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As the above title indicates, because of the publication schedule of Hungarian Cultural Studies this bibliography straddles 2019-2020, covering the period since the publication in Fall of 2019 of last year’s bibliography in this journal. Each year’s bibliography may also be supplemented by earlier items, which were retrieved onlyrecently. Although this bibliography series can only concentrate on English-language items, occasional items of particular interest in other languages may be included. For a more extensive bibliography of Hungarian Studies from about 2000 to 2010, for which this is a continuing update, see Louise O. Vasvári, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, and Carlo Salzani. “Bibliography for Work in Hungarian Studies as Comparative Central European Studies.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (Library) (2011): http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/hungarianstudiesbibliography

Although only a decade in age separates each one from the next, the women whose life stories are discussed here represent three distinct Holocaust generations of Hungarian-speaking women. I aim to examine the recently published memories/memoirs of these three women whose narratives are all centered in the Holocaust when the deportations began in Hungary in 1944. Their personal stories are placed within a larger socio-historical context, but treat matters which come within the personal knowledge of the writer and therefore offer precisely the kind of alternative micro-history often provided by women’s narratives. All three authors also have in common that they left their homeland as young adults and hence their stories arguably belong more broadly to the most important subgenre of life writing today. While such writing is produced by both genders, writing by females predominates. My aim is, in part, to examine in the texts under discussion the three autobiographers as self-historians in their retrospective and crafted stories told (and retold) in different contexts, so that their life stories are not merely a recapitulation of past events but rather their creation of personal narrative identities.

How long and how strong is Diasporic memory? How many generations can it encompass? How deeply can generations that never lived in the old country relate to its landscape, language, colors and tastes? In the case of Israelis of Hungarian origin, these questions inevitably have to do with the history of Hungarian Jews in the late nineteenth- and early-to-mid twentieth-century, with a focus placed more acutely upon World War II and the Holocaust. Written by a female Israeli researcher of folk and documentary culture who belongs to the second-generation of Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivors, the present article strives to deal with the foregoing and other relevant questions through a comparative literary-cultural analysis of the only two presently existing Hebrew-language Hungarian cookbooks. These two cookbooks were published in Israel in 1987 and 2009, respectively, by two male cultural celebrities, the first by a Hungarian-born journalist, author and politician and the second by an Israeli-born gastronomer and grandson of Hungarian-Israelis.

Volatility regarding negotiated subject positions features prominently in Hemingway’s works. Yet, his portrayal of Hungarians in the vignette of Chapter VIII and the short story entitled “The Revolutionist” (both found in the collection of In Our Time, 1925) underlines 1920s America’s unwillingness to modify preconceived stereotypes about the “other.” Both stories have attracted considerable attention among scholars who have analyzed these texts from such perspectives as political ideology and the arts. Aiming to fill a gap in literary criticism, I shall examine the narrative representation of stereotypical approaches to the Hungarian minority with emphasis on societal expectations set by white, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class men in the United States during the 1920s. The values they propagated in society illustrate that the Roaring Twenties was an openly discriminatory decade in which ignoring and sometimes literally attacking the “other” for deviating from the prescribed norms of the era was acceptable. Anxiety about the “other” uncovers a great deal of national insecurity; America’s battle with foreigners merges into a battle with itself.

This paper presents Gergely Péterfy’s Stuffed Barbarian [Kitömött Barbár, 2014] in the context of eighteenth-century, pre-Revolutionary debates on slavery and the related question of the “human.” It investigates the ethical and political stakes of Péterfy’s narrative technique and argues that the improbably omniscient, third person character narration used throughout the novel performs the universalist and exclusive ideology Bildung of the European Enlightenment, which Péterfy mourns.

In this study the personal life and professional career of Zsuzsanna Kossuth, the youngest sister of Lajos Kossuth, is discussed based on primary and secondary sources with special emphasis on her physical and emotional journey into exile, where she was surrounded by both Hungarian emigrés and American intellectuals. By the time she arrived in the United States in 1853, her personal life had been full of ups and downs: she had lost her husband and baby son within a year of each other, spent months in prison twice and had become sick, with only a cough initially, then pneumonia and finally “pulmonary affections.” In spite of the many setbacks she suffered, Kossuth also stands apart for the unusual reason that she had a career: in April, 1849, during the Hungarian War of Independence, she was appointed the Chief Nurse of camp hospitals. Although she has not become as famous as Florence Nightingale, viewed as the founder of modern nursing, Zsuzsanna Kossuth organized seventy-two camp hospitals and a network of volunteer nurses five years previous to the Crimean War. The year 2017 was dedicated in Hungary to her memory commemorating the bicentenary of her birth in particular and to the profession of nursing in general. Her legacy should be promoted globally.

This article explores borders, border crossings and the geography of separation in two recent Hungarian films. In The Maiden Danced to Death (2011) and The Notebook (2013), two films produced within a few years of one another and just before the recent re-erection of a border between Hungary and its neighbors, escape provides the vehicle for the brothers’ separation. Of particular interest is the frequent portrayal of brothers separated during communism, often with one brother staying and one leaving. In these films, regimes and ideology tear brothers apart; whether viewed on screen or only alluded to, the crossing of a border becomes a physical symbol of this separation and loss. The fraternal pairs’ personal lives interact with history, especially the repressive state as manifested in Hungary’s border. Geocriticism, border and trauma studies perspectives will help understand the anguish of this separation. In these films, political realities fray the bonds between brothers and lead to their separation through the border, or to its trace, as identities are subjected to traumatic reconfigurations.

In this paper, Schwartz offers a gendered analysis of Mészáros’s most recent feature film [‘Aurora Borealis’]. She argues that the film presents a transnational narrative about repressed traumatic memories as they pertain to sexual and political violence dating back to the early 1950s. The film explores the effects of postmemory (Hirsch) through three generations across Hungary, Austria, Russia (the former Soviet Union), and present-day Spain. With the help of theories of trauma (Herman, Kaplan, Caruth, LaCapra) and through a close reading of the symbols and colors used in the film, Schwartz reflects on the healing potential of narrative recovery together with the role children born as a result of armed conflict can play in rethinking narratives of war and in exploring their own transnational bridge-building potential in the twenty-first century.

A Hungarian writer who became a prominent public figure in the Horthy era, Cécile Tormay’s (1875-1937) fame and success was principally due to her memoir, Bujdosó könyv [‘The Hiding Book’], a work published in 1920-21 that depicts the two Hungarian revolutions following World War I. This popular work enjoyed several editions during the interwar period and was translated into English and French for propaganda purposes. After World War II, Bujdosó könyv was among the first works banned by Hungarian authorities for its anti-Semitism. Hailed as the most notable female author of the interwar period, Tormay’s name rose anew after the fall of socialism in 1989. Fueled by the official biography written two years after her death in the Horthy era by the conservative professor of literature, János Hankiss, a revival in the cult surrounding Tormay’s work has taken place in recent years. Hankiss portrayed Tormay as a woman of Hungarian noble descent whose deeds were motivated by sheer patriotism. This paper contends that Cécile Tormay was embraced by the interwar elite for her active role in the counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the First Hungarian Republic.

One of the most important poets of postwar Hungarian literature, János Pilinszky’s (1921-1981) poetry represents the problems of connecting with the Other, the imprints of Second World War trauma and the struggle with God’s distance and silence. Although, unlike the case of most of his contemporaries in Eastern bloc Hungary, his poetry has been translated into several languages, he is hardly known in English-speaking countries. The metaphysically accented lyrical worldview and creator-centered aesthetics—which shows parallels with the Christian poetry of Michael Edwards—of this Hungarian poet are difficult to link or to bring into discourse. On the occasion of the most recent publication (Pilinszky 2019) of Pilinszky’s non-literary publications which are practically unknown to non-Hungarian scholars, I attempt to outline the major attributes of Pilinszky’s poetry and aesthetics in order to highlight—with a mystical approach in mind—the intertwining presence of said lyre and aesthetics in his poem, In memoriam F. M. Dosztojevszkij [‘In Memoriam F. M. Dostoevsky’].

In 1924 Hungary ratified and codified the 1912 Hague International Opium Convention, the first international drug control treaty. However, the new law that regulated and later criminalized the usage of narcotics in Hungary was not the result of internal debate and had no real domestic political will behind it. In contrary, this law was the result of external demands as Article 230 of the post-World War I Trianon Treaty required Hungary to join the Hague Convention. This paper examines what the contemporary Hungarian attitude towards drugs and drug users was. In order to answer how this attitude developed and changed, the following study examines how the contemporary media, artists and intellectuals and various governmental and non-governmental organizations discussed and represented the issue of narcotics.

Faced with communist Czechoslovakia and Hungary’s 1977 scheme to construct a diversion canal and hydroelectric dam system on the Danube, a movement gradually arose in Hungary to fight the plan. This national dissident campaign, which started with discussion groups and technical articles, not only brought in an extraordinary cross-section of opinion and background—united around the preservation of natural heritage—but played a key part in the rebirth of a lively civic society within a long repressed political and intellectual culture. The story of this movement’s arguments, strategies, and ultimate success is both a key story in the decay and collapse of communist rule in Hungary, but a case study in how a non-western European/American approach to the politics of preservation can rally support and achieve consensus.

The purpose of this Note is to clarify the interpretation of the volume, July 1944: Deportation of the Jews of Budapest Foiled (Reno, NV: Helena History Press, 2018), put forth by Peter Pastor in his book review, “A New Historical Myth from Hungary: The Legend of Colonel Ferenc Koszorús as the Wartime Saviour of the Jews of Budapest,” that was published in the 2019 issue of Hungarian Cultural Studies. Rather than making any attempt to remove or lessen blame for the acts committed following the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, this collection of studies aims to shed light on whether Regent Horthy’s order to Colonel Ferenc Koszorús prevented the deportation of the remaining, nearly 300,000 Hungarian Jews who lived (or were just hiding) in Budapest.

This paper presents a brief language history of the Hungarian Jewish community since their establishment in the Carpathian Basin to the present, with a special focus on Yiddish. Between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, Yiddish became the group’s majority language; after the 1850s, the Hungarian Jewry started a process of language substitution. By the 1930s, the use of Yiddish was mostly limited to the ultra-Orthodox communities of Eastern Hungary, while the rest mainly adopted Hungarian. In this research, a pilot study of the current situation of Yiddish has been mapped using several methods, including a questionnaire answered by a hundred and thirty individuals and unstructured interviews with linguists. Although this study’s results confirm the earlier research by Matras (2010) and Shandler (2006) in establishing that Yiddish is generally a post-vernacular language while Hungarian has acquired the role of an ethnic language, it was found that a considerable percentage of those living in the Carpathian Basin still preserve Yiddish. This paper aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the group dynamics in bilingual communities and, specifically, to provide a clearer view of the language situation among the Hungarian Jewry.

Rememberances by John J. Dwyer, Géza Jeszenszky, and Tibor Frank.

The Polanyis came to prominence in the capital cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Vienna and Budapest) when words mattered, culture was not a four-letter word and Austro-Hungary was territorially the second-largest and the third most populous entity in Europe. The review examines how two recent biographies about members of the Polanyi family treat their protagonists and the forces that shaped their lives after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

As a couple, Miklós Mészöly (1921-2001) and Alaine Polcz (1922-2007) have a special status in Hungarian literature. Mészöly is one of the most important figures of postwar Hungarian fiction. His wife, Polcz, became an author at the age of sixty-nine when her first book, a wartime memoir entitled Asszony a fronton [1991, ‘One Woman in the War’] (Polcz 2005, 2002b), gained attention. Although she has been generally regarded only as an írófeleség [‘a writer’s wife’] (see Borgos 2007), by the turn of the century she eventually became more popular than her husband. This paper focuses on a novel by Mészöly, Pontos történetek, útközben [1970, ‘Accurate Stories on the Road’], that was based on Polcz’s tape recorded narration of her journeys mostly to Transylvania. My analysis poses two questions; the first regards the issues of style and narration, while the second examines the topic of gender. In other words, this approach to Mészöly’s novel aims to grasp the characteristics of the narrative style of Mészöly by comparing his transcription to the text recorded on the tape made by Polcz. How was it possible for the husband to publish a novel exclusively under his own name from his wife’s “raw material”?

In this interdisciplinary article that draws on the intersections of Hungarian and Jewish Studies within a framework of cultural studies and gender studies, Louise O. Vasvári investigates the socio-political role of beauty pageants in 1920s European and—more specifically—in Hungarian social, political and cultural life. The article is structured as a case study of the life of Böske Simon, who was born into a bourgeois Jewish family in 1909 and who won the first Miss Hungaria competition in 1929, soon followed by the title of Miss Europa. Vasvári aims to place Simon’s role as Hungarian beauty queen in a broader focus by examining from a gender perspective the international development of beauty pageants, of the illustrated press, and of commercial beauty culture in the 1920s. She examines the symbolic space allotted to the concept “Modern Girl,” who in the interwar [re]construction of gender and national identities came to represent both the enticements and the dangers of modernity. More specifically, she examines how the problematic gender representation of women in such pageants and their reception by the press and by the public interact in the broader interwar nationalistic cultural sphere in post-Trianon Hungary.

Before the political shift that occurred in1989, the biographies of early communists who had participated in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 could not be the subjects of critical histories. Later, such historical actors were either vilified or simply neglected. This article contributes to the reversal of this neglect by examining the youth of the novelist Ervin Sinkó (1898-1967), who both participated in the rule of the Soviet Republic and authored Optimisták, Történelmi regény 1918-1919-ből [‘The Optimists, a Historical Novel About 1918-1919’]. This article describes how the experience of anti-Semitism and traumas caused by the First World War led Sinkó through a number of fluid, intermediary stages that culminated in his support of communism; eventually, however, Sinkó’s experiences within the Soviet Republic’s regime prompted him to abandon communism in favor of an idiosyncratic form of Christianity. From another perspective, this work also traces the concurrent development of Sinkó's personality, from that of an aggressive adolescent to a compassionate adult.

Albeit what can be described as the “European” contributions to world modernities (with Arab modernity included) are often perceived as a self-evident fact, a scrutinizing look is useful in shedding more light on the mostly ignored European cultural contributions to the Arab Nahḍah (Arab Renaissance) and modernity that were neither colonial nor orientalist, especially during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, with particular focus on Egypt and the Levant. This study examines the contributions of Europeans who settled in Egypt and the Levant, such as the Hungarian photographers Otto Schoefft (1833-1890s) and Zoltan Kluger (1895- 1977), Hungarian illustrator and painter Éric de Nemès (1910-??), the Spanish cartoonist Juan Santez and the Armenian cartoonist Alexander Saroukhan (1898-1977), to name a few. It also challenges the perception that the Europeans who migrated to and settled in the Arab region (especially in the early twentieth century) were living in “cultural ghettos.” Instead, the work of the above artists, literati and others shows that the European communities in Egypt and the Levant were cultural agents who contributed to the literary and artistic landscapes in their respective fields of expertise.

Introduction to the thematic cluster.

Informed by feminist theory on the one hand and thematic and rhetorical criticism on the other, this article examines the components of discourse in two books by Péter Esterházy that share an emphatic attention to sexuality. The author interprets Esterházy’s discourse of sex as grounded in the figure of the double entendre, with a different function in each work. In Kis magyar pornográfia [‘A Little Hungarian Pornography’], vulgar corporeality and communist politics are shown as commensurate; both have a double meaning, with sex and politics referring both to themselves and to each other. In using one discourse as a cover for another, Esterházy continues the Central European Witz [‘joke’] tradition, giving a particular twist to it by making the transference of meaning two-directional, thereby assigning double meanings to sex and politics alike. In Egy nő [‘She Loves Me’], Esterházy attaches a double meaning to sex in a different manner; here sex is not a cover for something else but is shown to be reduced to itself, with a double meaning attached to its internal power relations. Sex is presented as a power game, in which man is repulsed by women yet is hopelessly attracted to them. Moreover, sex acts as the only tellable story taking the place of the untellable story of love. In this piece of postmodern fiction, the multiple perspectives bring about an interpretational uncertainty on the part of the reader as to whether sexist discourse is legitimized or subverted, and whether this legitimization and/or subversion is carried out by the narrator and/or by the implied author.

The main aim of our research is to provide an overview of what role language education plays in how Hungarians living in diaspora communities preserve their cultural identity. To this end we compared three Hungarian schools from three continents (North America, South America and Australia), selected by a sampling based on geographical location. We compared the similarities and differences between their educational methods according to factors predetermined by the research group. By reviewing the extant, but limited literature on this topic, the authors studied the present situation of Hungarians living abroad and the actual questions of identity preservation with special regard to language learning and preservation. These results present a detailed image of language education within the Hungarian diaspora. We also compared the educational methodology employed by the three schools based on different statistical data, such as the number of students, their cohort, student motivation as well as the role of partner institutions in the preservation of Hungarian identity. This study introduces the similarities and differences among institutions located far from one another.

The late work of the Hungarian émigré linguist and comparatist, Theodore Thass-Thienemann, presents a challenging combination of psychoanalytic discourse and the historical study of languages. His two-volume book entitled The Interpretation of Language (1973) sets out to complement the Freudian analysis of dream images and bodily symptoms via an investigation into the symbolism of ordinary verbal expressions as they appear in the languages of Indo-European cultures. His attention to the unconsciously inherited dimensions of particular idioms opens a path to the linguistic archeology of the human mind and a rethinking of the very notion of “idiom” in terms of “idiotism.” After providing a brief overview of the life and late works of Thass-Thienemann, this study offers a comprehensive analysis of his book. In the final analysis, Thass-Thienemann appears as the provocative thinker of a spectral inheritance, from which even his own discourse is not exempt.

Concentrating on some important literary and theoretical works, this article examines how Hungarian identity has been given different meanings and various forms of expression over the past few centuries. Hungarian identity is an ever-changing concept and the question of belonging and what is Hungarian has been subject to numerous interpretations. Linked to periods of victory and prosperity, and their opposite, defeat, humiliation and poverty, as well as revolt, revolution, defiance, resignation and even silence, the alternating forms of national identity can all be found in literature. The fact that Hungarians have more than one text (the “Hymn,” the “Appeal” and, recently, the “Székely Hymn”) that assumes the status or quasi-status of a national anthem itself indicates the multiplicity of Hungarian identity. These texts have become part and parcel of national identity due to the frequency with which individuals encounter them from their early childhood on. This is coupled with a strong Hungarian literary canon, which also plays an essential role in identity building. In the absence of a solid literary canon, literary works are less significant in the identity structure of many other nations; in larger countries a diversity of texts are taught at school due to substantial regional differences. In contrast, the Hungarian school system has traditionally placed and still places emphasis on a stable and only slowly changing literary canon which, in turn, leads to a body of literature known to most members of society.