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.
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.
Jaritz, Gerhard and Katalin Szende, eds. 2016. Medieval East Central Europe in a Comparative Perspective. From Frontier Zones to Lands in Focus. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. 265 pp., illus.
This article focuses on the English translation and reception of a major contemporary Hungarian novel, Ádám Bodor’s The Sinistra Zone. A fairly slim book, The Sinistra Zone was first published in 1992, established Bodor as a major writer and inspired a considerable amount of critical literature in Hungary. The article first gives an overview of the position of The Sinistra Zone in contemporary Hungarian literature and highlights some issues discussed by critics that are relevant for the discussion of the English translation and reception. After reviewing the American reception of the book, Orzóy examines how specific features of Bodor’s prose are rendered in Paul Olchváry’s English translation by discussing some translational choices and analyzing how these choices may modify possible interpretations of the novel. It is also suggested that besides the interpretive potential of the English translation, expectations towards translated novels may be a reason for the divergence of opinion between Hungarian and American reviewers and critics.
Kis, Pál. 2016. Csillaggal nem jó járni most. Kis Pál budapesti fényképész naplója 1944. október-december ('Better Not Walk around with the Star Now - the Budapest Diary of Pál Kis between October and December 1944'). Foreword by Pál Závada. Budapest: Magvető. 128 pp. Photos; Fenyves, Katalin and Marianne Szalay, eds. 2015. A holokauszt és a családom ('The Holocaust and My Family'). Budapest: Park Könykiadó. 492 pp. Photos.
This paper investigates the portrayal of gender in the work of Swiss-Hungarian writer Agota Kristof. Texts from her oeuvre that belong to different literary genres and creative periods are analyzed through a framework of materialist feminism, masculinity studies and narratology. Based on an analysis of the incidence of the female voice, two aesthetic strategies can be observed: on the one hand, Kristof’s early texts show a certain interest in women’s subjectivity, on the other, her later writings foreground male characters and their perspective. Overall, women are portrayed as homebound wives and mothers and men are dominant as narrators, writers and protagonists. While this seems to reflect the patriarchal dichotomy, other elements undermine this reading: male characters are weak and marginal, and in a few significant texts, women’s life in the family is represented as a prison from which they wish to escape. In these texts, the female character’s voice reveals the internal conflict between her aspirations and the pressures to conform to prescribed roles, which, in some instances, leads to subversion in the form of violence against her husband. Thus, though on the surface Kristof’s work seems to reinforce or merely reflect patriarchy, the deeper layers of meaning bring into succeeding focus a fundamental interrogation of gender roles.
The communist takeover in Hungary after World War II presented obvious challenges, hardships, and even dangers for the conservative-nationalist scholars who were part of the intellectual elite of the interwar period. Marginalized within the new socio-political order that emerged after the communist consolidation of power in 1948-49, conservative-nationalist intellectuals who were not completely silenced by the communists either retreated from public life entirely, or else found themselves having to struggle to remain relevant within the state-socialist system then under construction. Though limited in what they could publish, and relegated to minor and often precarious positions within the scholarly community, former conservative-nationalist scholars were nevertheless granted limited spaces within which they could produce relevant and even important scholarship, and in so doing could also “reinvent” themselves—if in many cases only partially and perhaps opportunistically—as public intellectuals. Focusing on the life and work of Ferenc Fodor between 1948 and his death in 1962, this article explores the concrete ways that a once-prominent geographer of the interwar period continued to contribute to geographical knowledge production under communism, and how he used this scholarly work as leverage in his attempts to partially rehabilitate himself in the early communist period. Contributing to a growing body of critical work on Hungarian geography under communism (see articles by Márton Czirfusz and Róbert Győri in this issue, for example), this study helps to lay the groundwork for future research on the relationship between the politics of scholarly production and the spatial re-imagining of postwar Hungary.
As the above title indicates, this bibliography straddles 2012-2013, covering the period since the publication in Fall of 2012 of last year’s bibliography in this journal. Each yearly bibliography is supplemented by earlier items that were only retrieved recently. Although this bibliography can only concentrate on English-language items, occasional items of particular interest in other languages are included.
For a more extensive bibliography of Hungarian Studies from about 2000 to 2010, for which the AHEA yearly bibliographies are an 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.
Kovács, Mária M. 2012 : Törvénytől sújtva – a numerus clausus Magyarországon, 1920-1945 (Down by the Law - the Numerus Clausus in Hungary, 1920-1945). Budapest, Napvilág Kiadó, 2012. 267 pp.
Reviewed by Tamás Kovács, Magyar Országos Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives), Budapest
In this paper, I shall argue that the convergence of ideologies operating through the creation of enemies like racism and Bolshevism with discourses regulating gender relations in the Central Europe of the twentieth century had the grave consequence of questioning women’s position in the political community. In short, I shall argue that in the context of racist and Bolshevik discourses, the very fact of being female was in itself a political threat to women. To demonstrate my point, I shall discuss two recent publications. First, I shall analyze the context of the convergence of racist and misogynist discourses in turn-of-the-century Vienna through discussing András Gerő’s book, Neither Woman Nor Jew. Second, I shall explore how the discourse of class struggle affected the political status of Hungarian women in the Stalinist era through discussing Eszter Zsófia Tóth’s book, Kádár’s Daughters.