyem, Katz
my heart beats faster, hoping that it might be THEM! So we worked hard to
renovate our own house and returned home to 153 Erdély utca. In time our own
hopes were to rise again.
In the fall of 1945 a new school system, known as the general school
(általános iskola), was started. Grades V to VIII were called Junior High. I got
enrolled and graduated in 1948. This was a delightful period of my life. New
teachers came, some of them as Hungarian refugees from Romania, young and
enthusiastic, males and attractive females, including Miss Júlia Rétváry and
Ilona Szathmáry, Mr. Béla Medve, József Sarkadi and the most enthusiastic
educator I have ever known, Mr. Viktor Békés, the Principal. They all found more
enjoyment in practicing the art of teaching than in physical discipline. With
some of them I keep in touch still. The class consisted of mainly over-aged
students, as the level of compulsory education was raised. We were just grateful
to be able to continue our education. I was good in most subjects, especially
those in the humanities. It was a wonderful educational system. The entire
atmosphere in school was full of the spirit of a new beginning and hope. I wrote
patriotic poems, stories and humorous plays which were displayed on the bulletin
board facing the street and performed at school gatherings and at commemorative
celebrations organized for the adult community. The future belonged to us, it
seemed. Little did we know what was to come.
Off to Higher Aims
(Hajdúböszörmény, Budapest, 1949-1956)
After graduation from Junior High I applied to and got accepted at the
Mihály Fazekas Gymnasium in Debrecen. I loved the place and was most impressed
by the historical atmosphere of Debrecen. But I was not there for long. Owing to
overcrowding in the students’ hostel, I got a transfer to the István Bocskai
Gymnasium in Hajdúböszörmény, some 22 kilometers from Debrecen. I completed my
Senior High there in 1953. This city of 30,000 turned out to be a delightful
place. In spite of a highly structured and restricting life in the student
residence, and a very strict educational system of high standards in school, I
have nothing but happy memories of the four years spent in that city. At school
and at the residence I was isolated and blissfully ignorant of what went on
outside my immediate surroundings.
For those were excruciating years for the entire nation. In 1947 the
Communist Party won a majority in the Parliament by rigging the elections. The
event marked the beginning of a tyrannical system. The new government, made up
of renegade characters returning from the Soviet Union where they spent decades
in exile, abolished Hungary’s thousand-year old constitution, liquidated our
civic and religious leaders and took up open persecution of the middle class and
prosperous farming communities. My parents, along with the rest of the town,
were politically harassed and devastated by incredibly high taxes. At the end
they were forced to give up their land and were coerced to join a poorly
organized collective farm which did not work very well.
Fortunately for me, I was given an opportunity to further my studies
free. The government considered me and my generation to be a part of the system.
And being “in the system” had its advantages. The most obvious one was that once
we were accepted through a scholastic selection project, we did not have to pay
tuition fees. In Böszörmény we were housed in a fine student residence called
the Kálvineum, originally built by the influential Calvinist Church for the poor
and orphaned boys of the faith. The Bocskai István Gimnázium was, and still is,
considered as one of the best institutions of its kind in the country, owing to
its high standard of education. We had highly qualified teachers, including our
Principal of the gymnasium and Director of the hostel, Mr. János Mihály. There
were dedicated teachers such as Drs. Béla Papp, Antal Csiha, Márton Tímári, Mrs.
Izabella Kerékgyártó and others. My classmates often teased me by saying: “Miska
János, when are you going to grow up to be Mihály János?!” I couldn’t even dream
of becoming such an eminent person as our very strict but humane director.
Although I still favoured subjects in the humanities, it was quite refreshing
for me to discover the mysteries of the pure and natural sciences.
I was particularly impressed by Mr. Albert Horváth’s rendition of the
discovery of the periodic table. Mendelejev, as he explained it to us, begun by
ordering the eighty-one elements known in his time in sequence according to
their atomic weight. Soon he noticed that many of their chemical properties were
repeated at regular intervals, which led him to order them into horizontal rows
and vertical columns. He placed the two lightest elements, hydrogen and helium,
at either end of the first row, followed by two rows of weight elements, like
two octaves of musical cords, followed by three rows of eighteen. This left some
vacant places where the Russian scientist predicted new elements, which were
later found. He found a secret order in an apparent chaos.
I did well at school. When I matriculated from Senior High in the spring
of 1953, among 120 graduating students I got to give the valedictory speech. It
was full of enthusiasm. As for the impact of Mendelejev’s periodic table on me
personally, many years later as a librarian in far-away Canada, I was driven by
similar desires to create order out of chaos, when researching and compiling my
comprehensive bibliographies on Hungarian studies in Canada and other subjects.
In June I took the train from my hometown, changed over in Debrecen to
Budapest. My application was accepted by Loránd Eötvös University (ELTE), and I
was invited to come in for the entrance exams and, if successful, start my
university studies in September, majoring in Journalism and Comparative
Literature. The exams were preceded by an event I’ll never forget. Having
traveled by train all night, I arrived in Budapest at 5 a.m. First I dropped by
my sister’s place on the Ajtósi Dürer Sor and streched out on the sofa for a
short nap. Before leaving for work, Emike reminded me to make sure to get up
early in order to get to the university in time. As it turned out, I did not
wake up until 9 o’clock. I got off the sofa running. Arms flailing, briefcase
dangling, down the street I dashed in great panic. Luck was with me. At Thököly
Street I caught the first streetcar. I arrived at the university at 10 a.m. The
written exam, as it could be seen through the open door, was well under way.
Rows of students, crouching over white sheets of paper, faces drawn in
concentration, were labouring away. I noticed a portly gentleman, neatly
dressed, sitting by the entrance to the classroom, flipping through some
documents. Breathlessly I asked:
“Excuse me, sir, is this the place where the entrance exam for
journalism is being taken?”
The gentleman, who could have been an Assistant Professor, looked at me.
“It certainly is,” he said curtly. “Unfortunately, it started an hour ago.” With
that he returned to resume rifling through his files.
I produced the official letter of invitation, informed by the Dean that
my application had been accepted and held it out to him. The Assistant Professor
looked at it with sad expression on his face. “I told you, the exam started an
hour ago.”
I was devastated. I felt my whole future drain away from me. I just
couldn’t let it happen. I begged him to at least let me to give it a try. “I’ll
manage to catch up, somehow,” I said desperately.
He reached down to a carton box at his feet and lifted a sealed manila
envelope, turning to me with a painfully sad look on his face. “All right,” he
said in a low voice, handing over the envelope. “You can try. But you must not
disturb the others!”
How I did it I don’t know, but I managed to answer all the questions and
finished with the others. The oral exam the next day seemed to go without a
hitch as I fielded the questions on literature, history and - characteristic of
the times - of the accomplishments of our socialist government. When asked what
made me decide to become a journalist, I replied that I really wanted to be a
writer. “I am planning to write a drama about St. Stephen, first king of
Hungary,” I said proudly.
Eyebrows raised, the examiners seemed to be delighted. They advised me
that a would-be dramatist did not have to major in journalism. It was obvious
that they didn’t think highly of the newly created faculty. What followed after
that was more like a discussion of what the most relevant historical sources
relating to the turn of the millennium were, rather than an entrance exam.
I had a burning desire to become an author ever since I can remember. I
wrote humorous plays and stories and poems patronizing local people. I did these
in secret as my parents were against the thought of me becoming a starving
author, even more than they were against the idea of my becoming a journalist.
By this time seeing what they knew to be all lies in the newspapers, journalism
has become a dishonourable profession in their eyes, though they thought that at
least I wouldn’t starve. I had to assure them that I would not become that kind
of a journalist. Even then, they had their doubts. I have impressed my examiners
and they wished me good luck in any profession I have decided to embark upon.
Our faculty was situated on Pesti Barnabás Square, across from the
Petőfi statue, where three years later our student demonstration started. Our
residence was in Buda, just above Zsigmond Móricz Square, in the classical
building that used to house the one-time elitist Eötvös Kollégium. From the
second semester on I excelled in all the courses. The first semester was one of
adjustment as well as of study, but from the second semester on I received the
highest marks in all the written and oral exams. Perhaps owing to this, at the
beginning of the second year at ELTE I was appointed by the faculty to be Group
Leader. This turned out to be an onerous appointment. The Group Leader, there
were three such positions, was in charge of some 15 class mates. He/she was
expected to keep attendance at classes; represent the group at faculty meetings,
assist the poor ones in their studies, make recommendation to administration as
to the amount of scholarship each student should receive and distribute the
monthly scholarships to members of the group. Still I managed to keep up my
grades and hear my name being read among distinguished students on Radio Kossuth
at the end of the school year. I felt like I had just become famous!
In spite of the politically biased education system, I continued to take
my university studies seriously. I figured if members of my family were destined
to work twelve to thirteen hours a day doing backbreaking work on the fields,
there was no reason why I should work less than they at a job that was much
easier. I was awed to attend the classes of such eminent scholars as Imre
Trenchényi Waldapfel, perhaps the greatest Homeric expert of all time. The grey
bearded gentleman’s thunderous lectures were usually rewarded with standing
ovations.
As a tutor I got involved with some interesting characters, but none
more so than István Dobi junior, the thirty-year-old son of the longest standing
member of the communist politburo. Dobi senior was once the leader of the
Smallholders’ party my father belonged to, but when his party became outlawed,
he sought to extend his career with the communists. He held a largely ceremonial
post in the government, but was entitled to the privileges of a high ranking
official. Consequently his family, including his son István and his young wife,
lived on rose Hill in Buda where Rákosi lived, in the most exclusive part of
Budapest.
Dobi junior was as interesting as he was a troubled man. He was famous
for his brutal physical strength. He served a number of years in the French
Foreign Legion, and was in the process of writing a novel about his experience
in Algeria. In one chapter he described the rebels who made life hell for them.
During the nights young men kept throwing rocks at the wooden shacks where
members of the legion slept. István in his fury caught hold of one of the
rascals and killed him with a single blow. He still had nightmares about that.
At one point the barrack was set on fire, but he with a small group of
legionaries escaped the inferno. Of his original regimen he was the only one to
come back home alive. He was a handsome man, married to a kind, gentle woman.
She was beautiful as only vulnerable women can be. I think it was their shared
vulnerability more than their good looks that made them such a good couple. I
got to know István well and was sorry to learn that he did not get along well
with his famous father. Senior Dobi was an alcoholic, and having to move in the
circle of party backstabbers he must have become paranoid as well. At any rate,
as Dobi Jr. revealed to me, he accused his son of “having been sent by the
imperialists to destroy his father’s political career.” As a communist politburo
member he must have been embarrassed to have a son who had been a member of the
“imperialists’ army.” I knew that István Jr. was a troubled man, vulnerable, and
prone to getting carried away. Once, when I suggested he use more descriptions
in his narrative he came back with a revision so full of description that the
narrative was lost. But nothing prepared me for what was to come. Even many
years later I was shocked to learn in Canada that István Junior committed
suicide by shooting himself in his father’s presence at his office in the
Presidium.
At the end of the second year, one of my lecturers approached me to
polish up my term-essay: “Onomatopoeic, or Sound-imitating, expressions in János
Arany’s epic poems,” and submit it to a linguistic periodical. Being contented
that in September I was scheduled to start my practice work at a provincial
newspaper in Nyíregyháza, I declined the kind offer. I lived to regret it. Never
again did I have a chance to publish in a linguistic journal.
I spent the 1955-56 school year in Nyíregyháza. It was a most satisfying
year of practicum, working at the daily paper, the Néplap. I was well received
by the established staff that found my lively, enthusiastic presence refreshing
and were stimulated by a new voice in their midst. After the first months which
were spent gathering and writing news items, I was assigned to doing serious
journalistic writing. I traveled a great deal and wrote colourful stories and
reports about the daily lives of individuals, members of collective farms and
the agricultural industry. I preferred traveling by train and each trip resulted
in several articles published in our newspaper and broadcast by the local radio.
One of the first things I learned as a practicing journalist was the importance
of verifying a story.
Material for news coverage was collected via visitation, telephone,
correspondence and the media. At one time I was desperately short of material
and used an item received a few weeks before from a fellow, describing the
annual accounting that had taken place in his collective farm. According to him,
members of the collective were delighted over the unexpectedly high earnings. He
even presented the news to me in a self-composed ditty! My news story that
appeared the next day without proper verification created an uprising in the
collective farm. As it turned out, the event did not take place and the earnings
were not expected nearly as high as suggested by our Néplap. Members of the
farm, mistrusting of their administration to begin with, suspecting mischief,
took siege to the administration building, armed with pitchforks, crowbars and
bicycle chains, ready to lynch the rascals. The telephones never stopped ringing
at our newspaper all day. We had some explaining to do.
In January I was appointed to edit a weekly supplement for the youth
organization DISZ (Working Young People’s Association). This appointment gave me
an opportunity to put out a youthful, many-sided and up-to-date paper. I wrote
articles about the concerns of young people, about their social and family
problems, their educational and employment worries, about their personal
concerns in love and happiness, as well as unhappiness caused by broken family
life, poverty, and political discrimination, a highly touchy subject those days.
Some of my reports were broadcast by the national media, including Radio Kossuth
in Budapest, as the best writing of the week. I felt touched at the end of the
practicum when the editor of the paper, István Szécsény, offered me a permanent
position as head of the cultural desk, with a starting salary of 1,300 forints.
Although it was a respectable wage at the time, I declined the kind offer and in
September I returned to the university.
The Budapest I returned to was not the same as the one I left to do my
practicum. The process of thawing that begun with the death of Stalin reached
temperatures in the pot close to a boiling point. It was hard to concentrate on
one’s studies. The political news was conflicting and confusing. The Russians,
it seemed, were trying to reform their system at home but were afraid of losing
control in “the satellite states.” First they installed Imre Nagy the reformer
to replace the Stalinist Rákosi, then they put Rákosi back for a while, only to
replace him with another hard liner, Ernő Gerő. But the reformers in the party
did not want let go of Nagy. Although Nagy, being a loyal Muscovite, did all he
could to discourage even his friends from gathering around him both for the sake
of their safety as his own, he was nevertheless widely regarded as an
alternative to the hardliners by everyone. The reforms he initiated during his
short stint as party leader, designed “to put a human face on socialism” – quite
a comment on the times – may have been nixed by Moscow, they were not forgotten.
But some of Nagy’s friends had more guts than he did and carried on. Led by
these intellectuals there was a movement afoot inside the party wanting change
away from the Stalinist mode and toward Nagy’s. The always tightly controlled
Irodalmi Újság or Literary Gazette became a forum for the reformers as some of
the leading writers became involved. At school we were talking politics all day
and getting sick of talking. We wanted to do something, to act. When news of the
demonstrations came from Poland, we wanted to show our support by organizing a
demonstration of our own. As we were organizing, confusion reigned. Gerő’s
government first authorized the demonstration then forbade it, then acquiesced
again. For sure, there would have been fewer of us to start the march if it was
forbidden, for fear of the secret police was still strong, and we would have
been risking our careers if we ignored the government order. But it would not
have mattered anyway. So many others joined our march on the street that our
numbers seemed insignificant. The events of October 23rd, 1956 are well known.
In the early hours student delegations visited the factories to talk to
the workers ensuring them that our demonstration planned for the afternoon was
going to be a peaceful one. We were going, among other items, to express our
solidarity with our brothers in Poland and East Germany, and to demand domestic
economic and political reforms. With that in mind, a group of four of us visited
the April 4 Factory. We got as far as the gate, where an official met us.
“Listen to me, young comrades,” he said sternly, “you better get back to
school and behave yourselves, or else, the good people of Hungary will crush
your foolish revolution.”
For the record, our original idea was not of a revolution or to
overthrow the government, but of reform.
The demonstration, as planned, started at 2 P.M. We gathered in front of
our university building on Petőfi Square. After listening to patriotic speeches
we marched to the memorial dedicated to the Polish General, who fought on the
side of Hungarians during the 1848-1849 revolution, Joseph Bem, and on to the
Parliament Building. People were jubilant all along the streets, encouraging us,
youthful marchers. There were national flags lowered from the windows (I never
imagined there were so many Hungarian flags left in the country!), some of them
with a hole in the centre, where the communist emblem stood. By the time we
reached the parliament buildings, tens of thousands of people had amassed. After
a long await, the formerly deposed Prime Minister, Imre Nagy arrived and
addressed the crowd by saying:
“Comrades!”
“We’re not comrades,” the crowd shouted in response.
Late in the evening we marched to the Museum Square and to the Radio
Building on Sándor Bródy Street, where student delegates requested the
broadcasting of the 16 Point proclamation as the demands of the nation. The
secret police opened fire at them from the darkened windows. Large convoys
arrived from the industrial district of Csepel, loaded with young armed workers.
This turned the peaceful demonstration into an open revolution. Shortly
after midnight, when Soviet tanks stationed outside the capital city, invaded
Budapest, and the revolution gave way to a war of independence, a war between
two socialist nations. But soon our October Revolution that came to be admired
by the West as an event that shook the world was crushed in early November. A
new “Revolutionary Government” was initiated by the Soviet Union, headed by
János Kádár, a former victim of the regime. With him tyranny replaced tyranny.
On November 4, the soviet onslaught reached me in Nyíregyháza, where I
was sent by the Revolutionary Council with four of my colleagues to assist in
developing a democratic administration. We were stationed in the City Hall. In
the early hours I have noticed through the window that two tanks were stationed
in the middle of the street, their turrets pointing straight at our building. At
that very moment Prime Minister Imre Nagy was calling out to the world by radio
that this government was in place and that the Russian forces had initiated an
invasion. He asked the Western governments for help. It would never arrive. I
alerted my colleagues in the next rooms and we escaped through a back door. We
knew then that it was over. I got a ride to my hometown with a bus transporting
home transient industrial workers.
I staid with my family for several weeks, most lethargic and depressed,
not knowing how to go back and live under the previous regime. On December 19,
the local administration received word from Nyíregyháza, informing that
“visitors” from the Party Headquarters were coming to “enquire” about my
activities during the past months. I was tipped off of it in advance by the head
of the town’s council, advising me to disappear for a few days. “But don’t do
anything hasty!” he advised. That’s when I realized that I would be forced to
escape. The family discussed the situation, and agreed that I do best to defect.
My brother Károly wanted nothing more than to come with me and join our brother
Antal, of whom we had learned that he had crossed the border to Austria. Károly
was a thin, weakly young fellow and I was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to
handle the ordeal. And it was heartbreaking to think that our parents would be
left behind totally alone.
My mother packed up some sausage and bread, we bid tearful farewell next
morning and I left my beloved hometown with two of my friends. For reasons
unclear to me, my parents seemed relieved to see me leave. I did not recognize
their selflessness, and was quite bitter for years in Canada that they just
wanted to get rid of me. I later came to realize that my parents wanted a better
life for me. They did not want me to go through the ordeal that they had
experienced: lost wars, defeated revolutions, foreign invasions, personal
harassments, enforced collective farms. We arrived in Budapest late at in the
evening. It was a sad sight to see the not long-ago beautiful city in darkness
and complete ruin.
I was a patriotic Hungarian and could not imagine a life outside of my
country of birth. A year before I was offered a five-year scholarship to
continue my studies in China, the opportunity I declined. I was going to
participate in the effort of making that country a wonderful place in which to
live. Now I was torn about leaving the nation that had invested so much in me. I
was hoping to become a Hungarian writer, following the footsteps of my heroes,
Zsigmond Móricz, Ferenc Móra, and Péter Veres.
We spent the night at the Déli train station, waitig to make our attempt
at escape. State thugs came during the night, demanding our identifications. I
told them that I came back to university from home, ready to rebuild the city.
They nodded in agreement. They were not as agreeable with a young fellow in the
fine uniform of the military academy. They grabbed him, marched him outside and
later he came back, hair tousled, wiping blood off his face. Also, there was a
fellow, a loud Bulgarian, yelling at the hoods saying what a goddamned
government this was.
One of the thugs told him that he was a lousy immigrant. The country had
given him a good life. “You came here from Bulgaria and you became prosperous.
You should be more grateful,” he went on. The Bulgarian yelled back, “No, I owe
gratefulness for nothing. And I am leaving this goddamned country and will never
set foot in it.” The group took him, marched him out into the darkness and he
never came back. It was a fearful night.
In the morning we boarded the train heading towards the border at
Hegyeshalom. The train was jammed with travelers, most of them fellow
dissidents, some of them standing on the stairs, their bicycle dangling in their
hands. At the town Lébény, some twenty kilometers from the border, we got off
the train. We came across a group of people, standing by the sidewalk, chatting
away. We made friends with them. We ordered some wine and raised glasses to the
homecountry and to our (indefinite) future. Seeking help to get across the
border, we were initially fooled by two pseudo-guides, who fooled us, leaving us
behind not far from where we had left. From then on we were on our own.
Following the stars towards the West, we got lost in the never-ending swampy
fields of Hanság walking aimlessly, me in summer shoes.
During the ordeals I couldn’t help reminiscing my childhood, my family,
and the wonderful years at school. As mentioned, I never thought of leaving my
place of birth. But then again, there was the time of uncertainty, the constant
fear in which everyone lived. I, for example, had omitted from my compulsory
biography the fact that my grandfather Kovács had spent seven years in the
United States and, owning sixty hectares of land, he was declared by the regime
a kulák and his family was exposed to constant harassment. I have also neglected
to include the fact that my parents had owned before the Russian occupation a
grocery store and that my father was the local president of the Independent
Smallholders Party. Omissions of this nature would sooner or later backfire,
leading to serious conclusion. The journey was exhausting. The deserted
countryside Hanság was crisscrossed with knee-deep ditches fool of water, their
edges overgrown by tall grass. Stepping on them, one ended up in the bottom, the
shoes filled up with water. It went on for the duration of the night. Nowhere a
light to be seen, not even a lone star in the sky pointing the direction. Not a
sound to be heard, not even a dog barking. But I felt I did the right thing to
volunteer this journey.
I spent two months in Austria, a few weeks in a refugee camp near Linz,
the rest in Vienna. The one-time capital city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was
beautiful. It was with some irony that I observed the elegant historical
buildings and streets and parks in complete repair, I was envious of the happy
people carrying on without any sign of anxiety. There were well organized
refugee camps, tasty food at the university dining room, shiny big luxury
automobiles and streetcars swishing along the streets. I never felt as desolate
in my life. I was homesick. I felt guilty of leaving my homeland in darkness and
ruins. In the refugee camps I have come across a few of my colleagues, most of
them were not of model types. Many of them, and especially in the Humanities,
did not belong there at all, and did not even want to be there. The only reason
they decided to stick it out was to escape the three-year compulsory military
service. I wished I could go back home. I hoped that no Western country would
accept me. Even during the screening session at the Canadian Embassy, where most
of the candidates gave the impression of what great heroes they were during the
revolution, I tended to underestimate my role in the events. I was stolid, and
gave the impression that I didn’t take this whole thing seriously. The lady
interpreter turned to me and whispered in my ear:
“Look out, man. If you keep on like this you’ll never set foot in
Canada!”
A Chance in Life
(Montreal, Hamilton, Toronto, 1957-1962)
I did make it to Canada. My depression, however, prevailed. At
twenty-five, without the knowledge of any Western languages, what future was
there for me? I found my new surroundings, the desolate countryside buried under
deep snow, the empty roads with misshapen telephone poles, strange looking
housing complexes in Montreal with outside stairways totally alien. Above all, I
was tired of cramped refugee camps and the bone-chilling cold that turned your
face snow-white in a minute. When my Aunt Mary Kaszai and her pretty niece came
to visit me in St Paul l’Lermit and asked proudly what I thought of Canada, I
told them insensitively I thought little of it. It was hard to believe that some
day I would become a devoted Canadian and that I would love most of everything
about Canada. But there was a long and hard way ahead.
Following the defeat of the revolution, close to 200,000 refugees
escaped Hungary for the West. Canada generously gave home to more than 37,000
people, the largest number accepted by any nation. I was among the fortunate
ones to be given a second chance to start my life anew. And what a wonderful
opportunity it was! I arrived in Canada on February 21 and spent about a month
in Montreal. Due to the lack of other space, we stayed for a few weeks in the
city jail located on rue Ste-Catherine. A place called the Petőfi House, across
from the McGill University, was set up by the city to house the Hungarian
refugee students. As it turned out, a group of my compatriots, some 40 students
who must have put on the rabbit shoes after the first gun shot rang out in
Budapest, had taken possession of the three-storey building that was designed to
house some hundred people. The early arrivals went out of their way to deter our
joining them. It was by force that we could take possession of the empty
amenities. So much for fraternal solidarity!
We started attending English classes soon after. When the opportunity
arrived to move on to another city, in my case to Hamilton, I was the first to
volunteer. Twenty of us traveled via train to our new destination. How delighted
we were to learn at McMaster University that we were going to be placed in
private homes! English language classes resumed soon after our settlement. My
attendance lasted only for seven weeks, as I got a permanent job at St. Joseph’s
Hospital as an Orderly, earning $40 per week. The most wonderful aspect of my
employment was that it gave me an opportunity to learn the language fast. This
proved to be of great benefit to me.
In September 1958, after having passed the entrance and language exams,
I started my university education at McMaster all over, without receiving any
credit, eventually majoring in History and Philosophy. I supported myself by
working during the summer months as a house painter, tobacco farm labourer and,
later, as a Toll Collector at the Burlington Bay Skyway Bridge. At the latter I
often put in 18-hour shifts, occasionally traveling from work to University
Sports Centre, where the exams took place. The salary was good for those days,
at $1.50 per hour.
I graduated from McMaster in April, 1961. There were three other
Hungarian students graduating. One of them was Jenő Zádor, who went on to the
United States to receive a Ph.D. and post-doctoral degrees in Chemistry. Another
chemist, Miss Emese Molnár, graduated at the same time, as did Ferenc Földváry.
It was a truly gratifying experience to hear the Chancellor calling me a hero
during the convocation. Apparently the university administration had little
confidence in my becoming a success story. I was a withdrawn person, showing few
signs of adaptation and, thanks to my still present language difficulties, even
my scholarly ability. Sure, I had been an advanced university student in one of
Europe’s most prestigious universities in Budapest. But it was there, and I was
now here, reading, writing and learning in English, which made all the
difference in the world. Even after I had passed the entrance exams and the
Dean’s letter of acceptance was in her hand, the Dean’s secretary tried to
discourage me from taking the risk. ,,It will be a most difficult course,” she
pleaded with me. ”Why don’t you try a subject in the sciences?
Our success was partly due to the generous support of McMaster
University and its remarkable professors including Professors Truman, French,
Dalmage, Kilbourn, Novak and many others. And it was also due to the financial
support of such organizations as the Newman Club and their wonderful officers
and members, among them Father (and later Bishop) Sherlock and Ms. Helen Barry,
whose encouragements meant a great deal to us.
Shortly before graduation, Ms Bertha Bassam, Director of the School of
Library Sciences at the University of Toronto visited our class, recruiting
students for the library profession. At the time, as we learned from Madame
Bassam, there was a great shortage in qualified librarians. At the end of the
session I went to see the Director. We had a pleasant talk. Miss Bassam was a
very attractive lady and a good listener. In reply to her question as to what my
main interest in the profession was, I told her about the rich cultural and
intellectual heritage of the Hungarian community of Ontario. I shared with her
my dream of compiling a bibliography of Hungarian accomplishments in that
province. Miss Bassam was most encouraging. “Yes, Mr. Miska,” she said. “It’s a
wonderful idea. And why not extend it to all Hungarians across Canada? Why not,
indeed? Just have a look at Mr. Turek’s compilations on Polish-Canadians!”
My future was determined at that moment.
I started library school at U. of T. in September, majoring in academic
library administration. It was a hard course, full of assignments, lab tests and
oral presentations. It took, for example, for the library schools in the United
States to cover about the same amount of material in three semesters, offering
an M.L.S. degree that was condensed at our school into two semesters for a
B.L.S. There was a lot of tension throughout the school year. Of the 110
students enrolled, some of them with Ph.D. degrees in Plant Science, Geological
Science and Literature, less than 80 graduated. At the outset I myself had some
difficulty with descriptive cataloguing. Our first assignment was to prepare a
handmade copy of an entry located in the university library card catalogue. I
did a careful job, making the handwritten card legible and beautiful. It
resulted in an F, as in Failure. The next assignment was not any better. In
fact, I failed the third one as well. Finally, Miss Ball, our professor in
Cataloguing and Classification got a hold of me and enlightened me about the
formats required.
The U. of T. did more than just train me. It was there that I have grown
to become a devoted Canadian.
The early sixties marked the beginning of a national awakening in
Canada, in which the University of Toronto played a major role. At our faculty,
textbooks imported from the United States were no longer in use. And there were
no more history classes glorifying even the most ruthless days of the British
Empire. We took subjects from such professors as Margaret Murray in reference
sources, from Catherine Ball and Margaret Cockshutt in cataloguing and
classification, and Ms. Silverthorn in literature, all of them radiating
national pride and self-esteem. What a wonderful experience it was to have among
the visiting lecturers Canada’s leading poets and novelists, let alone the
patriotic publishers and book dealers and eminent librarians such as Harry
Campbell and the great scholar, Brian Land!
A Promising Start
(Winnipeg, Ottawa 1962-1972)
Before the end of the term, directors of libraries across the land came
to conduct interviews with us, aspiring candidates. I was offered positions by
McMaster’s Memorial Library and the Toronto Metropolitan Library. At one point
Mr. Alfred Bowron of TML had told me: “John, if you would like to work in
Toronto, come and see me.” There were several offers from the large Federal
libraries in Ottawa as well.
By then I had developed romantic notions about the western part of the
country, and especially of Winnipeg. Of the latter I had heard some stories from
my former landlord, Mr. Andrew Kozma, who in his time had spent several years on
the wonderful Prairies. I had my interview with Mr. David Foley, Chief of
Libraries at the University of Manitoba. When he advised me of some attractive
vacant positions at that establishment, I was all but sold on the prairie
capital. Mr. Foley, a large bald-headed man with a deep resonant voice, offered
me a choice of three positions as head of the Engineering Branch Library, head
of the Fine Arts and Architecture Branch Library, or as the assistant head of
the University Extension Library. “Take your choice,” he said, smiling.
Although the former two had a great appeal to me, I lacked the
confidence in taking charge of a large university branch library in subjects
unfamiliar to me. As a result, I chose the Extension Library. My duties, under
the leadership of Mr. George Noble, included the management of the traveling
libraries and doing cataloguing and classification of material, as well as
providing reference work to the rural community throughout the province. Most of
the services were conducted by telephone, rail, regular or air mail. I was in
charge of some 200 extension libraries. Books selected by me were sent in
cartons to local schools, grocery stores or private homes, managed by volunteer
custodians, teachers, storekeepers, or house wives. Some of the towns such as
Grand Rapids were so isolated that no road connected them to the main land. Air
or boat service was the only method of communication, and only air service
remained during the long winters.
It was a most rewarding work, considering that most of those communities
had no library service of their own. Receiving grateful letters from our users
made me feel like a savior, playing an important role in helping a new
generation of future scientists and scholars, even future leaders of the nation!
My starting salary was $4,800 per annum. After retirement in 1991 as director of
14 research institute libraries with Agriculture Canada, my annual remuneration
was $52,000 – about the same value as my starting salary thirty years earlier!
(I’m pleased to learn that some of my young colleagues today earn twice the
amount I did.) Back in Winnipeg, I stayed with the Extension Library for close
to two years. It was time to move on.
In the fall I applied for a transfer to the Engineering Branch Library.
I stayed in that position for three years, serving a student population of 1,300
and a staff of 60 in mechanical, electrical, civil and agricultural engineering.
Those were the years of the Beatles, the Kennedy assassination and the violent
student demonstrations throughout the United States (Kent University!) and
Canada. We were happy to acknowledge that no riots had taken place on our
campus, and especially in our complex. The engineering students seemed to be too
worried about passing their exams and were dead serious about preparing for
their responsible careers designing new machinery, constructing roads and
bridges and laying the ground for the forthcoming electronic information
techniques that make life so much easier for us today. At the same time in my
patria, the Kadar regime began to let up on the oppression and, borrowing
heavily from the all too willing West, introduced what came to be known as
“goulash communism.” The standard of living improved at last, and laid the
ground for the nostalgia for the regime in later years when the goulash was gone
and the payments became onerous, resulting in the lowering of the standard of
living.
I felt comfortable about Winnipeg the moment I got off the airplane. The
wide and straight streets lined with elm tress and the atmosphere in general
reminded me of Debrecen, a large Hungarian city at the edge of the Great Plains.
Although I rented a bachelor apartment in the historical Fort Gerry, close to
the university in the elbow of the Red River, I favoured the downtown and,
especially the northern part of the city. Though Ukrainian in temperament, the
Main and Logan streets have always been a poly-cultural mosaic, a zone in which
languages and ethnic identities coexist, but fail to blend. This was the area
that our countryman, John Marlyn, has made immortal in his novels Under the
Ribs of Death and Putzi, I love You, You Little Square. I found life
most stimulating in Winnipeg. It was a cultured city with a symphony orchestra,
a theatre managed by a fellow Hungarian, Johns Hirsch, and a national ballet
company. I became active in the provincial library association. In 1965 I was
elected to president of the University Library Association and joined the
Canadian University Teachers’ Association. It was in Winnipeg that I became a
Canadian citizen.
Winnipeg had a sizable Hungarian community. There were two Hungarian
churches, a Calvinist and a Roman Catholic. There was a literary society that
met twice a month, and an adult choir and a dance group headed by the charming
Mrs. Trudy Edenhoffer. I frequented the numerous Hungarian dining rooms,
barbershops and meat markets. Becoming quite active in the Hungarian community,
I gave talks in the literary society meetings and was a guest speaker to
Hungarian commemorative events on March 15 and October 23. I wrote short stories
and essays published by the local weekly paper, Kanadai Magyar Újság and
by the Képes Világhíradó
(Illustrated World Review in Toronto). Most of my stories date back to
the Prairie Capital. I spent my free time on street corners listening to people
conversing in Ukrainian, Polish, Greek, German, Yiddish. Emulating our great
novelist Zsigmond Móricz, I carried a notebook in my shirt pocket and jotted
down segments of conversations and memorable expressions that later made their
way into my stories. I wrote about characters that I could identify with.
Unlike some of my author colleagues who found the country alien, I noted
much that was positive in Canadian life and I endorsed everything about it. I
built my short stories on conflicts between people with different ideas or
different perspectives. I wrote a story about a sentimental fellow whose
attachment to his old country made it so difficult for him to adjust to his new
environment, as opposed to his buddy, a reckless careerist (‘A templomjáró
krónikája / The Churchgoer’s Chronicle’). Another story was about the owner of a
small bookstore on Main Street, across from the Alexandra Hotel, who tries to
make it good in his new environment which he truly loves, as opposed to a
right-wing character who tries to belittle his endeavours (‘Könyvesboltban / In
the Bookstore’).
One of the happiest events in my life had taken place in Winnipeg when I
married a lady, Marie Brockhausen, in 1965. Marie is of German origin and was
born in Estonia. After the war they settled in Heide, Holstein, Germany. We had
known each other for two years prior to our marriage. She came to Canada in
1960, and was employed as a research technologist with the Department of Animal
Science at the University of Manitoba. Our wedding took place in the Hungarian
Calvinist Church on Brandon Street, officiated by the Rev. László Kálmán. The
reception for the 20 guests was held at the Viscount Hotel, followed by a lively
party at Marie’s brother, Ernest’s place. My brother Tony came from Greenwhich,
Conn., which made us feel very happy. My best man was Kenneth McRobbie. Kenneth
taught history and European culture at the university. He was also a poet, an
editor and a translator from Hungarian into English. The poets Ferenc Juhász and
László Nagy became accessible to the English-speaking reader through Kenneth’s
and Ilona Dusynska’s translations. His first wife, Genevieve Bartal, a librarian
and a poet, was of half-Hungarian origin. His second wife, Dr. Zita Utasi
McRobbie is teaching in Vancouver at Simon Fraser University. We rented a
comfortable suite with wide picture windows on St. Mary’s Road, south of the Red
River in Ste Boniface and commuted to work together along the Perimeter Highway.
We had a wonderful time furnishing our new home and planning our future. Soon
after our wedding we bought a full-log summer home north-east of the city which
I painted in the traditional Hungarian colours, white and black at the lower
part. It was a delight to spend the lovely summer weekends surrounded by
romantic forests rich in wild animals and berries.
My acquaintance with Kenneth McRobbie started in a peculiar way. On the
way to work on a frosty morning a distinguished looking gentleman was standing
at a bus stop on Pembina Highway. He looked familiar from previous times and I
stopped and offered him a ride. He got in, we said hello. There was a collection
of poetry, Eyes without Faces, on the dashboard of my car. He looked at it. “How
do you like it?” he asked. “I like it very much. Kenneth McRobbie is a fine
metaphysical poet,” I said. “It would be nice to meet him.” “Greetings,” he
offered a hand. A friendship started. I helped him preparing the first drafts of
some of the Juhász poems, and especially the biographic ‘At Childhood’s Table.’
Unfortunately, shortly after our wedding, the lovely church where the literary
evenings were held, also served by the Rev. István Nagy (at one time the
Director of the Institute of the Diaconates of Debrecen, and an accomplished
author and poet), was demolished to give way to a bridge over the Red River,
connecting the districts of St. Boniface and Fort Gerry.
August was a sad month for us. My father had passed away of an enlarged
heart. He drove himself mercilessly throughout his life. In addition to doing
the farm work, father was a grocer. He would load up our wagon with grocery
items and drove our old horse, Pista, to the small hamlets, returning home late
at night. Sometimes his winter hat had a coat of snow and ice, the wagon loaded
with farm produce. During summer months, after a day’s work on the field, father
would drive our farm animals to pasture, spending the nights on his feet again.
Finally, his heart failed him. I flew to Greenwich, CONN, to spend a few days
with my brother, Tony. On the way via air to New York, eyeing the fellow
passengers of my father’s age, I was heartbroken over the inevitable fact that I
became an orphan. Being political refugees, we were ill advised to return home
and attend our father’s funeral. Years later, during her visit, my mother
described the funeral, saying that when Father István Sebella came to bid
farewell to our father on behalf of his two sons living in exile, the large
congregation wept.
In 1966 our libraries got a new director, Mr. Bill Wilder. Bill was an
American and an accomplished librarian. He was going to shake up the services as
there were serious complaints about the slow method of ordering and cataloguing
new acquisitions. It took on an average seven months for a book to reach the
staff who requested it, which was unacceptable to the users. Mr. Wilder got wind
of my eyeing opening positions in the East. He did not want to lose me. He
called me over one day and showed me an enormous chart spread out on a large
desk in his office.
”This is what the new setup is going to look like, John,” he said,
straight-stemmed pipe in his mouth. ”Have a look at it and see where you think
you would best fit in.”
I promised that I would. But in reality I was like the guys in the film,
Paint Your Wagon. Except that my stars pointed East, instead of West.
After having lived in Winnipeg for nearly five years, I grew homesick
for Ontario. I have applied for a position in Ottawa with the Department of
Forestry and Rural Development (DFRD). The chief librarian came to Winnipeg to
interview me. I got a job as head of the cataloguing section. The relocation was
made in September, all expenses paid by the Department. Our farewell to Winnipeg
and to the many wonderful friends that grew so close to our hearts wasn’t easy.
There were emotional farewell parties at work and in private. My friend,
Alexander Domokos, an author of dozens of historical and social novels and
collections of poetry, had penned a fine poem for the occasion which brought
tears to our eyes at the last literary society meeting I attended.
The Department of Forestry, as I came to realize much too late, was
under constant reorganization. It was shifted back and forth between Agriculture
and other departments, causing a lot of confusion. The library was a total mess.
It housed three collections with three different classification systems, Oxford
(ODC), Universal (UDC) and Dewey Decimal Classification System. It was a
nightmare for a cataloguer, and the patrons as well. In addition, there were
frequent conflicts between the library and the departmental administration.
After a year I have applied for a position as assistant head of Collections
Development and Acquisitions with Agriculture Canada. I stayed with that
department in different positions for twenty-five years. The Libraries Division,
as it was called, was well organized, had a competent staff, headed by Mrs.
Margaret Reynolds and assisted by such accomplished librarians as Miss Dorothy
Duke, Mrs. Margaret Csaba, and Miss Ethel Wilson. My tenure with that large
library system had coincided with the conversion from traditional library
operations to a highly automated information system. It was during my first year
in Ottawa that my first book, a collection of short stories I had translated
from English into Hungarian appeared in Winnipeg, entitled Legjobb
elbeszélések angolból (Best Short Stories from English.) It included short
stories by American, British, Australian and Canadian authors. Of the Canadians,
I have translated the lovely surrealistic short story, ’’One is a Heifer,” by
Sinclair Ross, and another, ’’A shiny red apple,” by Morley Callaghan.
When the position of Chief of Collections Development and Acquisitions
became vacant, I applied for the job. The competition was stiff but, owing to my
familiarity with the subject, I came out the winner. Consequently, I became
responsible for the collections development and acquisitions of a million-volume
network system housed in the Sir John Carling Building. I was also in charge of
the collections development of 30 research station libraries across Canada. The
book purchases and periodical subscriptions were performed by members of my
staff. As library automation was still at the infant stage, much of the work was
carried out manually, with the help of a rudimentary machine listing and
processing system. My wife, Marie, had applied for a job as research
technologist with the Department of Medicine, University of Ottawa. She won the
competition over 70 applicants, as she was informed, and worked in the same
position until 1972, the time we relocated to Alberta. We purchased an
historical and romantic two-storey house in Aylmer, Quebec, overlooking the
Ottawa River, surrounded by century old pine trees. We paid $12,500 for it.
Although the distance to our working places was about seven kilometers, during
the rush hours, the drive took us an hour-and-a-half each way. What a waste of
time it was! Winter-time was especially hazardous for driving, due to the icy
and snowy road conditions.
In 1968 I initiated the establishment of the Association of
Hungarian-Canadian Authors. The founding event took place at our home, at 12
Jubilee Street, which later earned the name of Golden Street in a poem by my
colleague Ödön Kiss. Those present were: Dr. Ernő Németh, a poet, Dr. Ferenc
Harcsár, a chemical engineer, Mr. Fred Schwilgin, an architect and a poet, and
myself. The society became a reality out of necessity. I was working on an
anthology of Hungarian-Canadian authors and, in lieu of a publisher, there was a
need for a Society to father the project. The young society soon represented a
sizeable community of authors across the land. I became the president and editor
of an anthology series. Dr. Németh was elected to Treasurer, and Ödön Kiss
accepted the position of Secretary.
Our authors’ association had generated keen interest throughout the
country. The initial membership was 22 which more than doubled in a few years.
We had the following members from Winnipeg: Alex Domokos, Imre Naphegyi, Andrew
Haraszti, Rev. Stephen Nagy, and Dr. Alexander Kristóf, a physician; from
Calgary and Vancouver came the prose writer Lajos Simon and the talented poet,
Miklós Tamási, respectively. From Montreal we had the avantgard László Kemenes
Géfin and György Vitéz (real name György Németh), from Toronto Lajos
Kasza-Marton, and members of the young generation, all many-volume authors,
including Brigitta Bali, Ágnes Simándi, Tamás Hajós and others. I have issued a
series of newsletters to keep the members abreast of organizational events and
literary activities. We held authors’ evenings, participated in commemorative
events, published reports about ourselves in the Hungarian media and, above all,
published a series of anthologies, 12 volumes to date, ten in Hungarian and two
in English translation. I remained president until 1975 and edited five volumes
of the anthologies. This was the stimulating Trudeau-era, when bilingualism and
multiculturalism flourished in Canada. The government and the general public had
expressed keen interest in the activities of the ethnic community. Our
anthologies and individual publications of poetry and fiction found ready and
willing market in Canadian libraries and book stores. We still consider those
early years as a renaissance of Hungarian cultural accomplishments in Canada.
These were groundbreaking years. At work, computer automation of library
services took off, fast gaining momentum. The National Library and the Canada
Institute for Scientific and Technological Information (CISTI) took the
initiative in developing new methods of scientific literature searches and
retrieval, whose benefits really became noticeable in a decade or so, the time
it took to complete the enormous task. Our library took the lead. By the middle
of the ‘70s Agriculture Canada Libraries Division, directed by Mrs. Margaret
Morton, assisted by Mrs. Jane Wu, Ms Carole Joling, Ms Joyce MacIntosh, was one
of the most advanced and automated special libraries in Canada.
At this time I gathered my short stories in a collection entitled Egy
bögre tej (A mugful of Milk), which was published by Mike’s Publishers in
Munich, in 1969. The collection included 14 short stories, some of them relating
to childhood memories but the majority took place in Canada. The collection was
well received by readers and reviewers. One of them, Lajos Simon, went as far as
proclaiming: “No city slicker could ever write such deep, intimate stories about
countryside living!” In 1987, Professor George Bisztray, head of the Hungarian
Chair at U. of T., was to write in his book, Hungarian-Canadian Literature,
words that really made me feel gratified:
The only short-story writer who has successfully represented several
themes and problems pertinent to the life of Hungarian Canadians is John Miska.
Furthermore, he is unique among Hungarian-Canadian writers and poets in that he
studied and worked in four distinct and widely separated regions of Canada:
Hamilton-Toronto, Winnipeg, Ottawa and currently Lethbridge. His familiarity
with the entire spectrum of this country, but also with the differences among
its Hungarian-born citizens, certainly contributes to the richness of his short
stories... Miska builds the majority of his stories on a conflict between either
different ideas or different human attitudes (…) His most successful short story
is “The Homecomer,” in which the author describes an old-time Hungarian-Canadian
communist’s disappointment with conditions in socialist Hungary when he visits
it after many decades…
In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t written some of these stories,
particularly the ones that were based on my childhood memories! These writings
were to bring me into conflict with my family. In one of the stories I had
described my father as he returned from the market, having sold our cow and, on
the way home with his buddies, having had one drink too many. After supper, as
the alcohol took effect, he got up abruptly and, without saying a word, smashed
the oil lamp to pieces. While I saw in that episode the desperate outburst of a
long-suffering man trapped in abject poverty, who had just been forced to
perform a mean act for nothing, selling the pet cow as the family’s last asset –
without getting a good price and thus without improving the family’s condition –
whose anger, directed at the false symbol of hope, the light, tragically only
plunges his family into greater darkness and more hopeless poverty – the family
thought I was demeaning my father. Worse, in “Winter-time Visitors,” I depict my
father as easy target for freeloaders, showing that in situations of poverty
even good traits like generosity work against the man, the family thought I was
suggesting that his naïve generosity towards others kept us in poverty, and that
I was blaming him for it, when the family knew the situation was not his fault,
and that he was, indeed, a generous and good-hearted man. No wonder my
relatives, and especially my mother, were shocked and shamed to see the stories
published! In fact, my mother’s sister, Aunt Anna, in Osoyoos, B. C., found my
stories so degrading that she refused to show the collection to any of her
friends. It hurt, as my intent was only to illuminate, as forcefully as I could,
life in poverty as I knew it, which I did indeed.
Luckily the readers, not feeling personally exposed but being able to
relate to living in poor conditions, felt differently about the collection. The
first print sold out overnight. Some years later, while browsing in the
Metropolitan Toronto Library, I came across a copy of my book. It was worn to a
shred; it was soiled and torn. There were entire passages underlined in it. I
found exclamation marks and complimentary remarks written on the margins. Two
borrowing cards in the inside of the back cover showed that the copy was signed
out forty times. I was elated. I took the copy and, introducing myself, I showed
it to the librarian, telling her how much I loved to see books looking like
that. At first the young librarian, missing the point, started to apologize for
the damaged copy. I reassured her that I was serious. “Any author should feel
happy to see his book so well read,” I said.
While in Ottawa, I edited two volumes of an anthology in Hungarian
entitled “Anthology: A Book of Hungarian-Canadian Writers” (Antológia: a kanadai
magyar írók könyve). Both volumes were enthusiastically received. Reviewers and
readers alike identified with the writers in these slim volumes, writing about
Hungarian Canadians. The publication represented an original publishing venture
that turned out well. The anthologies were published on a cooperative basis. The
authors contributed $40 each per volume and received 40 copies in return. The
contributions covered about half of the printing and shipping costs. We, my wife
and I, paid the rest. Working on a shoestring budget, we had to find the
cheapest printers. When the shipments arrived, they came in large wooden
containers from the printer in Rome. We did the portioning, carried the heavy
packages to the post office and mailed them to addresses across the country. The
rest of the marketing was done collectively, which proved to be efficient. The
presence of the Hungarian Authors’ Association and the anthology series as a
reliable forum gave the authors new hope. As indicated in one of the essays on
this web site, hundreds of books of poetry, short stories and novels, essays and
monographs were published in Canada by Hungarians within the time span of a few
decades. We were, indeed, experiencing a period of literary renaissance.
New Challenges
(Lethbridge, Ottawa 1972-1991)
When the library area coordinator’s position for Alberta became vacant,
wanting to see more of Canada, I applied for the job. The regional headquarters
library for the province was located at the Lethbridge Research Station (LRS),
the largest of its kind in Canada. It was established in 1906. At our time the
institute had close to 300 employees, not including the provincial departmental
staff that was also stationed there. The staff included 75 research scientists
in plant, animal, soil, and the veterinarian sciences, some of them leading
experts in their field, including Drs. Johan Dormaar (soil chemistry), D.W.A.
Roberts (plant, cold hardiness), Robert Kasting (biochemistry), Alexander
Johnston (range management). The station was destined to receive a new and
modern facility. I was certain that such an undertaking was going to require a
modern library, offering a person a once-in-a-life chance to set one up.
Naturally, there were several applicants for the job. Once again, being at the
right place at the right time, I succeeded and won the competition. We sold our
Aylmer house for $21,000, and relocated to Lethbridge in May 1972. It was with
some anxiety that we drove across the prairie, wondering whether I was able to
measure up to the high expectations. Today, I still consider our 11-year stay in
that city as the highlight of my professional and personal career. It was in
Alberta where my long-time dreams of becoming a bibliographer came true.
Located some 200 kilometers south of Calgary, Lethbridge was a lovely
city of 55,000 then. It had a new university situated west of town in the
coulees. It also had a vibrant community college, where later I taught Hungarian
to adults. The city had fine fashion stores of high quality clothes. The pace in
comparison to Ottawa and Winnipeg was comfortably slow. People would wave as you
passed them on the street. The general atmosphere in Alberta was characterized
by energy and enthusiasm. The long-forgotten and underestimated little cousin –
as Albertans saw themselves – came of age. The Lougheed years emanated an
unprecedented economic boom. There was a high pioneer spirit throughout the
province. Those people were ready to show Eastern Canada, and especially
arrogant Ontario, who they were! The one-time sleepy cow-town, Calgary, had
grown to a busy oil city, not unlike the largest ones in Texas. The Universities
of Alberta and Calgary, and the other research establishments in Alberta had
just received from the provincial government enormous amounts of financial
support, making them able to attract the best minds from all over Canada and
from the world. It was a stimulating environment for a young person ready to
conquer the world. I loved the industrious atmosphere. Here one did not have to
apologize for being ambitious. As far as the staff was concerned, the LRS
resembled the United Nations. There were people working there from all over the
world. When compiling the ethnic and native Canadian bibliography, I had no
language problem whatsoever, as there were in-house language experts from
practically every one of the 65 nationalities covered by the bibliography.
The library was housed in an old building loosely connected to the
administration, the plant pathology and entomology sections. It was adjacent to
the auditorium, also used as the cafeteria, making the library easily accessible
and well frequented by the staff. It was cramped, books and periodical volumes
piled all over the place in complete disorder, on top of the shelves reaching to
the ceiling. The staff included two professional librarians and six clerks. The
assistant librarian did the acquisitions, cataloguing and processing of
material, as well as some reference and information service. The clerical staff
did public service, such as circulation of books, interlibrary loans, light
information and circulation of current periodical issues to individual
scientists, thousands of pieces per month. The management and record keeping of
this alone was a formidable job. People in the technical services area did
processing, typing, shelving, filing and other related duties. My predecessor,
an able librarian, had generated a large union card catalogue for the entire
area. This was a vital source of information, as it registered records of all
library material held by the other research station libraries in Alberta.
I was responsible for the management of the LRS Library: planning,
budgeting, administration, performance appraisals, writing monthly reports sent
to station administration and to headquarters in Ottawa. Duties included
participation in meetings of station administration and research project
meetings. This enabled me to be familiar with ongoing and upcoming projects. It
was amazing to watch the complexity of the projects, each involving several
researchers from different disciplines, some of them connected to similar
researches elsewhere in the country. Also, I was to coordinate services to four
other research institute libraries, one, the Animal Diseases Research Institute
a few kilometers west of town, one in Lacombe, another in Beaverlodge in the
Peace River country, and one in Vegreville, east of Edmonton. I made frequent
visits to the above three, Marie accompanying me. I drove company vehicles, each
trip taking five working days. It was a wonderful experience to see the
beautiful province as it started to experience prosperity. The northern part
went through such a boom period that often it was difficult to find
accommodations even in White Court or Grande Prairie, the largest cities in the
area.
It was a delight to have come for visits from the LRS, which was
considered to be one of the most prestigious institutes across the country. The
Director, Dr. J.E. Andrews, was a famous plant scientist and a superior
administrator, assisted by a group of five section heads and administrative
staff. The climate was pleasant, the high altitude and the semi-desert-like,
sunny weather proved excellent for both of us. It was Chinook country. It
happened quite often at winter-time that we went to bed in the evening with a
foot of snow outside. By the time we got up in the morning the snow was gone. No
puddles, no mud, the golf course across from our house was dotted with eager
golfers swinging their golf clubs. The allergy that I was suffering from in
Ottawa disappeared overnight. Librarians in the city had a distinguished status
unimaginable anywhere else. We bought a house on South Parkside Drive,
overlooking the golf course and Henderson Lake. It was originally built by the
University of Lethbridge for the first president of the new university. We paid
for the four storey split-level building $42,000. My wife kept busy looking
after the house and the large garden, full of grown fruit trees, flowers and
vegetable plots. From the start we have managed a busy social life; there were
frequent house parties, official and semi-official gatherings, visitors from
Ottawa and other places kept us on our toes.
When I started the job, the planning of the new $42,000,000 facility was
well under way. I was given full authority to work with the architects in
planning and developing the library quarters. The library was allotted 10,000
square feet of space, far more than I would have ever had the courage to ask
for. I spent months preparing the floor plans and getting the large collection
scattered all over the place ready for the relocation. Assisted by my staff,
when the time for the move arrived, I knew the exact space and location
practically every one of the more than 100,000 items. When the constructions
were completed and the relocation took place in the bright space over the
administration wing, the library became the pride of the station. It really was
a showcase. The spacious reading room with fine wooden tables, the stack area
with new shelving in the centre, the comfortable carols located along the large
windows overlooking the picturesque experimental plots, the city and, on clear
mornings, Chief Mountain from 80 kilometers away was an unforgettable
experience. The users considered it a haven in which to do research or casual
reading.
Our prestige was enhanced as the information revolution was in full
swing during the seventies, enabling us to provide more efficient day-to-day
services. Shortly after I took over, a biochemist came by and asked me about how
to best keep abreast of current literature. Although he was a consummate reader
and we circulated to him more than 120 periodical titles on a regular basis, he
was concerned about missing out on important publications. I promised him to
look into the matter. In a few weeks we started implementing the automated
bibliographic systems the Can/OLE and the Can/SDI. At the time these came as the
answers to his prayers.
Courtesy of Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information,
the former National Science Library, a new service known as the Canadian /
Online Services (CAN/OLE) was introduced. We prepared interest profiles in
collaboration with the individual research scientists, preparing an outline of
the basic key words that covered their field of interest. The profiles were
submitted to CISTI in Ottawa, where using specific databases with access to
thousands of related periodicals, printed lists resulted and mailed back to us
within a few days. Another system which was an improvement over the previous one
was also developed by CISTI. It was called Selective Dissemination of
Information (CAN/SDI). It did similar searches as CAN/OLE, except that CAN/SDI
did the work continuously, producing lists of bibliographies on a biweekly
basis. Services of this nature revolutionized information retrieval and
simplified work for library staff. There were other systems, including the one
offered by the University of Toronto Library, known as UTLAS, offering full
services in the ordering and cataloguing of library material. Once the
revolution had started there was no end to new developments. Individual
libraries introduced minicomputer systems, such as DOBIS at our headquarters
library in Ottawa, used for overall library work. By the middle of the ‘70’s our
Libraries Division was one of the most advanced and automated special libraries
in Canada.
By luck or intuition, I often had a sixth sense in spotting upcoming
research areas of importance. Right at the outset I started compiling a series
of bibliographies based on the research station publications since 1906. The
venture resulted in a 6-volume compilation and generated wide interest within
and outside the Department. The scientists were pleased to see their
publications properly organized and preserved. Shortly after that, for no
particular reason, I started work on a bibliography pertaining to solonetz soils
of the world. Alberta and Hungary were known to have had large areas of
salt-affected soils, which seemed important enough for me to do something about
it. It took me about six months to complete the work. I have managed to gather
some 1,300 citations in many languages; I organized the material under 12
subject headings and prepared subject, author, geographical and chronological
indices at the end of the volume. I have approached the Commonwealth
Agricultural Bureaux in Great Britain. I was delighted to learn that they have
accepted it for publication without delay. Shortly after that, one of our
project leaders in soil science dropped by and told me about a new project in
the offing: the reclamation of solonetz soils in Alberta. “Do we have any
information on the subject?” he asked. When I opened my drawer and produced a
copy of the neatly organized manuscript, he flipped through the pages and was
most impressed. And so was the station. During my stay in Alberta I have
published, as listed in the publications section of this web site, 22
book-length bibliographies in the agricultural sciences and the humanities, all
listed in Bibliography of Canadian Bibliographies, 2nd edition.
Some of the duties we added to our regular services were impressive. The
revising of references listed by researchers at the ends of their innumerable
manuscripts; the setting up of a research station archives and a photo
collection; the planning and organizing of a display series pertaining to
research projects and individual accomplishments were only a few of the work we
did on a volunteer basis. I served on several committees, including the
selection of research scientists for nominations for national and international
awards and recognition. When the research station directors from Western Canada
had their meetings at the LRS, I was often invited to talk about new advances in
information sciences. When the Director Generals across the Department had a
session in Ottawa to revise staff classification methods, I was approached to
send in some suggestions on the subject. My proposal for the establishment of a
departmental database for scientific publications was hailed by the Research
Branch. It’s staggering today to realize the amount of workload I carried during
those days. In addition to my regular duties, I gave seminars, offered
interviews for the media. I taught an evening class on Hungarian language at the
Community College. I was a recipient of federal and provincial government
grants, and an editor of anthologies in Hungarian and English (The Sound of
Time, 1974) and a tireless compiler of bibliographies.
There were two sad events in 1980 that cast lasting shadows on our
lives: the death of my brother Antal, followed three months later by the passing
of my sister, Emike. It is always painful to lose loved ones, but it is more
shocking to part with them so young. Tony, as we called Antal, was 40, Emike 48.
Our mother’s heart was broken, losing dad some years earlier, and now two more
of her children. Mother has had a hard life. She raised a large family. She ran
the grocery store, did most of the housekeeping, milking the cows twice daily,
and looking after the poultry and pigs we raised for slaughter. She did the
cooking and in summertime she would carry the dinner to us to the fields, some
plots being three kilometers away. And she did work in our large garden and in
the vineyard. She never complained.
Toni was her darling. Tony could charm her. He was always gentle to her;
he would give her a hug, calling her Anyukám, Drága (Mother Darling). Mother
visited both of us, Tony in Rye, N. Y., for a year-and-a-half, us in Ottawa for
two months. Her stay with Toni was truly memorable. Toni bought mother the
loveliest of clothing and expensive jewelry. Mother looked twenty years younger
during her stay in Rye. When my father-in-law saw my mother’s photos, he was
impressed how young she looked. Yet Emike was closest to her heart. Although a
brilliant child and a highly respected young lady in town (several most eligible
young fellows had asked for her hand in marriage), she depended on mother’s
down-to-earth guidance even after her marriage.
We all kept close as a family, but Tony was closest to my heart. We had
good singing voices and on the way home from the field we’d sing away on top of
the cow-drawn wagon. Tony was an entertainer. He could imitate people in the
most humorous way. During winter times our house was full of visitors, and Tony
would entertain them all. Often they were roaring with laughter. He was a born
storyteller. We slept in the same bed and Toni would improvise colourful stories
about his classmates. They were realistic stories he made up in a hilarious way.
Of the two of us, he would have had the best talent for writing. He had brains,
sharp like a razor. He remembered birthdays and events of long ago. But he
didn’t like school. He was one of the kids crying their way to school, every
morning. After graduating from grade 6, he served his compulsory three years in
the army and then settled in Budapest. He worked as a molder in the Áron Gábor
Machine factory. In Budapest we would meet on a regular basis. After the
crushing of the revolution he escaped, preceding me by a month. He and our
cousin, Antal Varga, went to the USA and settled down for a while in Greenwich,
CONN. Toni used to tell us humorous stories about their trials and tribulations.
They started off by leasing an ice cream store at the beginning of winter. Later
on they leased a fast-food store on the beach in Stamford, at the end of the
season. When the supplier came to collect, one of them would hide behind the
counter, while the other kept stalling the good collector saying, ‘my partner
went to our bank to withdraw some money.’ Toni supported our parents financially
soon after he landed in America. After becoming citizens of our adopted
countries we visited each other often. Toni would encourage me by talking about
the huge tower buildings we would be erecting. He would draw sketches on the
table, indicating the way the skyscrapers were going to look, built on steel and
cement stilts to make room for parking.
Tony’s heyday came when he landed a job as a waiter in the prestigious
Showboat in Greenwich. He had the looks and the charm of a French waiter which
is the highest qualification imaginable in food-loving America. He could charm
the most discriminating customer. When people, like members of the Kennedy gang,
came, or a large family known to make life most complicated for a waiter when
ordering for four to six people, kids and adults, changing the items over and
over, Toni was assigned to serve them. And he did without missing a beat. He
told us stories that made our eyes wet from laughter. And that soft and
good-natured brother of ours succumbed to alcohol. At times it became so bad
that cousin Toni or his wife, Sandy, would phone us, asking us to come and save
him. When talking with him on the telephone, he often excused himself and the
refilling of his glass could be heard. Toni has changed, the alcohol made him
unrecognizable. I flew over to New York several times, where he lived by then,
and brought him over to our place. When we entered the house, his first word was
to Marie: “Were you worried about me?” I was furious with him. He wouldn’t hear
of moving to Canada. He loved America. He was proud of it. He identified with it
completely. I did not approve of a lot things about his America.
It was a hot July weekend. We drove to the lake for a swim. In the lake
Toni’s image appeared in front of me, calling for help. I immediately got out of
the water, dressed and asked my wife to let’s go home. An hour after our arrival
the phone rang. It was from New York, a policeman was calling. The officer
apologized for bringing us sad news. “Your brother Antal has died.” We flew to
New York. Cousin Antal and Sandy helped us organize the funeral. It took place
on July 31. This is what I wrote in my diary for the day:
Today is Tony’s funeral. A sad day, ridden with pain and emotion. The
hearse brought his sealed coffin to the St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church. Low
Mass was celebrated by Msgr. Andrew Doran, a Slovak-American priest. There was a
small gathering, Marie, Antal, Sandy and myself, along with six pall bearers and
a lady we didn’t know. I cried. Marie and Antal gently touched my arm. It was a
simple sermon, no farewell speeches, no celebration of a life. This is fate of a
refugee. After the sermon we drove to St. Raymond’s cemetery, which is
overlooking the Hudson River. It is nice and peaceful here. The relatively low
humidity makes the weather feel pleasant. The graves are well kept. They bury
the dead in three layers. My brother, for the first time after a long while,
will not be alone. He will have souls to share eternity with. On the way back to
Antal’s place I felt heartbroken. I haven’t joined my brother in loving and
giving credit to his beloved America.
The news of Emike’s passing was delivered to me at work by Marie over
the telephone. It was in the afternoon, an hour before I was to give a
presentation to local librarians at the university. On the way to the
university, I felt guilty of pursuing my own affairs while she was lying dead.
But life had to go on, and my darling sister would probably approve of that.
Other large-scale projects that followed were two bibliographies, one on
irrigation practices of the world, a 4-volume compilation with annotations, the
other, cold hardiness and winter survival of plants, both over 400 pages. The
former focused on the general aspects of irrigation practices; on specific
methods employed; on soil relations and on crop response. The second work, the
cold hardiness of plants, has had a utilitarian nature. Its purpose was to
prepare the ground for a new movement in agricultural practices: the opening up
of the northern territory for agriculture. It was at the time that some overly
ambitious politicians from the region had tried to encourage the federal
government in Ottawa to help the populace take advantage of a large, hitherto
unused land in the north and open it up for production. It sounded great. Canada
was going to solve the looming problem, the food shortage of the world. There
was only one problem with this. In their enthusiasm, they forgot to realize that
the shortage of food in the developing countries was not caused by shortage of
food supply.
The reality was that the existing production could have easily satisfied
the needs of the world twice over. The government went ahead, started a
propaganda campaign encouraging would be farmers and established ones to sell
out and move up north, young and not so young men. As they did, they were to
realize in a few years that it did not work. Firstly, even if they had managed
to establish themselves, there were no suitable plants capable of surviving the
harsh climatic conditions, and second, if they succeeded in establishing their
cattle farms and operations producing feed stuff, the market wasn’t there. As a
result, they went bankrupt one after the other. Our bibliography, giving an
outline of the appropriate plants suitable for northern areas became a hot item.
It was sold by CAB for 75 pounds per copy, an enormous price at the time.
It was in Lethbridge that I have started work on the Ethnic and
Native Canadian Literature, a bibliography. It was a ten-year project. The
first edition was put out in microfiche in 1974. Hundreds of copies were sold to
university and public libraries and to appropriate government establishments. It
was also in Alberta that the first and largest volume of a three-volume
bibliography, entitled Canadian Studies on Hungarians, a centennial
project, was partially completed. However, the endless and ever growing projects
started to take affect on me. I worked so hard and put in so many hours that at
times I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. While putting the finishing
touches to the ethnic bibliography, a 500-page manuscript prepared on an IBM
typewriter, I was also invited by the community college to teach a Hungarian
language course to adults. I didn’t have previous experience in teaching. The
preparation for the first term required a great deal of time and effort. I was
so exhausted that one night I inadvertently dismissed the 3-hour class after two
hours. I didn’t even realize my mistake until my wife, who also took the course,
reminded me of my mistake on the way home.
Lethbridge has had an active Hungarian community. Its history goes back
to shortly after the turn of the century, when a group of people arrived from
the USA and found employment in the mines. At our time there were two groups,
the Old Timers’ Club and the Hungarian Cultural Society. The former was
established out of necessity. A lone Hungarian fellow had passed away and they
kept his body in the city morgue for weeks because there was no one to cover the
expenses of his funeral. That gave the impetus for the group to establish a
benevolent society. They purchased a large building in the downtown area and
made the renovations to make it suitable for rentals to lone members and for
cultural activities. At their annual meetings the society’s bank book was passed
around for all members to see for themselves where their financial status stood
at. The other society was established by the younger generation. They organized
fashion shows, dance festivals, and achieved that the city council set aside a
day, called the Hungarian Day. The Canadian and Hungarian flags adorned the city
hall for the occasion.
It took a few years that I became active in these communities. I was
involved in so many different ventures that I did not have much time for local
activities. Although people were pleased to see all the Hungarian-related
publicity I have generated in the media, I perceived that some might be asking:
“What kind of a Hungarian is a person who is not a member of the Old Timers’
Club?” Some of my Hungarian undertakings included the editing the third volume
of the Hungarian Authors’ Association, and preparing the fourth volume in
English that was published in 1974, under the title The Sound of Time:
Anthology of Hungarian-Canadian Authors. The volume included poetry and
fiction by twenty-seven writers, complete with biographical notes. Although my
generous selection of writings made the volume somewhat uneven in quality, it
was quite well received. Some high schools had ordered 20 to 30 copies for use
as recommended reading on multiculturalism.
Some other notable events while in Alberta followed. I was a recipient
of several grants from the federal and provincial governments. One was in
support of the publication of The Sound of Time. Another for my own
essays A magunk portáján: válogatott esszék (Mending Our Fences: Selected
Essays), put out in 1974. In 1972 and 1973 I was guest speaker in Toronto and
Winnipeg, respectively. In Toronto the Calgary-based Széchenyi Society organized
a conference which resulted in the establishment of the Hungarian Chair at the
University of Toronto. My talk pertained to the activities of Hungarian Canadian
authors. In Winnipeg, the subject of my talk at the commemoration of the October
Revolution was: “The Birth of National Sagas”, i.e. some heroes, among the ones
during the 1956 uprising such as Sándor Kopácsi, reached the status of folk
heroism. In 1974 I spent a month in Ottawa on loan to the Ministry of
Multiculturalism, to set up a computer-assisted information system. The same
year I was invited by the National Archives of Canada to donate my private
collection pertaining to my correspondence, manuscripts, awards and a 4-volume
scrapbook containing writings about my work.
Today my collection makes up one of the largest individual fonds in the
ethnic section, properly organized, thanks to my colleague and friend, George
Demmer, who was hired to organize the collection. About the same time I was
elected by my author colleagues an honorary president for life of the Hungarian
Canadian Authors’ Association. I was also nominated by members of the LRS for a
Doctor of Laws degree by the University of Lethbridge. In 1977 I was awarded the
Queen’s Jubilee Silver Medal for my accomplishments in librarianship and
bibliography. In 1978 I received an Alberta Achievement Award for Excellence in
Literature and Bibliography, followed by a silver medal from the Árpád Academy
for the Mending Our Fences. I was also nominated for the Chief
Librarian’s position at the University of Lethbridge which I declined. My
recommendation to set up a database for Agriculture Canada publications had been
approved, which made our return to the Capital City imminent.
At the end of September we sold our house on South Parkside Drive, the
government hired a moving company to pack our belongings and we bid farewell to
the lovely city that was supposed to be our permanent home in Canada. Memorable
as our stay was in Alberta, we were ready for a change. I have done my share of
bibliographies and was now ready for new challenges. Not suspecting that many
more of the same was to follow over the years. My new position in Ottawa was
classified as Area Coordinator of Libraries in Central Canada. I was in charge
of fifteen research libraries located in the Ottawa area and throughout Ontario
including Vineland, London, Harrow, and Guelph. I had two offices, one at the
Animal Diseases Research Institute in Barrhaven, some 25 kilometers from Ottawa,
and one at the Entomological Research Institute, at the Central Experimental
Farm on Carling Street. Some of my libraries, such as the ones at the entomology
and plant research institutes had national status due to the size and complexity
of their collections. Most of them were headed by professional and clerical
staff seconded from the Libraries Division, but some of the smaller ones were
not staffed. I visited them and performed basic services which I enjoyed as
much, if not more, than administrative work. The latter included planning,
organizing and management of library activities within my region, as well as
budgeting, staffing and performance appraisals.
A regional coordinator attended annual divisional meetings and
participated in teleconferences for coordinators. As a senior staff member,
he/she was a member of the Deputy Minister’s executive council and attended the
annual meetings, usually lasting for five days. This was the body that carried
out the directives put forth by the minister of agriculture, at times jotted
down on the back of an envelope. Some meetings of senior library staff were held
at such exclusive places as the Montebello Resource Centre. At one time I was
assigned the same room where US President Ronald Reagan staid a few years
before. To keep abreast of scientific, professional and departmental matters we
were expected to attend scientific and technological seminars. I have a file
containing the certificates of advance courses that I had taken in Time
Management, Process Skills, Focus on Management, Management by Objectives,
Management Orientation Program. Some of these courses were conducted out of town
and were most stressful, some of them lasting for weeks. At the end it was a
relief to return home and to regular duties.
Life at headquarters was livelier and more stressful than in Alberta.
New policies emanating from the Parliament, dramatic instructions for basic
reorganizations issued by the Deputy Minister’s or the Assistant Deputy
Ministers’ offices had hit us harder and more intensively than out in the
regions. Some of the policies and regulations were in total opposition to one
another. At one time, a new and ambitious minister of agriculture had vowed to
hire for the department the very best brains the land could offer, only to learn
a week later from the boss man at Treasury Board saying: Like hell we are! We
couldn’t afford paying the best brains anyway.
Our daily operations were carried out by telephone, electronically, by
regular post and personal visits. Each institute library had its own library
committee and the coordinator was expected to attend the meetings in an advisory
capacity. Coping with technological development was an essential part of the
functions. Technology changed so fast that often times it was enough to be away
for a few weeks and when returned, not being able to log onto one’s computer.
The institute libraries, depending on the interest of the field librarians, and
the generosity of the institute administration, have employed a variety of
techniques via mini-computers and using all kinds of software programs. Some
librarians tended to carry automation a bit too far. They computerized even a
small periodical card index, making it difficult for the users to locate a
current issue, or asserting whether it has arrived yet. It was disheartening to
find that too much time was spent in front of the monitor, rather than serving
the users over the counter. Rectifying the occasional mismanagement required
tact and diplomacy. Annual performance appraisals had to be humane but
constructive. Organizational life at headquarters was more formal than in the
regions. Here clerical and professional staff paid closer attention to duties
listed in their job descriptions. If a clerk, for example, was requested to
perform duties above his/her range, which is inevitable in a smaller operation,
the union was called in to negotiate for increased remuneration, which was an
administrative nightmare.
In addition to my regular work, I was also invited by the Association of
Agricultural Librarians to establish and edit a quarterly bulletin. I gave it
the title Ensemble Agriculture. We purchased a house in Barrhaven for $145,000.
It was a 4-bedroom two-level house in a new development that gave us nothing but
trouble. The previous owner had converted the heating system to gas and the
pilot light in the furnace kept going out, while the gas was building up in the
entire house. In addition, it was a corner property and the snow ploughs piled
the heavy chunks of icy snow in our wide laneway, making it impossible to get
out with a car. We sold the house after four months, and moved back to downtown
Ottawa, renting a 2-bedroom condominium at 71 Summerset St. West, near the
Ottawa Canal. Later on we purchased the place and stayed in it until our
relocation to Victoria in 1992. The condominium complex was close to all the
amenities, minutes walk to the bank, grocery stores, National Arts Centre; close
enough on foot to the National Library and the National Archives, whose
collections I was using on a regular basis for my extra curricular projects.
One of the main reasons for accepting a transfer back to Headquarters in
Ottawa was the idea of a compilation of a Department-wide bibliography. My
earlier proposal for the project had been endorsed and applauded by the Research
and Health of Animal branches, two establishments that were going to benefit
most from the undertaking. After I had settled into my new position, it was
decided by our library administration that it was an impractical project that
was, due to vigorous downsizing that started throughout the government, beyond
our capabilities to carry out such an enormous project. I could have put up an
argument in defense of the project, reminding that CISTI had published similar
bibliographies over the years, and our agricultural branches had volunteered to
finance the undertaking. Furthermore, I already had other undertakings in the
offing. One of these was a bibliography pertaining to the Libraries Division. I
thought, an historical summary, combined with a list of publications by members
of the library would be an appropriate way to celebrate its 75th anniversary.
After completion the work was published by the library under the title
Celebration, 1910-1985. The compilation was arranged by subject and provided
information on the activities of a major Canadian government library. The
material was gathered from library holdings and files held by the central
library and from the thirty establishment libraries across the country.
My other, even more ambitious, undertaking was the preparation of a
procedures manual, this too, for the Libraries Division. It turned out a
comprehensive project, the first attempt to combine the traditional work
procedures with computer-assisted methods. I couldn’t have done this work
without the assistance of our Technical Services people who plaid a major role
in adapting the existing technology and working out new ones in order to replace
an outmoded manual system of information storage and retrieval. As it turned
out, the manual came to serve as a history of the Agriculture Canada Libraries,
as well as a service manual.
After relocation to the capital city I have re-establish contact with
the Multicultural Centre of the Secretary of State. In the past I have received
several grants from that department. The most recent one was the one assisting
me in the preparation of a centennial bibliography of Hungarian studies in
Canada. I have toiled on this work for over a decade. In Lethbridge, using my
annual leaves and official travels I have managed to unearth a large amount of
material not listed anywhere before. In Ottawa, owing to our proximity to large
library collections and archival material, I was able to bring this project to
fruition (the main publication to be followed by three supplements, 1992 in
Ottawa, 1995 in Budapest, and 1998 in Toronto-Budapest). The compilation of some
1300 references of primary and secondary material was published by the Canadian
Plains Research Center (CPRC), University of Regina, under the title:
Canadian Studies on Hungarians, 1886-1986: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary
and Secondary Sources. The bibliography was arranged under two major parts:
(1) Hungary and Hungarians, and (2) Hungarians in Canada. The general headings
were further subdivided by such headings as Reference Works, Commercial
Relations between Canada and Hungary, Economy, Literature, Immigration,
Integration versus Assimilation, Demography, Religion, Refugees of 1956. The
subject arrangement, complete with author/title and subject indexes, made the
compilation user friendly and accessible.
The bibliography has generated critical acclaim within and outside
Canada. It was reviewed by most major journals including the Canadian
Literature, Canadian Library Journal, Quill & Quire, Journal of Canadian
Studies, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, American Book Review Annual
and many others. The Papers of the Bibliographic Society of Canada, for
instance, wrote among others that “This is a bibliography that deserves to be on
library shelves and in the scholars’ libraries. It is comprehensive, well
organized, easy to use, and will be the standard bibliography for
Hungarian-Canadian studies for years. […] It attests to the contribution to
Canadian society that a small number of highly literate people can make…” (PBSC
XXVIII). The reviewer of the Prairie Forum wrote: “J.M. has been very thorough
in identifying the most useful and valuable Canadian writing on Hungary and
Hungarians, and thus, for most readers his work must be accounted a success.”
(P.F. 13, 1, 1988) According to the reviewer of Hungarian Studies Review: “The
general reader may never discover the pleasures offered by a bibliography, but
librarians, historians, book dealers and other dogged diggers of delectable
detail may rejoice, for here is a good book for them!” (HSR XV, 2) I am most
grateful to the publisher, and to a great number of people who so unselfishly
offered their assistance in this important work, and most specifically to
Gillian Wadsworth Minifie, editor of CPRC, Regina, and George Demmer, of Ottawa,
for the painstaking effort in doing the proofreading of the manuscript.
Another work of mine that came to see the light while stationed in
Ottawa was the ethnic bibliography. While still in Lethbridge, I have applied to
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for a grant. I was
planning to bring my bibliography of ethnic and native Canadian literature
up-to-date and needed some financial support to cover the expenses arising from
travel, office supply, purchasing a computer and other costs. The application
was turned down. As a result, I started work on an anthology of
Hungarian-Canadian writers. I have received financial support from the Secretary
of State in the amount of $11,000 and started work on the subject without delay.
I drafted form letters to some thirty-five authors considered for inclusion,
inviting them to submit manuscripts for consideration. Upon receipt of the
writings I started compiling, selecting and organizing the material. It was a
delight to return to editing an anthology. It was about a decade ago that I have
edited a similar collection published under the title
The Sound of Time. The present proposal was received
enthusiastically by the authors. They thought it was a unique idea to combine
Hungarian writings in English translation, along with those originally written
in English. My author colleagues thought of me as a man with a golden touch, as
I was the only Hungarian editor outside of Hungary who was able to pay
honorarium for their work.
The editing nearing completion I have approached several publishers. To
my great surprize the manuscript, entitled Crossroads, was accepted for
publication by the Queenstone Publishing House in Winnipeg. The typesetting was
done within a month, the neat galley proof delivered in no time at all. Things
were moving exceptionally well, until the unexpected happened. A letter arrived
from Joann Paar, the publisher, informing that the company had folded up. The
bad news was most devastating. A lot of work went into that venture:
corresponding with scores of authors, working with translators, negotiating with
publishers for copyrights of the works I planned to publish. I have managed to
line up some of the best poets for doing the English version, including John
Robert Colombo, Dennis Lee, Christopher Levenson, George Payerle, Robin Skelton.
They did an excellent job on the translations. In the wake of the sad news I
have approached a few other publishers, amongst them McClelland and Stewart and
Exile Publishers, in vaine. In great disappointment I packed up the manuscript
and put it away. It took some twenty years when the anthology finally got
published in a much revised and enlarged form, put out by the prestigious
Guernica Editions in 2002, under the title Blessed Harbours: An Anthology of
Hungarian-Canadian Authors. The 260-page collection included introductions,
biographical notes on the authors and a list of publications relating to the
subject.
In 1985 I was invited by the National Library of Hungary to attend and
give a presentation on Hungarian library collections in Canada to a conference
of special librarians held in Budapest. The three-day conference was attended by
librarians from around the world. The conference theme was varied, there were
sessions on library administration, automation, collections development
policies. I was pleased to be invited, as I could return to my patria as an
invited guest of an honourable institution, as opposed to crawling back as a
sorry dissident with hat in hand. Furthermore, it was a special event for us,
Hungarian-Canadians. It was in 1985-86 that we celebrated the first centennial
of Hungarian migrations to Canada. I prepared a study on the subject, giving an
historical summary of the Hungarian presence in Canada, approaching the topic
from a statistical, thematic and bibliographic point of view. This was also
going to be a memorable event in my life, the first visit to my mother and my
relatives in 29 years. Still, when it came to flying across the Hungarian border
from Zürich, I got so nervous I thought I was going to get a nervous breakdown.
As it happened, for weeks prior to my departure, I was reading a book by
the historian Emil Csonka, describing the terrible atrocities meted out to the
political and economic prisoners before and after the 1956 Revolution. Although
there was a general amnesty for those refugees who did not commit any crime
before their escape, but who could guaranty the safety of a visitor to his
motherland behind the Iron Curtain? I was relieved after passing through the
check-in point. As it was my first visit, the officer didn’t even bother looking
at my suitcases. The presence of the military at the Budapest Airport was quite
noticeable, but inside the city life appeared to be as normal as in Ottawa. I
stayed with my mother’s house and at my brother’s condominium, both in
Rákospalota. A large group gathered to welcome me, cousins and aunties and
uncles and nieces, hugging and kissing, happy to see me after close to three
decades. Following the conference we drove with my brother Károly’s
Romanian-made Dacia automobile to our hometown Nyírbéltek. We spent a few days
there with relatives.
I couldn’t get over the dramatic changes the town had gone through over
the years. The old houses with straw roofs and earthen floors gave way to modern
two-storey and split-level houses with large picture windows. There was
electricity, running water and indoor toilet facilities never heard of during my
time. It was a beautiful garden town. There was hardly any trace of agricultural
activities. Instead of cow-drawn wagons kept in the back of the properties,
automobils were parked along the streets. Yes, those were the last years of the
good old „Goulash Communism”! We visited my old school and I was pleased to find
that it was still there; there were medical facilities with local doctors and a
care home for the aged. We visited the greek catholic church with its colourful
iconostasies, and the roman catholic heritage church called the „little temple”,
erected in 1222. Incredible as it was, the little Roman-style building stood
there as a witness to invading Mongolian, Turkish, Austrian and Russian
occupying forces, leaving destruction and desolation behind.
On the way back to the capital city we drove through Hajdúböszörmény and
visited my old Alma Mater. What an emotional feeling it was to occupy, again,
the last bench where I used to sit for four school years as a member of Class C.
In Budapest we dropped by my old university on Pesti Barnabás Street, across
from Petőfi Square, where the demonstrations started on October 23, 1956. I also
visited the student residence located at 11-13 Ménesi Street, near Zsigmond
Móricz Sqare. I was sorry to learn that the complex that used to house the
famous Eötvös Kollégium, where I also lived for close to three years, was
discontinued and it was occupied by the Literary Institute of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences.
The conference, as mentioned, was held at the National Széchényi Library
in the Royal Castle of Buda (Budavári Palota). The first people I ran into were
Drs. Martin Kovács and Iván Halász de Béky. Martin was a professor of history
and sociology at the University of Regina. He spent his sabbatical in Hungary,
doing research. Iván was a librarian at the University of Toronto, in charge of
the Hungarian collection. We often exchanged notes on bibliographic matters.
Later on he repatriated to Hungary. Other notables attending the conference as
speakers included Drs. Thomas Kabdebó of the UK, the historian Péter Gosztonyi
of Switzerland, and László Kovács of the USA. My presentation was well received.
In addition to the historical summary I gave an introduction to the nature and
size of the Canadian-Hungarian book collections, based on a survey I conducted
of seventeen public libraries across the country. It was interesting to learn
that a few of the small-town libraries like the one in Lethbridge had larger
Hungarian collections than those in Montreal or Winnipeg. I had talked about the
Bilingual and Multicultural Act and its benefits that resulted in a cultural
renaissance for the Canadian minorities. Under the heading Thematic Guides I
have talked about our book collections in the sciences and the humanities, and
especially about the ones written by Hungarian-Canadian scholars such as Hans
Selye, John Kosa, N.F. Dreisziger, Tibor Rajháthy, George Bisztray, Tibor Baráth
and others.
I had the future Hungarologists in mind in discussing the relevant print
and online bibliographic sources that provided a key to Hungarian holdings,
including the national and university library card catalogues, the print
material and the online sources such as the Canadiana, the Canadian Theses,
the Canadian/Online Enquiry, and the Canadian/Selected Dissemination of
Information. Other useful sources mentioned were the annual publications such as
the Books in Canada, Canadian Books in Print, and the trade journals
(Canadian Forum, Canadian Literature, Canadian Magazine Index, Canadian
Periodical Index.) In keeping the research scientists in mind, I have
recommended the use of the large global systems with strong Canadian input such
as AGRICOLA, AGRIS, AGRINET). It was with a great degree of pride that I have
talked about the bibliographic studies compiled by Hungarian-Canadians (Iván
Halász de Béky, János Miska, Joseph Telek, and Judy Young). My presentation,
complete with an extensive bibliography, was published in the conference
proceedings in 1989. At the end of the session I was interviewed by the National
Kossuth Radio and the local television. Two days after my return to Ottawa I was
visited in my office by an RCMP officer to be debriefed. He apologized for the
inconvenience but, as he pointed out, some of my vigilant compatriots in Ottawa
had heard my interview on the radio and reported me for my visit to a country
behind the Iron Curtain. Freedom, it seemed, not only had its well publicized
price, it also had its less publicized limits.
It was with great anticipation that we returned to the Capital Region.
Ottawa was a beautiful city, surrounded by the historic Gatineau Hills and
charming century-old towns nestling in the Ottawa Valley, and on the Ontario and
the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. Driving around with our mini-van called
Talpas, we spent our weekends at the Upper Canada Village, overlooking the
majestic St. Lawrence River, or in the picturesque Renfrew area, near the
Algonquin Park. Here we came across in the tiny settlement of Griffith of a
romantic 75 acre property with a new two-story log house for sale, for $120,000.
It was unbelievable that you could by a small estate near the National Capital
for about $300 per acre, as opposed to $1,000 per acre in Fort Vermillion,
northern Alberta, close to the North-West Territories.
Following the Trudeau-years, the Capital Region was a vibrant city.
There were all kinds of intellectual and cultural activities. My diary is full
of exciting events we attended: literary readings held in the National Library
and at private homes; conferences at the two universities; performances in the
National Arts Centre; official openings of new museums and other government
amenities and on and on. Canada has reached its national maturity in the
‘seventies and the ‘eighties. New universities and research institutes were
established across the country, and the established ones had grown tremendously.
Canadian publishing houses came into existence, sponsoring books by Canadian
scholars and writers. It felt wonderful to be Canadian.
It was an honour to be a person of ethnic origin. Canada has been
generous to its immigrant people. It has provided fertile soil for the cultural
activities of immigrant Hungarians as well. My bibliographies listed scores of
Hungarian university teachers, researchers in the scientific and technical
fields who made remarkable contributions to their professions. Furthermore, my
book: Literature of Hungarian Canadians, published in 1991, registers more than
90 Hungarian-Canadian authors of books of poetry, fiction and drama, published
in Hungarian, English and French. This number does not include the ones, and
there are many of them, who published their work only in newspapers, periodicals
and anthologies. I have edited a series of anthologies put out by the
Hungarian-Canadian Authors’ Association. Our volumes were sought-after by the
libraries and book stores. When our volumes, for some reason, were delayed,
reminders were coming in from libraries all over the land. (Today some of them
are in a habit of returning our publications offered on a complimentary basis,
on account of lack of space or, horribile dictu, giving the excuse that their
Hungarian quota has been filled.) The writings of ethnic Canadian poets were
translated into English and French and published in prestigious anthologies such
as the Volvox, the
Canadian Fiction Magazine’s translation issues, and The Poets
of Canada. Our books were listed in the national bibliography Canadiana, in
Books in Canada and other trade publications.
The same year, in 1985, I received a phone call from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council, informing that some funds became available and
my application for a grant to prepare a bibliography of ethnic Canadian
literature had been approved. Multiculturalism had become an integral part of
Canadian life. Studies such as ethnicity, nativism, minority literatures and
cultural pluralism constituted a good portion of our school curricula and media
output. Extensive studies were devoted to literatures in the non-official
languages. Due to an ever increasing demand for information on ethnic
literatures expressed by educators, librarians and other information
specialists, SHHRC had changed its mind about my original application.
At this time, however, my response was look-warm. I told the officer
that I was going to think about it. I have discussed the offer with my wife and
we felt that it would be impractical to carry out the work as outlined in my
original plan. According to it, I suggested that I was going to hire a research
assistant to work out of our home, which was in Lethbridge, where we had a
spacious house. In Ottawa, a two-bedroom condominium was inappropriate for that
purpose. In a few days I called the lady and turned the offer down. She sounded
most persuasive. She suggested that I could employ my wife for the assistant’s
job. After some consideration we had accepted the offer and started to prepare
enthusiastically for the three-year project. My wife visited the computer
stores, gathered information on minicomputers most suitable for project. We
purchased a Macintosh Plus and a laser printer for $15,000. By using the
manuals, Marie has taught herself, and me, how to use the computer for such an
enormous multilingual project. She purchased the office supplies, set up one of
the bedrooms for work area, and we were ready to tackle the job.
The bibliography was based on my earlier compilation put out on
microfiche. Having established a database, I have started to integrate the old
citations with the new ones. The criteria for inclusion were as follows: An
author had to (1) publish books of poetry, fiction or drama; (2) be born outside
Canada and have settled in Canada as a child, adolescent or adult; (3) have
written the work while residing in Canada; (4) but France, the United States,
Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand were excluded. Some exceptions were
allowed, i.e., authors of German-Mennonite, Icelandic, Ukrainian descent, if
their language of creation was other than English or French, and Native authors
were included regardless of linguistic considerations. Marie was in charge of
administration, book keeping, paying honorariums to co-workers, income tax etc.
I did the gathering, organizing and formatting of the material. In addition to
using the national and the major university library holdings, as shown by the
published bibliography, I have consulted more than a hundred reference sources
(encyclopedias, directories, bibliographies), and 139 related books, monographs
and research studies. During my research I have come across more than 300
periodical titles in many languages that were important enough to be listed,
with their abbreviations, at the head of the book.
Once completed, the author/subject index contained the names and
reference numbers of 3100 authors, some of them having published multiple
volumes of poetry, fiction or plays. The arrangement was going to be by subject,
alphabetically by nationality, each containing basic references, lists of
anthologies, followed by the individual authors, giving first their publications
and writings about them. The latter gave the bibliography a truly reference
value, as most of the book reviews, studies and short biographical articles were
published in newspapers not indexed or listed anywhere. I have obtained most of
this information directly from the writers by telephone, correspondence or
personal visit.
The following basic bibliographic information was to be provided:
author(s)/title in the vernacular with English translation/place of publication,
publisher, date and genre. Short biographical notes were given about each
author. Most of the citations were annotated. There were a number of problems to
be solved. For example, some countries such as the former Yugoslavia and
Czechoslovakia, and India used more than one language. Another challenge was to
create an acceptable method of transliterating the Cyrillic and oriental symbols
into the Latin alphabet. In this I have succeeded so well that some Canadian
encyclopedias adapted the system I have created.
The bibliography was published by the University of Toronto Press under
the title Ethnic and Native Canadian Literature: A Bibliography. The
445-page book had been on the market for ten years. It sold for a pricy $130 and
generated an overturn of $40,000. I received as honorarium 5 %. It is still
considered a pioneer publication. One of my colleagues, the late Philip
Connelly, had this to say about it: You put as to shame. We should have prepared
this tool decades ago! There were extensive reviews about it, published in the
major professional journals. The Encyclopedia of Library and Information
Science, published in the USA, hailed it as an indispensable work. “Many of
the Canadian references in this encyclopedia have been taken from this
extraordinarily useful bibliography…” The Canadian Library Journal wrote:
“Literature by ethnic and native authors has generally been regarded as outside
the mainstream of Canadian literature and is overlooked by scholars. Miska’s
comprehensive bibliography is an admirable attempt to make works by and about
these Canadian writers accessible to the students, critics and the general
reader. The Könyvtári Levél of the National Library of Hungary was
delighted to see that the Hungarian section was as extensive as the other major
language groups including the Italian, the German and the Ukrainian.
Some reviewers found my definition too narrow, for I have refused to
classify some leading mainstream writers such as Joy Kogawa, Mordecay Richler,
Rudy Wiser, to name but a few, as ethnic authors. My reason was, and still is,
that the above writers were born in Canada and are Canadian writers. Only
because they happen to write about the Japanese, the Jewish or the Mennonite
experience in this country, the subject matter does not make them ethnic. Let
alone the fact that the term “ethnic” has some negative connotation.
Furthermore, the novels of the above, and many more similar authors, are listed
in the third part of the bibliography, under Minorities in Canadian Literature.
A Fruitful Retirement (Victoria, 1992)
After some soul searching we decided with Marie for me to take an early
retirement and move to Victoria. We had spent some of our vacations on Vancouver
Island and were quite familiar with Victoria. In addition, we had close
relatives, my cousins Mary and Anne, and my niece Janice living in the area.
They had large families, and even their families had children, one cuter than
the other. I loved my profession and my place of work. I had seniority and was
familiar with the complex setup and functions of the department of 11,000
employees. In spite of the rigorous government downsizing, my position was
secure. There were talks of having me seconded to the Planning and Development
Division, the brain centre of the ministry, for the duration of the
reorganization period that was under way at the time. However, I felt I had made
my contribution to my profession. Now I was dreaming of a new period in my life
I could devote more time and energy to what I have always wanted to do - writing
short stories and essays about Hungarian studies in Canada. We lived
economically and have managed to save enough for the rainy days. The savings and
our pensions promised to be enough for a modest but comfortable life. Upon
retirement I qualified for a golden handshake and received $62,000 in cash,
which came as an added bonus. I left the department in September 1991. I was 30
when I received my first paycheck and at 59 I could afford to retire. What a
wonderful country, Canada!
It was a mild sunny afternoon on December 2, 1992, when we landed at the
Victoria Airport. It was heartwarming to see from the airplain that there wasn’t
a drop of snow on the ground. Near the airport we rented a car. Corvette was the
only make that they had available. What a treat! Cruising along the picturesque
PET Highway, through Sidney and Saanich, all the way down on Blanshard Street,
we knew for certain that we were going to be happy in this city. I had my
anxieties about our decision, as always at such drastic changes in our lives. I
remember the time in Lethbridge when we signed the papers for the purchase of a
house how sick I got to my stomach over the worries. Had we done the right
thing? And now, friends in Ottawa were trying to discourage us from making the
move. Victoria was a nice city, no doubt about that, but what’s so special about
it? Its climate was too wet, too damp, not good for the arthritis. And, for an
author and literary organizer, it was a dead-end. There was nothing going on
there! As the saying went, Victoria was for the newlywed and nearly-dead.
I am glad to say that time proved them wrong.
In retrospect, I have been busier in my retirement in Victoria than ever
before. Let’s just look at some of major activities that I have been involved
in. In 1993 I became a visiting scholar at the library of the University of
Victoria. This appointment resulted in the receipt of a grant from the
Multicultural Directorate and the preparation of a supplement to my Canadian
Studies on Hungarians. It was published in 1995 by the Hungarian
International Philological Society in Budapest. The next year, following the
passing of Miklós Tamási, a poet and founder of the periodical Tárogató,
published by the Hungarian Society of Vancouver I was invited to take over that
monthly paper. In addition to the editing post, using my own rich bibliographic
resources, I have authored and published four collections of essays, short
stories and chapters of my memoirs written in Hungarian. Some of them have been
published also by periodicals in Budapest, Chicago, Toronto and Vancouver. I was
also co-editor of the California-based Magyarok Vasárnapja (Hungarians’
Sunday) and have contributed to anthologies, periodicals and newspapers in
Hungary, Canada, Germany and the USA. It is in Victoria that I have prepared a
new and revised version of the anthology Blessed Harbours. I was guest
speaker to commemorative and literary events (on five occasions in Vancouver and
four in Victoria). In 2001 I became the editor for over three years of the
Szigeti Magyarság (Hungarians of the Island), a bimonthly paper of the
Hungarian Society of Victoria. I have also edited six books of poetry and a
novel authored by fellow writers in Nanaimo, Parksville and Ontario. And it was
in Victoria that I was inducted into the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in
Budapest (2004) and the following year my hometown elected me as an Honorary
Citizen of Nyírbéltek.
Editing the Tárogató for close to five years was one of my most
memorable experiences in British Columbia. I did most of the planning,
organizing and writing for the paper out of Victoria. On the last weekends of
each month I travelled to Vancouver to put the issues together. We had an
editorial office in the Hungarian Cultural Centre at 728 Kingsway. We had a
wonderful group of volunteers to work with such as Jolán Csordás, Éva Kossuth,
Ilona Palkó, Éva Kerti, András Szeitz, George de Kova and others. We altered the
format and the contents of the periodical considerably. Our predecessors used to
fill the paper with clippings from newspaper sources in Hungary. Most of the
articles were about the unfortunate lot of the Hungarian minority in the
Successor States. We retained some of these sad news items, but decided to make
Tárogató a basically Canadian-Hungarian paper, emphasizing the positive
qualities that make the reader look and feel good. We published original
writings about accomplished people in British Columbia and across Canada. The
issues were filled with colourful reports on such people as János Kenyeres, a
professional horseman in Kingston and later in Winnipeg. We wrote about the
internationally renowned artist Dora de Pedery-Hunt, about a nationally famous
chef Julius Pokomándy, of Vancouver, about Professor Anthony Kozák, Associate
Dean of Forestry at UBC, and about Ágota Bysztrom, the department-head librarian
in Ottawa. I wrote a series of articles about people like the Hon. J.W.
Pickersgill and Watson Kirkconnell, entitled “Friends of Hungarians.” Tárogató
came to serve as a forum for Hungarian-Canadian writers. We published the work
and wrote critical appraisals about local poets and fiction writers in Canada.
We have also published short stories by Canadian authors including Morley
Callaghan and Sinclair Ross. In short, our intention was to show Hungarians in
the best possible light, emphasizing the fact that they are talented, that they
are not isolated and are appreciated for their qualities by the host society.
The readers and the contributors loved it. We received and published scores of
encouraging letters from all over the country.
The Hungarian Society of Greater Vancouver has ever been a dynamic
social organization. Its membership by the ninetees reached more than a
thousand, thanks to such devoted presidents elected for two years as Mrs. Jolán
Csordás, Csaba Tanner, Dr. Joseph Molnár, Mrs. Magda Sasváry, Prof. László
Szanyi, supported by some equally enthusiastic members of the executive. There
were lively annual meetings and well-attended cultural events. Our editorial
schedules were productive and full of fun. Typesetting of the manuscripts was
prepared on in-house computers. The editing, polishing and paste-up job was done
collectively. Madame Jolán was a great organizer. She was energetic and on top
of societal and community events. The two Évas, Ilonka, György, András Balla and
Georgina Hegedős were excellent contributors and had an artistic flare for
formatting and pasting. We had a lot of fun. Editing was accompanied by singing
and reciting poems. We had delightful lunches of Hungarian delicacies served up
by the president of the time. I spent the nights at the Csordás’ in their
executive home in North Vancouver. Laci, a professional engineer (now retired),
and former Deputy Chief of CPR’s Western Business Unit (with an annual salary
surpassing that of the Prime Minister’s) was an excellent cook. His most
delicious steaks were prepared with the precision of a senior engineer. Joli and
Laci came from the part of Hungary that I am from. We had so much in common.
They were almost like brother and sister to me. I have the warmest memory of
those years.
At first we rented a suite at 1020 View Street, but soon after we bought
a condominium at 139 Clarence Street. The 12-storey complex with picture windows
is situated in the James Bay district, overlooking the Beacon Hill Park, the
Juan de Fuca Strait and the Olympic Mountains. From our windows the Canadian
flag can be seen in the Beacon Hill Park, showing the direction of winds which
are not uncommon on Vancouver Island. On one occasion, when I was preparing for
my presentation of the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution, I looked out
of the window and was surprised to see that the flag had a hole in the centre.
The sight gave me the inspiration for a short story „The Mutilated Flag in
Victoria.” Although, as I later came to learn, the Victoria flag was not
defaced by human hands but by a vicious storm called marine bomb, it reminded me
of the mutilated flags that came to symbolize the 1956 Revolution. The two-page
story created a sensation. It was published over and over by papers in Canada,
Hungary, Germany and elsewhere. In fact, it was translated into Esperanto, and,
as I was informed by friends, the Minister of Cultural Affairs of Hungary read
excerpts from it as part of his commemoration given in the Opera House, on the
41st. anniversary of the revolution.
We enjoy living in Clarence House, because of its comfort and close
proximity to the park, shopping centres and the Dallas promenade along the
ocean, but mainly because of the friendly and helpful neighbours. At the outset
we travelled a lot. Favourite destinations were trips to Up-Island, Nanaimo,
Parksville, the Comax Valley, to Port Alberny and the Long Beach near Tofino.
For years I have been active in the strata council, attending meetings, making
decisions as to the management of the complex, but mainly letting my thoughts
wonder while working in our beautiful community garden. Of late, we have melowed
considerably. And partly because of an almost fatal pneumonia I suffered some
years ago. It was so serious that the doctors gave me two hours to live. My wife
and my cousins began to make arrangement for my funeral. Our medical specialists
of course new very little of the Hungarian virility. Our young family doctor,
came to visit me after my release from the ICU where I have been kept in an
artificially induced coma for twenty-two days, and told me jokingly:
’’If you don’t look after yourself better, I’ll be around longer than
you.”
’’Don’t bet on it,” I said teasingly.
Victoria has a viable Hungarian community. The first settlers arrived
here after the Second World War. They received a substantial boost as a result
of the influx of the 1956 refugees. The Hungarian Society of Victoria was
established in 1966. It has been active ever since. Main activities include the
annual commemorations of the 1848-49 and the 1956 revolutions. The Society is a
regular participant in such community events as the annual Folkfest and the
Saanich Fair. Other traditional events are the summer picnics, the St. Stephen,
and the Kathaline and Elizabeth dances, and the Christmas and New Year
celebrations. Sub-groups included are the Friends of Hungarian Literature, which
has held monthly presentations for over a decade now. The Búzavirág Dance Group
has performed by the same dancers for close to four decades! The Language School
and the Choir. A significant event occurred on January 9, 2005, when the
official opening of the Hungarian Cultural Centre took place - at a time when
similar Hungarian organizations are folding up due to depopulation all over the
world. The opening was attended by Federal, Provincial and Municipal dignitaries
and by a jubilant Hungarian community. The renovated club has become the centre
for most Hungarian activities in Greater Victoria.
Although I have attended most of the annual commemorations, I have not
become much involved in the local activities, with the exception of assisting
Steven Butz in the editing of the Szigeti Magyarság. In 2001, however, I
was approached by the President of the Society, Mrs. Katalin Kövér, asking me to
take over the paper as Editor. It was with some reluctance that I accepted the
invitation. I wasn’t familiar enough with the local community life and I was
busy working on other projects. As there was no other volunteer to take on the
job, I felt obliged to accept the responsible and time-consuming appointment. A
comfortable editorial office was set up for me in the new Cultural Centre, its
windows overlooking the city with the majestic Legislative Building. I did the
editing for over three years and, I must admit that I found great enjoyment in
doing the work. I was fortunate to have some dedicated people to help me,
amongst them Edmond Vlaszaty, who succeeded Katalin Kövér as president, and Imre
Csorba and George Fias. Imre did the technical layout and wrote a series of
historical summaries of the Society, while George was instrumental in the
polishing of the articles and the proofreading.
Edmond was one of the finest presidents we have had. As a graduate of
UBC and Cornell in commercial management, and Manager (now retired) of the
University of Victoria Faculty Club, he was knowledgeable about business
matters. He was a concientious and helpful leader. He gave me freedom in editing
and supported us in making the necessary improvements on the paper. Dönci, as
the members called him, was partly responsible for the fact that the Society had
received a substantial grant from the Federal and Provincial departments for the
renovation of the Cultural Centre.
George Fias, on the other hand, proved to be a talented writer as well.
He was also good at editing and proofreading (he had laser eyes for missprints)
and, above all, he was an expert in computer technology. He was, and still is,
the Editor and Webmaster of the Society’s web site. In addition to a demanding
position with a telecommunication firm as Information Manager, George was the
one to teach us, fellow members, how to use the computer. He was also a designer
of web sites.
The Szigeti Magyarság, similarly to Tárogató, had become a paper of high
quality writings, focused on local and Hungarian-Canadian themes. The paper has
an intelligent and demanding readership. Several members of UBC’s Sopron
Division had retired and settled in the city. Also, a number of educated people
from across Canada to seek employment or retirement on Vancouver Island. We have
published articles about Hungarian community affairs of the area and paid
tribute to those who made us proud with their personal accomplishment, whether
as a student, research scientist or parent. Several of our writings had been
reprinted by newspapers and periodicals in Hungary and Eastern Canada.
Two of my undertakings carried out of late considered significant were
the completion of the third supplement to my Canadian Studies on Hungarians, and
a series of essays on the accomplishments of Hungarians in Canada.
The first was a bibliography that followed the style and format of its
two predeccesors. Some added features included were an introductory survey of
official and semi-official material held by Canadian and Hungarian national and
provincional repositories. The most comprehensive ones in Canada were the
National Archives of Canada and the National Photography Collection, both in
Ottawa. Amongst the provincial ones of importance, as far as Hungarian material
is concerned, were the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, the Archives of
Ontario, the Glenbow Archives in Calgary and the Saskatchewan Legislative
Library. The supplement also provided information on the nature of collections,
i.e., social, religious and cultural organizations, and the types of material,
i.e., manuscripts, photos, slides, sound recordings, films, videos, as well as
official documents such as the records of the Prime Minister’s Office, the
related records of the immigration and settlement of Hungarians, of the
Hungarian Refugee Program of 1956.
The main repositories in Hungary were the National Archives of Hungary,
which incorporated much of the material generated by the various ministries
(Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Agriculture, the
Hungarian Consulate Generals, the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Emigrants and
Remigrants’ Protection Bureau). Other sources listed were the Office of the
World Federation of Hungarians and the Institute of the (Communist) Party
History. Of the regional and religious sources of significance were the Roman
Catholic Arch Diocese of Esztergom and Kalocsa and the archives of the Reformed
Church of Hungary. Non-government and literary archival material were collected
by the National Széchényi Library, the Library of the Hungarian Scientific
Academy and The Petőfi Literary Museum.
The essays I wrote in Victoria and published in periodicals in Hungary
and Canada were devoted to the accomplishments of Hungarian scientists in
technology, applied and pure sciences and the humanities. This was quite a large
and varied group and had shown achievement in the agricultural, forestry, and
geophysical sciences (i.e., Tibor Rajháthy and Joseph Molnár in plant breeding,
Les Safranyik and Imre Ötvös in entomological research, and Zoltán Hajnal in
geodesical science). The household names in the health sciences were Hans Selye
in stress management, László Kátó in leprosy, and Imre Thököly and Béla László
in tuberculosis; in the pure sciences such as mathematics János Aczél and Miklós
Csörgő, in anthropology Emőke Szathmáry, in chemistry and biochemistry Sándor
Thomas and Camill Sándorffy showed lasting accomplishments.
Some of the university teachers in the humanities and especially in
history, ethnography and the social sciences, were N.F. Dreisziger and Benneth
Kövrig, who had published extensively on twentieth century Hungarian history.
John Kosa and Martin L. Kovács were known to be experts in sociology and
ethnography.
I wrote a paper on Hungarian art and music in Canada in both English and
Hungarian. There were scores of painters, sculptors, medal and postal stamp
designers and industrial artists in Canada, including Andrew Bőszin, Nicholas
Hornyanszki, Imre von Mosdosy, Dora de Pedery-Hunt, who exhibited all over the
world and whose works are represented in Canadian and foreign museums and art
galleries.
Music and literature were two other fields that Hungarian Canadians
excelled in. There were a great number of professional composers, educators,
performers and coaches working across the country. George Zaduban referred in
his paper in Encyclopedia of Music in Canada to 56 professional musicians of
Hungarian origin being active in Canada. The first distinguished Hungarian
musician to have lived and worked in Canada was Clara Lichtenstein (1860-1946),
who settled in Montreal and organized the Royal Victoria College. The violinists
Géza de Kresz and Jean de Rimanoczi lived in Toronto and Winnipeg, respectively,
the pianist Paul de Marky in Montreal. The composers István Anhalt and Tibor
Polgár lived in Kingston and Toronto, respectively. Canada has been favoured by
Hungarian musicians of world renown. Visiting performers included Ernő von
Dohnányi, József Szigeti, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, György Czifra and János
Starker.
I don’t intend to dwell heavily on literature as there are some related
essays included in the Literature section on this web site. Suffice is to say
that literature enjoyed a renaissance during the 1970s and 1980s. According to
our bibliographic records, there were more than 160 collections of poetry and
close to 100 books of short stories and novels published in Canada within two
decades. In my estimation, there were two dimensions of Hungarian-Canadian
literature, the one written in Hungarian, and the other in English. The latter
should be familiar to the initiated reader. The poetry of Eva Tihanyi, George
Faludy, George Jonas, Robert Zend, Thomas Könyves, Endre Farkas and the novels
of John Marlyn, Stephen Vizinczey, Marika Robert, Gabriel Szohner, George Jonas,
George Payerle, Tamas Dobozy are accessible to the general public.
The poetry written in Hungarian is just as rich in quality as its
English counterpart. There were three generations of poets, the first included
Ferenc Fáy, Tamás Tűz, Miklós Tamási, Iván Halász de Béky, Sándor Kristóf,
József Csinger - unfortunately all of them are deceased - who were born and
raised in Hungary and followed the traditional styles of the Classicist and the
Occidentalist schools. The second and third generation poets, headed by George
Vitéz, László Kemenes Géfin, Ferenc Veszely, Ágnes Simándi, József Seres,
Brigitta Bali, created a literary expression of their own. If we can talk of a
literary movement that stood on its own, it was these poets who established it.
The prose section, and especially the short story genre, are also rich in
quantity and quality, but not quite as vigorous and experimental as poetry. The
novels of Éva Sárvári and Sándor Domokos, the short stories of István Nagy, Imre
Naphegyi, József Juhász were considered to be of lasting value. It was indeed a
heyday of Hungarian-Canadian cultural and intellectual era that I have been a
part of. I feel humbled that, owing to my professional position and personal
interest, I have been able to maintain close contact with most of the people I
had written about. I was at the right place at the right time for which I am
grateful.
* * *
Well, this is about the most that I can tell you about my life at this
time. There are further notes for stories and outlines of projects on files, and
I hope that I’ll be able to complete an enlarged version in the years to come.
They are meant to show a rich a life that started from humble beginnings, from
the times of kerosene lamps to a majestic space age. Although my part was
nonexistent in placing the first spaceman on the moon, my professional career
has coincided with the great discoveries that made our Information Age
equivalent in importance to the Industrial Age. Marie has played a great part in
my accomplishments, for which I am grateful. I would also like to convey my
thanks to a great number of friends and colleagues who helped me along my way,
including Judy Young-Drache, Director, Canada-Hungary Educational Foundation;
Professors George Bisztray and Nándor Dreisziger and József Jankovics,
Secretary-General, International Association of Hungarian Studies for publishing
some of my bibliographies; Dr. Arthur Grenke, National Archives of Canada; Dr.
Csaba Nagy, Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum; George Demmer, Hungarian-Canadian Heritage
Collection. Special thanks go to Frank Veszely for editing the manuscript and
George Fias for establishing my web site. I am eternally grateful to my patria
for having invested so much in me, and to my chosen country for offering me a
second chance and much more.
Celebration
During my long career as a writer and literary organizer I have had
occasion to work with countless of writers and poets while editing anthologies
and preparing their collections of poems for publication. In appreciation I have
received letters acknowledging my assistance and poems dedicated to me. The
following are such writings that I treasure with a degree of nostalgia.
Also included a poem by Linda-Lee Barrett, dedicated to my dear wife, Marie, who
has passed away on July 18, 2011. More on this in the revised and enlarged
version to be published in the printed form.
Charles Corbett* Translation’s Ecstasy
For John Miska
I am
flesh of your flesh and
yours are the genes I have carried
though my eyes be blue, I, ambassador
from the Creators in Canada to the Misty Magyar Mind.
With laser-pen I cut and burn so the Phoenix
may rise again and fly above a new heaven and
a new earth and hear her song anew.
Come, singers Saxon, greet the Magyars mystic,
a salute and a pledge in the vintage of ‘56
which was a good year.
Let us hear the new songs, attend the new tales
Attila-told.
My blue jeans, my new genes are richer by migration,
by translation, fertilization, and thus
I am flesh of your flesh, though my eyes be blue.
*Charles Corbett was a librarian. He wrote the above poem in 1972
while we were translating poems from the Hungarian for inclusion in The Sound of Time: An Anthology of Hungarian-Canadian Authors,
published in 1974.
Alexander Domokos To My Friend, János Miska
God speed, my friend. I do regret you leaving.
The order’s such. To counter fate is moot.
The wind will sweep you on. And it is easy:
such is Hungarian soul without root.
I ask that the warm handshake of our parting
remain between us like a binding rope,
indifference not dull what we are feeling,
for looking back is not enough for hope.
Reflection may render a soul be blissful,
deep reverence of thought secrets unlock,
colourful memories may magically
the long forgotten heartstrings newly struck.
The soul of writers – and you are one, János –
a sensitive thing is, easily hurt,
this is why it can cry or burst out singing,
sometimes so soft, other times angry, burnt!
Separated by streams, forests or mountains
is not the worry: distance may be bridged.
And in our spirit we’ll be always with you:
true friendships parting will never unhinge.
We’ll be with you. Go! Let you be our spokesman,
speak in our name, and our orphaned homeland,
tell how we feel, our soul how badly wounded,
speak here, since in our homeland now we can’t.
Ambassador you be – both for us and them,
a wandering minstrel, one who fights with pen,
for – after all – you are indeed a writer,
your magic powers dreams turn real again.
Go then, God bless! New causes are worth fighting,
you are still young – you will have time to rest –
followed by the warm handshake of our parting:
the timeless bond that time won’t break though test.
Translated by Frank Veszely
Linda-Lee Barrett* Ode to Marie Miska
We were blessed to have known you.
You were many things to many people:
A loving wife, friend, sister, and a mother to me.
As well as a trustworthy companion to others.
We thank you, Marie, for your unselfishness.
And for your honesty, which was constant.
We thank you, Marie, for the love you gave us.
Which we knew would be never taken away from us.
Marie, we thank you for your loyalty.
A loyalty which never changed,
Be it wind or storm day or night, you were there.
What joy you brought us with your stories.
I, for one, Marie, treasured what you shared.
We on the ninth floor and so very many others
Will miss you and be inspired by your hope.
We shall see you soon, Marie.
Victoria, B.C., August 18, 2011
*Linda-Lee Barrett is a Victoria-based artist.
Ödön Kiss* Parting words to a far-moving friend
“Distances don’t count,” writes my trusted good friend,
“I shall go west to light a blazing torch.”
How can you stop who seven seas have now crossed,
how can you stop the searcher from the search?
“Distances don’t count,” you say and you are right:
the Magyar language spreads across the globe.
Hungarian language, Hungarian fate:
we carry you forever without hope.
We carry you hopelessly – yet with hope.
Translated by Frank Veszely
*Ödön Kiss, a founding member of the Hungarian-Canadian Authors’
Association, and author of three books of poetry, wrote the above
poem upon learning of our decision to move to Alberta.
