Submitted Papers

Ancient Diaspora: Evidence of an Iron Age Migrant at Zöldhalompuszta, 5200 Kilometers from Home

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
This paper contextualizes the historic diaspora of Iron Age peoples across the vast Eurasian steppe by analyzing the source and diffusion of three steppe motifs associated with gold objects recovered from the Zöldhalompuszta burial in the Carpathian Basin of Eastern Hungary. In earlier papers I investigated the source and ubiquitous spread of the stag motif featured as a shield ornament in the Hungarian burial. Subsequently I analyzed the motif of a stylized raptor head attached to the alert ear of the Zöldhalompuszta stag. In this last stage of research I analyze the source of a third motif – profiled images of lions also found in the burial. The evidence of the triad of motifs fits within a pattern of diffusion of steppe imagery emanating out of Southern Siberia in the seventh and 6th centuries BCE fanning east and west into the peripheral areas of the Eurasian steppes up the Danube delta into Central Europe and into East Asia along the Amur River. Analysis of the cache of artifacts from Zöldhalompuszta suggests the physical presence of a migrating group from the Arzhan region of Southern Siberia. On the basis of its preserved content, the burial represents the movement of steppe people some 5200 kilometers from home.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Mrea Csorba Ph.D. I received all three of he academic degrees from the University of Pittsburgh-. She has been teaching courses in art history at the University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University as an adjunct faculty member since the early 90’s. Her MA thesis (1987) investigated horse-reliant cultures associated with Scythian steppe culture. For her Ph.D. (1997) she expanded research of pastoral groups to non-Chinese dynastic populations documented in northern China. Part of this research was published in the British prehistory journal ANTIQUITY, Cambridge, England (ANTIQUITY 70, 1996, 564—587). Her research may be viewed at http://edtech.msl.duq.edu/Mediasite/Play/2ea00c36fc2b4050ba46072efc0b80111d
and at http://www.duq.edu/academics/schools/liberal-arts/centers/interpretive-and-qualitative-research/video mrc25@pitt.edu

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Living in Modernity: Ferenc Balázs, Global Utopia and the Transylvanian Village, 1923-1927

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
In 1923-1928, the Transylvanian Hungarian intellectual and Unitarian minister Ferenc Balázs observed the global landscape of his historical present as he crossed the trans-imperial and colonial landscapes of Western Europe, North America, East and South Asia. During his travels, Balázs personally examined the radical socio-political initiatives that pacifist and anti-colonial intellectuals such as Toyohiko Kagawa, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mohandas Gandhi embraced in response to the post-war crisis of global modernity. After his return to Greater Romania, Balázs embarked on the rural development of Transylvanian micro-region in the pursuit of a new world society that would transcend a global system structured in his time by politics of difference indebted to empire, colonialism, the nation-state and minority-building.
By retracing how he capitalized on the flow of ideas and people across Protestant missionary, anti-colonial, and pacifist networks, this paper inserts Balázs's social reforms into a history of worldwide mobility, cultural exchange and connectivity.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Zsuzsanna Magdo is the Assistant Director for Partnerships and Programs at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Russian and East European Studies. Before her appointment to Pitt, Zsuzsa served at the Center for Global Studies and the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. At Illinois, she has taught on Eastern Europe and Russia, modernity and religion, utopianism and empires in world history - themes that are also central to her research and publication. Zsuzsa holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois.
https://pitt.academia.edu/ZsuzsannaMagdo zsuzsannamagdo@pitt.edu

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Catholicism, Women and the Nationalist Movement

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
This research looks at Hungary and its current use of Catholicism in relation to Women and the Nationalist movement. Catholicism and Gender equality are interrelated. Catholicism as a state religion promotes traditional family values. The Roman Catholic Church teaches religion in public institutions in Hungary, interlacing traditional gender roles with the Nationalist movement and creating roadblocks toward women’s equality. Hungary’s concordats with the Vatican and the Istanbul Convention are in conflict when addressing women's human rights. In addition, the promotion of a moral authority blurs the separation of church and state making it difficult for a secular society to blossom. The Catholic Church in Hungary, wanting to establish political power and rationalize the Nationalist movement to solidify that power, conflicts with women’s equality and arguably, with democracy.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Marty Pack is a recent political science graduate student focusing on human rights. Her thesis concentrated on domestic violence in Eastern Europe through the lens of Catholicism. She is a freelance human rights documentary producer and teacher in the Columbus Public School system. Her freelance documentaries look at complicated social issues and explores them in a way that informs the public. Her films have been used to educate Chicago Teachers Union members and social work students. She has traveled to several countries presenting her political science masters research at various conferences, in hopes of enlightening educators about domestic violence in relation to gender equality and religion. She lives in Columbus, OH with her two teenagers and hopes to pursue a PhD in 2019 combining her film background and academic investigation. m-pack@neiu.edu

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“ ‘Ölelem a Térded!’ I Hug Your Knees (Not Kiss Your Hand!): Béla Zerkovitz, Dezső Kosztolányi, and Joséphine Baker”

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
From dirt-poor beginnings in early 20th century racist America, African American cabaret performer Joséphine Baker rose to heights of global fame in interwar Europe, taking Paris by storm, later bedazzling the rest of Europe including two visits to Hungary. In 1928, this “Bronze Venus” was almost banned by the Hungarian Conservative Party, but after being screened before the police committee, her show was a huge success at the Orfeum Theatre in Budapest. According to a contemporary account from TIME Magazine, a Hungarian cavalry officer behaved too amorously, displeasing the Italian “Count” serving as her manager who challenged the officer to a sword-fighting duel. They met in a cemetery while Baker cheered from atop a tombstone. During her second Budapest visit, a young fan, hopelessly in love with Baker, shot himself after one of her concerts. Kosztolányi wrote a glowing article about her in the Pesti Hirlap. Béla Zerkovitz’ internationally renowned hit song, “Gyere Jozefin. . . ölelem a térded,” appears in the musical comedy Csókos Asszony/Kissing Lady, still regularly performed in the 21st century, though most spectators are clueless regarding the origin of the song. Despite her success as a Jazz Age mega-star, her worldwide performances were denounced as animalistic. Condemned as a primitive threat to civilization, still, she played to full houses who found her fascinating and amusing. This paper argues that Hungary was not isolated in post WWI European malaise, and by embracing Baker, who symbolized the Other of urban interwar European modernity, the country sought to evoke “metropolitan” or “European” culture and transform its capital city into a cosmopolitan metropolis.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Mártha Pereszlényi-Pintér is the former Chairperson of the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Cultures and Associate Professor of French at John Carroll University in Cleveland, OH. She earned her Ph.D. in Romance Languages from The Ohio State University, and studied at the Institut de Touraine (Tours) and the Bryn Mawr Program (Avignon) in France. Her research and publication accomplishments include French and also Hungarian Literature and Culture of the pre-modern period (Medieval, Renaissance, 17th century), Film, and Language for Business & the Professions. She has read papers at national and international conferences. While at OSU, she wrote or co-wrote 16 manuals for individualized instruction in both French and Hungarian with group grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Annenberg Foundation. She was born in Austria and emigrated to the USA with her Hungarian parents. She is also a past President of AHEA, and chaired or co-chaired four past AHEA annual Conferences.

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Hidden Hungarians: Martin Rose, the founding father of Rose Iron Works, a Cleveland Treasure

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
This presentation will trace the history of Rose Iron Works, one of the little known treasures of Cleveland, Ohio, of which many native Clevelanders are unaware, much less that it was founded in 1904 by Hungarian immigrants. Martin Rose, born in 1870 in Csepe, Hungary, was a highly skilled ornamental blacksmith trained in the best shops in Budapest and Vienna. In 1929, he hired fellow Hungarian artisan, Paul Fehér, away from the preeminent Kiss studio in Paris in order to introduce Art Deco metalwork to the USA. “Muse with a Violin,” designed by Fehér in 1930, was inspired by the construction of Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Symphony; the screen, a quintessential example of Rose and Fehér’s refinement of European style and an icon of American Deco metalwork, has toured many museums, including: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, and many others, including the Cleveland Museum of Art’s 2017-18 “The Jazz Age” show. Rose Iron Works became the source of decorative metalwork for prominent families building Cleveland’s early economic empire. Rose and his descendants collaborated with world-renowned designers such as Viktor Schreckengost with whom they produced a large mural for the entrance to Cleveland Hopkins Airport. They also collaborated on murals for Marathon Oil Company at their Texas headquarters. Rose Iron Works is located in the heart of Cleveland’s historic Saint Clair Superior East side neighborhood, where their forge shop has been operating for over a century.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Mártha Pereszlényi-Pintér is the former Chairperson of the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Cultures and Associate Professor of French at John Carroll University in Cleveland, OH. She earned her Ph.D. in Romance Languages from The Ohio State University, and studied at the Institut de Touraine (Tours) and the Bryn Mawr Program (Avignon) in France. Her research and publication accomplishments include French and also Hungarian Literature and Culture of the pre-modern period (Medieval, Renaissance, 17th century), Film, and Language for Business & the Professions. She has read papers at national and international conferences. While at OSU, she wrote or co-wrote 16 manuals for individualized instruction in both French and Hungarian with group grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Annenberg Foundation. She was born in Austria and emigrated to the USA with her Hungarian parents. She is also a past President of AHEA, and chaired or co-chaired four past AHEA annual Conferences. mpereszlenyi@jcu.edu

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Documenting Hungarian Underground Art, 1970s-1980s

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
The proposed paper, with a focus on Hungarian alternative artists’ periodicals of the 1970s-80s, is based on research in connection with my work cataloging ephemeral Hungarian art publications for the Museum of Modern Art in 2016. The art of the Hungarian neo-avantgarde has generated considerable attention in recent years, as attested by a well-received recent retrospective at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York entitled “With the Eyes of Others: Hungarian Artists of the Sixties and Seventies,” or two substantial consecutive exhibitions of the “Hejettes Szomlyazók” group in Budapest in 2017. While the corpus of critical literature analyzing and evaluating the art of the period is growing and the rediscovery of the most relevant artists – the majority of whom gained international recognition after having left Hungary – has been gaining momentum, a substantial amount of the ephemeral samizdat material still remains little known. My goal is to highlight some of the more obscure short-lived serial publications of the parallel world of art of the Socialist era, and to bring attention to the need of their preservation.
I presented a different version of this paper at the IFLA World Congress in Wroclaw in August 2017.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Christina Peter is Head of Acquisitions at the Frick Art Reference Library, an art research institution affiliated with The Frick Collection in New York. She holds an MA in Russian Language and Literature, English Language and Literature and in General and Applied Linguistics from the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and an MS in Library Science from the Palmer Library School, Long Island University. In her current position she is responsible for East European collection development, original cataloging and authority work. She has given presentations on East European collections, art book publishing and cataloging issues at a variety of conferences. In 2013 she received a “Pro Cultura Hungarica” award for fostering cultural relations between Hungary and other countries. peter@frick.org

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Cold Warriors/Lövészek (Documentary Film)

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
Our new documentary: Cold Warriors (USA/Hungary, 56 minutes, director(s) Réka Pigniczky-Andrea Lauer Rice

This year the founders of the Memory Project (Hungarian-American visual history archive) directed and produced the Memory Project's first documentary, "Cold Warriors" (Lövészek), a 56-minute film about the nearly-forgotten American-Hungarian Rifle Association. The film was completed in May of 2017 and since then has screened at various locations including the Chagrin Falls Documentary Film Festival in Ohio, the Itt-Ott summer conference organized by the Hungarian Society of Friends, and at the prestigious Urania National Theater in Budapest on November 7th, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The film has also run on Duna Television, Hungary's primary broadcast channel.
Brief Synopsis:
In Rummerfield, Pennsylvania at the height of the Cold War, a handful of young American-Hungarians were ready to fight for freedom in a homeland they barely knew. Nearly half a century later, in 2016, they return to the remote, run-down farm along the Susquehanna River, to the revolution of their past - and the dreams of their youth. This is an unusual class reunion that speaks about the Iron Curtain, the Cold War and being a hyphenated American. About having two homelands - and one sense of justice.




Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Andrea Lauer Rice and Réka Pigniczky, co-founders of the Memory Project, are both daughters of 1956-ers and have worked together for 20 years. Réka Pigniczky is a journalist and award- winning documentary filmmaker. Her trilogy of documentary films - Journey Home (Hazatérés), Incubator (Inkubátor) and Heritage (Megmaradni) all explore the legacy of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the question of Hungarian identity. Andrea Lauer Rice is an author and producer of multimedia educational tools that teach young people about culture, history and language. She has co-authored several books, created an oral history website, and produced a computer game and graphic novel about the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. pigniczkyreka@gmail.com

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1945: A Hungarian Film Reckons with Antisemitism

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Based on Gábor T. Szántó’s acclaimed short story Hazatérés/Homecoming, 1945 (dir Ferenc Török, Hungary, 2017) features a superb ensemble cast, lustrous black and white images shot by world-renowned cinematographer Elemér Ragályi, a score by Tibor Szemző, and historically detailed art direction, all of which contribute to an eloquent drama that confronts a traumatic chapter in the history of the Holocaust in Hungary.
In the immediate aftermath of WWII, two Orthodox Jews arrive by train on a sweltering August day as a domineering village notary is about to marry off his son to a peasant girl, catalyzing an unwelcome reckoning with the recent past for the local inhabitants. Meanwhile Red Army soldiers lurk on the sidelines, seeking to enrich themselves through the daily business of Occupation.
My presentation contextualizes the film's portrayal of the complex postwar situation at a pivotal moment in Hungarian life, exacerbated by housing and food shortages, and the status of possessions expropriated by the state and allocated to the people, and when Jews who had been deported and survived often found themselves targets of a new wave of antisemitism. Through film extracts and stills, I interrogate the film's narrative of distrust and denunciation, guilt and denial, recrimination and reparation in dialogue with historical documents and first-person video testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Catherine Portuges is founding director of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies, professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies, and curator of the Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival, University of Massachusetts Amherst. A frequent lecturer at international conferences, an invited programmer, curator, juror and consultant for film festivals and colloquia, and a delegate to international film festivals, her books include Cinemas in Transition in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 (Temple, 2013); Gendered Subjects (Routledge, 2012); and Screen Memories: the Hungarian Cinema of Márta Mészáros (Indiana, 1993). Her recent essays have appeared in Cinematic Homecomings: Exile and Return in Transnational Cinema; Cinema, State Socialism and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917-1989: Re-Visions; Bringing the Dark Past to Light: the Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe; Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss in European Cinema; Cinema's Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács; and A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas.
Prof. Portuges is a member of the Academic Advisory Board for the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies, and serves on the editorial boards of Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Jewish Film and New Media, and Hungarian Studies; she has recently been appointed associate editor for film for the journal American Imago. She was awarded the Chancellor's Medal for Distinguished Teaching, the Pro Cultura Hungarica Medal from the Republic of Hungary for her contributions to cinema, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for "The Subjective Lens." The working titles of her current book projects are "Filming the Holocaust: Third Generation Eastern Europe" and "Hungarians in Hollywood." portuges@complit.umass.edu

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Hungarian Cookbooks for Hebrew Readers – a Comparative Cultural Analysis

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
How long and how strong is Diasporic memory? How many generations can it, or should it, encompass? And how deeply can generations that never even lived in the old country relate to its landscape, language, colors and tastes? In rigorous state-formation settings, wherein the new society (re-)constructs itself by resurrecting its ancient or traditional infrastructures and creating new indigenous ones, while at the same time devaluating the shorter-term memories of its many newly-arrived immigrant groups, the answers to these questions inevitably tend toward negative or dismissive. This mechanism works even more strongly among relatively small origin groups, like Hungarian Israelis, and as we move further and further away from the moment of their arrival to the new country. On the face of this far from promising inventory of Hungarianism among present-day young Israelis of Hungarian origin, it was surprising and heartening for me to discover an entire Hebrew-language Hungarian cookbook (more precisely a card-box formed book), one of the only two of its kind in our culture, entitled Goulash lagolesh – matamei hamitbakh hahungari ['Goulash for the Browser - Delicacies of the Hungarian Kitchen'] (Tel Aviv: LunchBox, 2009), created by Ofer Vardi (b. 1973), a food journalist and owner of a recipe and life-style press. The other existing Hebrew Hungarian cookbook is the work of the late journalist, writer and politician Yosef/Joseph Tommy Lapid, né Tomislav Lampel, who was born in 1931 in Novi Sad or Újvidék and died in Tel Aviv in 2008. Lapid's Hungarian cookbook (co-authored and edited by Ruth Sirkis) is titled Paprika – kakha mevashlim hahungarim ['Paprika – This Is How the Hungarians Cook'] (Tel Aviv: R. Sirkis Publishers, 1987). Based on the general portraits of the two Hebrew Hungarian cookbooks and those of their authors, as well as on the understanding that cookbooks are never just lists of recipes but also cultural products and culture preservers, my presentation asks and offers answers to these questions: What kind of Hungary is imagined (in Benedict Anderson's sense of "imagined communities" as formulated in his 1983 book by this title) by the authors of the two cookbooks and their expected or implicit readers? Which periods and events in Hungarian history are stressed and which times and issues are suppressed or barely glimpsed or misrepresented in each of the two books and why? What parts of the two books are specifically Jewish, or even Israeli? And last, in what ways are these two cookbooks also, or to no less extent, powerful, multi-sensory personal, familial and communal memory works whose proof lies not only in their puddings but also, if not more so, in their hindsight prudence?





Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Prof. Ilana Rosen of the Dept. of Hebrew Literature at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev is a researcher of documentary literature of Jews and Israelis in the twentieth century. She has written five books and over forty articles on these topics.
Her last study, Pioneers in Practice – an Analysis of Documentary Literature by Veteran Residents of the Israeli South, was published in 2016 by the Ben Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism. As of 2013 she is the Book Review Editor of Hungarian Cultural Studies, published by the University of Pittsburgh. ilanaro@bgu.ac.il

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Identity and Intergenerational Remembrance Through Foodways: Case Studies of Three Generations of Hungarians of Jewish Origins

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
In this study, through the interdisciplinary analysis of foodways with Gender Studies and Holocaust Studies, I aim to show the cultural and gendered significance of the wartime sharing of recipes for starving women prisoners in concentration camps, as well as for the continued importance of food talk and food writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust in the memory work of survivors and their descendants. Fantasy cooking, or “cooking with the mouth,” as it was called in many camps, and recipe creation was a way for many inmates to attempt to maintain their identity and connection to their ethnic and family history, while depiction of food memories also has a continuing role in the postwar memoir writing of survivor women. I will also examine the continued use of food talk as a genealogy of intergenerational remembrance and transmission in the postmemory writing of the second generation and even-third generation daughters, and very occasionally of sons. Studying multigenerational Holocaust alimentary writing becomes particularly important today because we are fast approaching a biological and cultural caesura, where direct survivors will disappear and we will need new forms of transmission to reshape Holocaust memories for the future.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Louise O. Vasvári (M.A. and Ph.D., UC, Berkeley) is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and of Linguistics at Stony Brook University. Currently she teaches in the Linguistics Department at NYU and is also Affiliated Professor at the University of Szeged. She works in medieval studies, diachronic and socio-linguistics, Holocaust studies, and Hungarian Studies, all informed by gender theory within a broader framework of comparative cultural studies. She has published with Steven Tötösy, Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (2005), Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies (2009), and Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies (2011). louise.vasvari@stonybrook.edu

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