Hungarians

Doug and I became interested in Hungary on our trip and got a book called Hungary: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat, by Paul Lendvai.  This struck me as a particularly Hungarian title, but I couldn’t say why until I started reading it.  So far I’ve found out:

1. Hungarians have nothing to do with the Huns -- the confusion comes from the similarity of names.  Still, some Hungarians like the idea of being related to Attila so much that they name their children Attila, or their city streets.  And I have to say I was disappointed too.  It just seems more exciting to be descended from Attila rather than some vague tribe somewhere between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains. *

2.  Hungarians have been overrun or ruled by just about everybody: Mongols, the Holy Roman Empire, Turks, Habsburgs, Nazis, Soviets.  (With a list like that you sort of wonder why the Incas hadn’t taken a crack at them as well.)  It explains, at least partly, why they’re so melancholy — their music, their literature, the fact that they don’t have a lot of jokes.  My mother once taught me a Hungarian nursery rhyme that went, “When I was very young, / I didn’t have a rocking horse.”  And they all seem to be like that, talking about what they don’t have, their disappointments in life.  As Arthur Koestler once said, “To be a Hungarian is a collective neurosis.”

3.  Franz Liszt was so proud of his Hungarian heritage that he started to learn Hungarian.  But he got to the fifth lesson, and the word “unshakability” — “tántorithatatlanság” — and gave up.

First of all, who starts off with “unshakability”?  I’ve been studying Spanish for years, and I’ve never seen it once.  (My Spanish dictionary doesn’t even have it, actually, just “unshakable” — “inconmovible”.)  But second, I can’t really blame him.  I didn’t even get as far as he did, just looked at a Hungarian dictionary once and decided that it wasn’t really that important to know what my mother and her friends were saying.

I wouldn’t be (half-) Hungarian if I didn’t register a complaint.  There’s no entry in the book’s index for “Roma.”  There are five references under “Gypsies,” but these lead to comments about Gypsies from other people and not the Roma themselves, and some of them are complaints that Hungarians and Roma have gotten mixed up in the public mind.  Lendvai talks a lot about how tolerant the Hungarians can be, how accepting of diversity (and he actually makes a good case, despite the guy who’s Prime Minister now), but this just shows, I guess, that you can never really know your own blind spots.  Which always makes me wonder what my own blind spots are…

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* And that way, of course, Doug could come back from work and say, “Hi, Hun, I’m home!”