Dezső Kosztolányi was one of the most avid and versatile Hungarian translators of the twentieth century. At the same time, translation offers a unique way of gaining insight into Kosztolányi’s own works, particularly into his last cycles of short stories, Esti Kornél (1933) and Esti Kornél Kalandjai (1936). Looking at these stories through the prism of translation reveals that Kosztolányi’s prose is very much like poetry. In it, linguistic form is at least as important as semantic content, if not more. Here, the recognition of formal patterns leads to semantic discoveries. Language has become the protagonist that manipulates the other characters. Translation points most straightforwardly to this fact because it is in translation that the loss, and, therefore, the presence of the original’s linguistic form are most acutely felt.In my presentation I discuss Kosztolányi’s approaches to translation as well as what questions raised in the process of translation reveal about his own fiction.

Two stories written by Modernist authors who are representative in their respective cultures (Hungarian and Croatian) describe the complex and complicated relationship between the European East and West. The two stories I am referring to are Kosztolányi’s “Bandi Cseregdi in Paris” and Krleza’s “Hodorlahomor the Great.” I would like to begin my presentation by discussing the challenges of translating “Bandi Cseregdi in Paris” into English, and then moving on to contrast the abovementioned stories. Furthermore, I will compare Krleza’s approach to the East-West relationship to that of Kosztolányi as well as to that of a third Modernist, the Romanian Mateiu Caragiale, who was a contemporary of both Kosztolányi and Krleza. The goal of this presentation is to further explore the ways in which three representative Modernist authors understood and negotiated the relationship between the European East and West, through language, aesthetics, and politics.

Governments seem to pay more and more attention to strengthening ties with co-national communities living abroad. The rapid proliferation of kin-state activism shows that states still play a major role in creating and reinforcing transnational involvements, contradicting scholarly estimates, arguing that the process of globalization would reconfigure or even erode the sovereign nation state. Furthermore, diaspora policies targeted toward co-national communities abroad are the most remarkable manifestations of a new kind of national aspirations by governments, which globally spread in the 21st century as a practice of cross-border community building and revitalization. The main aim of my presentation is to give a general overview of kin-state activism in Central and Eastern Europe. After briefly reviewing the historical background of the subject, I will turn to existing policies, exploring the most commonly adopted practices—such as the constitutional assumption of the kin-state’s responsibility; the adoption of benefit laws; the provision of ethnic preferential naturalization; and the launching of several programs and financial supports for co-nationals abroad—in Central and Eastern Europe. I will examine why and under what circumstances these practices have been developed in this part of Europe.

The presentation introduces a project plan of the University of Pécs (UP), which intends to reinforce the institutional cooperation with Hungarians living in the world. In line with the Hungarian government's efforts aiming to involve those who are interested, the UP wants to connect not only with Hungarian local organizations abroad, but also to link them culturally through education and learning at the University of Pécs. (Pécs was the European Capital of Culture in 2010.) Educational training programs based on the needs of Hungarian foreign communities provide the basis for the professional program. Under the Diaspora Innovative Program English and Hungarian languages can be used in distance learning curriculum packages (e-learning, m-learning, blended learning). Short courses, training courses take place in the following priority areas: Hungarian as a foreign language; Hungarian history, culture, folklore and traditions; Hungarian legal system. The courses fit the Bologna system, the European Qualifications Framework to ensure interoperability among the courses, training areas and institutions.

Writers, and certainly Hungarian writers, have confronted the past in order to argue for a better future for the nation. Today, this is often means addressing the geographically fragmented reality of the Hungarian community. That is, the diaspora. Yet, the concept is not wholly new. Hungarian as a multiethnic nation had an internal diaspora before the Treaty of Trianon and an external one following it. I will examine the approaches of several writers to this problem.

Pál Závada sees a Slovak "diaspora" of sorts in his Jadviga párnája. Péter Huncik examines the conficts in the new nation states that thrust Hungarians into diaspora without the movement of populations. In Romania, Béla Markó's Költők koszorúja addresses the problem of cultural maintenance within different cultural environments. This seems to me the central problem of the Diaspora: while remaining culturally and (sometimes) linguistically part of the mother country, to come to an understanding of geographical and political realities that do not, and never have, reflected on ethnic or linguistic borders. Authors can transcend political borders and point to a cultural commonwealth that embraces the diversity of modern writing.

The focus of scholarly approaches to post-1990 emigration from Hungary has dominantly been on the quantitative aspects: multiple research projects have aimed to quantify the scale of emigration, and to analyse the geographical location and basic socio-demographic indicators of the newly emerging Hungarian diaspora (Blaskó-Gödri 2015, Hárs-Simon 2015, Sík-Szeitl 2016). However, there is limited qualitative data available about the new emigrants. To fill this research gap, a small research team at the Institute for Minority Studies of the Centre for Social Sciences has been working on a project since 2018 that aims at the qualitative exploration of the largest new Hungarian diaspora groups. The research team conducted 60 semi-structured interviews in two main destination countries for emigrants, Austria and Germany, with Hungarians who moved to these countries since 1990. The main focus of our research was to capture if and how new emigrants are forming into a diaspora community. In this paper I attempt to unfold how Hungarian emigrants negotiate belonging and identity (and identity change) in the context of their emigration. By analyzing the interviews carried out with Hungarian individuals living in the UK and Austria, I point out patterns of diasporization and patterns of integration, and highlight some significant socio-economic factors that considerably affect these processes. I also address the question of whether dense transnational networks affect the chances of integration or rather the chances of diasporization of emigrants.

A Pécsi Tudományegyetem Kultúratudományi, Pedagógusképző és Vidékfejlesztési Karán az elmúlt években tudatos, intézményes munka zajlik Dienes Zoltán – a nemzetközileg is meghatározó magyar matematikapedagógus és a PTE díszdoktora – szellemi és kulturális örökségének megőrzésére és kortárs újraértelmezésére. Az előadás ezen egyetemi kezdeményezéseket mutatja be, különös tekintettel azok nemzetközi, illetve amerikai kapcsolódási pontjaira. A bemutatott tevékenységek közé tartozik a Dienes-játékok pedagógiai és nevelésfilozófiai feldolgozása, oktatási és élménypedagógiai programokba való beépítése, a Dienes Virtuális Múzeum kialakítása, valamint olyan tudományos és ismeretterjesztő projektek megvalósítása, amelyek Dienes gondolkodásmódját a 21. századi tanulási környezetek kontextusában értelmezik újra. Ezek a programok egyaránt szólnak egyetemi hallgatóknak, pedagógusoknak, és nem utolsósorban a diaszpóra közösségeknek is. Dienes azon meggyőződése, hogy a játékos, tapasztalati tanulás és a matematika egyetemes nyelve kultúrákon átívelő módon képes támogatni a megértést és a kommunikációt, ma is releváns üzenetet hordoz, melynek kedvező amerikai fogadtatása (Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco) előrevetíti a játékok további felhasználási lehetőségeit a magyar közösségekben. Az előadás végén a résztvevők konkrét Dienes-játékokon keresztül ismerkedhetnek meg az örökség gyakorlati alkalmazási lehetőségeivel, reflektálva arra, miként válhat egy magyar pedagógiai életmű élő, nemzetközi jelentőségű tudásforrássá a 21. században.

The Library of Congress aims to be a universal library; most of its 33 million cataloged books are in languages other than English and, in many cases, it possesses the largest collection of materials from and about a given country outside of that country. This is certainly true of its Hungarian collection, which numbers more than 200,000 volumes, making it the largest collection of Hungarica outside of Hungary.

Nevertheless, in the new digital era, the Library does not have unlimited resources and staff, so it must be highly selective in what it does digitize. Thus it concentrates on Americana—items related to American history and culture. Its digitized collections encompass millions of items, mostly photographs, documents, sound recordings, but also books, in cooperation with the Internet Archive and Hathi Trust. Although there are no separate “Hungarian” digital collections, there is digitized Hungarian material contained within other collections. This paper will attempt to describe some of the more notable examples.

The European Reading Room’s site is devoted to help researchers better find materials related to Europe. Of interest here are not digitized items but rather finding aids that direct readers to materials in more traditional formats, such as a guide to the Library’s Hungarian collections, an index to its Hungarian telephone directory collection, an index to its microfilmed collection Records from the War History Archives in Budapest, and a forthcoming index to Hungarian newspapers at the Library. The one digitized book concerning Hungary on the European Reading Room site is the bibliography Hungarians in Rumania and Transylvania, originally published by the Government Printing Office in 1969.

Elsewhere on the Library of Congress site, one can find Hungarian material in the Detroit Publishing Company’s postcard collection (ca 1900) and the American Memory project’s National Jukebox, which contains commercial recordings of Hungarian music. Hungarian folk songs sung by Hungarian-Americans form part of the collection California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties.

The above represents a selective sample, not a comprehensive listing of digital Hungarian material on the Library of Congress site. A finding aid for this material would be most useful and is in the works.

Hungary has a National Digitization Plan for Libraries for the period of 2007-2013. Recently, another strategic document called the “Digital Renewal Action Plan” has been issued by the Ministry of National Development, for 2010-2014. Despite the lack of coordination regarding digitization on a national level, we can find ongoing digitization projects in libraries, museums, and archives. The National Széchényi Library even participates in several European projects and initiatives. In this paper, the presenter will discuss how in Hungary the challenges of the Information Society are met by making digitized and/or original digital content (literature, audio-visual material, cultural artifacts) available: who is digitizing what material, and where to find it in the Digital Universe, i.e. on the Internet. Examples which will be given and demonstrated include Hungarian digital collections and electronic libraries, such as the Digital Library of Hungarian Studies, the Digital Academy of Literature, the National Digital Data Archive, the Digital Archive for Social Sciences, and the National Audiovisual Archive of Hungary.

Coinciding with the 2008 global economic downturn has been an escalation in violent attacks and intimidation against Roma and the resurgence of extremist groups with explicit anti-Roma agendas all across Europe. The Roma face widespread discrimination as social institutions and other elites have not only been complicit in the reproduction of prejudiced discursive representations, but also in allowing or denying access to social goods for subordinated minorities. The geographical scope of this study will be limited to Hungary in order to focus the contextualization and develop a more in-depth investigation into the discursive mechanisms used to rationalize discriminatory rhetoric and naturalize the criminalization of a subordinated demographic. While human rights groups have published reports criticizing the way the Hungarian government and local police forces have handled such incidents, this study will focus specifically on exposing how Jobbik, Hungary’s right-wing nationalist political party, uses discriminatory discourse in their founding documents as a means to gain more political supporters through a positive self-representation and simultaneously blame economic hardships on the Roma, which ultimately leads to the reproduction of prejudiced attitudes and their further marginalization.
Drawing from Ruth Wodak’s historical-discourse approach to critical discourse analysis and Teun van Dijk’s investigations of discriminatory discourse, this study will attempt to make explicit how the Jobbik party is complicit in reproducing discriminatory practices against the Roma, how such discriminatory discourse continues their marginalization and serves as an obstacle to their social integration, and how power relationships are generated and sustained through linguistic mechanisms within particular historical contexts and existing social structures.

The current paper considers the special meaning of micro-events in serial narratives of Gyula Krúdy. It reflects on this topic which is highlighted in this context because of the transitions from agents' activity to the conversational level. The importance of living speech and its tonal and thematic shifts are of special interest in this paper. As an essential part of the narration, small discursive events can not be properly understood in abstract means but principally in particular terms because characters who are involved in the events and social norms that regulate their behavior have special relevance. There are a large number of narratological patterns, ethical and emotional ideas and attitudes generating tension as a driving force of small discursive events. Using cognitive as well as rhetorical tools this paper aims to discover the overall effect of this phenomenon on readers’ understanding of these narrative micro-events.

In early modern Transylvania, providing family members with sanative care – from identifying ailments to preparing basic remedies to treat or prevent them – fell within the established practice of a woman running a household, one of the foremost sites of health-promoting activities. Healing and the maintenance of health were quotidian concerns entwined with culinary and other household activities. This study examines the salient characteristics of household recipe practices in the principality, drawing together sources that have not been previously considered in relation to one another. Attention is given in particular to seventeenth- through mid-eighteenth-century recipe collections of influential noblewomen whose writing, collecting, and exchange of medically-themed recipes comprised part of their activities of providing home-based sanative care. Household recipe collections, as a form of protracted thinking, also functioned as venues for intellectual practice and self-representation. Because recipes were an important part of the vernacular medical literature, their study offers indispensable insights into the period’s medical culture and the non-canonical actors who helped shape it.

Anna Lesznai met Edit Gyömrői in 1918, at the gatherings of the Sunday Circle, and their friendship lasted till the end of Lesznai’s life, despite the great geographical distance between them. In my lecture I explore the traces of their friendship and try to present some parallels and differences in their life course, circumstances and character. Lesznai and Gyömrői belonged to roughly the same generation, and they came from a more or less similar family background – assimilated Jewish middle-class/landowner families. They both came into contact and were active participants of nearly all intellectual and artistic circles of the age. Gyömrői’s career related to psychoanalysis (among many other activities), Lesznai worked in the field of literature and art. (They also wrote about each other’s works.)
The political circumstances forced both of them (especially Gyömrői) to change their places of living several times. Their 1919 emigration to Vienna and their most significant 1939 overseas emigration to the United States/Ceylon was the consequence of political and racial persecution concerned both of them. Her language, poetic and visual world, and social relationships kept especially Lesznai strongly attached to Hungary. Although Gyömrői seemed to adapt herself to the different environments and life conditions more easily, the loss of roots and language was a constant problem and pain for her, too. Their friendship represents the “brave old world” for them above all: the social and intellectual environment that both of them abandoned.

Although the dipis [DP = Displaced Persons] constituted the elites of interwar Hungary’s “neo-Baroque” world, and although as immigrants to the United States they significantly altered the structure of Hungarian-American society, as compared to the other waves of immigrants, they are hardly known. The primary reasons for this is the fact that they represented a social and political system that was not really welcome in America. They were also in the category of “ex-enemies,” which did not endear them to Americans and their Western allies. Equally important is the fact that – for whatever reason -- they left relatively few historical sources – memoirs and archival material – behind them.
In the course of the past 160 years several waves of Hungarian immigrants left their homeland and settled in the United States. Beginning with the so-called “Kossuth Immigration” after the defeated Hungarian Revolution of 1848-1849, followed by the massive turn-of-the-century “economic immigration” from Austria-Hungary (1890-1914), then by several waves of political immigrants before and after World War II (1919, 1933-41, 1944-45, 1947-48). This immigration process climaxed in wake of the violent anti-Soviet Revolution of 1956, which resulted in the exodus of nearly 200,000 Hungarians, of whom over 40,000 ended up in the United States. The last major Hungarian immigration took place after the fall of the communism in 1989-90, which brought additional thousands of Hungarians to the USA. They were not really immigrants, but people who hoped to improve their economic wellbeing by working in America. Their position is best described by the German term “Wohlstandsflüchtlinge,” which is best translated into Hungarian as “Jólétmenekültek,” and into English as “Guestworkers in search of a better life”.
Discounting the “Wohlstandsflüchtlinge” still in the process of migrating to the United States, the post-World War II immigrants came in two waves. These were the 45-ers, many of whom represented the elites of the interwar Horthy-regime; and the 47-ers who were of more modest origins and wanted to change the nature of the regime. They hoped to achieve this goal by cooperating with the occupying Soviet forces and the Communist Party. This hope, however, was crushed by the communist take-over of Hungary in the course of 1947-1948.
While all of immigrant waves possess a great deal of scholarly literature, this does not hold true for the 45-ers and 47-ers (the DPs). My goal is to remedy the situation by writing a synthetic work about these “forgotten immigrants.”

Focus is Hungarian Jews in Displaced Persons camps in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Jewish youth ( ages 12-21) in the camps liberated by Americans or who voluntarily moved to DP camps in the American zone and later emigrated to the USA. Post-Holocaust experiences from 1945-1952 found in the literature of those in their formative and young adult years will be presented and include topics pertaining to Allied liberators, locating family/friends, interrupted education, support systems, interaction with US military, camp conditions, attempts to return home, options for emigration, immigration difficulties, and establishing a new life in the USA.

At the end of WWII in Europe May 8, 1945, over seven million people had been displaced from their native lands, including some 100,000 Jewish camp survivors from locales such as Buchenwald April 11, Dachau April 29, and Mauthausen May 5-6, one of the last liberated. The number of Jewish DP's increased as those in hiding emerged, partisans stepped forward, and those who would not or could not return home and had nowhere to go were identified.
The Allies helped the surviving remnant reunite with families through the Red Cross, which provided housing, food, and Medical care, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and various Jewish agencies provided other needed assistance. DP camps originally housed on nationality divisions were changed to accommodate Jews only, thereby preventing Jews from living with perpetrators or collaborators, with Feldafing becoming the first all-Jewish facility.
Emigration to the USA was hampered by a quota system. By 1950, more than 100,000 Jews had entered the United States. Leonard Dinnerstein in his book on America and the Survivors of the Holocaust stated that little was known about the DP's after they left the camps, therefore, the literature noted in this presentation provides invaluable insights into the tribulations, adjustments, and accomplishments they experienced and the study model devised offers interesting points of comparison and contrast with other Hungarian Holocaust accounts. Memoirs and autobiographical works by Bitton-Jackson, Hersh, Isaacson, Orenstein, Roszner, and Singer will be described and several other author/DP emigres who experienced the American Zone and resulted in the USA will be mentioned. These and other Hungarians residing in their transplanted land of the USA were soon to greet the next wave of emigres from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Anna Lesznai (Amália Moscovitz), (1885-1966) was a celebrated poet and artist of the first Nyugat generation, a member of the Sunday Society, the first wife of Oszkár Jászi, and the niece of Lajos Hatvany. While Lesznai’s early life has been explored by Erzsébet Vezér and, recently, Judit Szilágyi, much less is known of Lesznai’s life after 1919 when she joined the ranks of the emigration. She lived in Vienna, then at Körtvélyes, Czechoslovakia on her family’s estate, moving back to Budapest in the 1930s and New York City in 1939 where she died in 1966.

Emma Ritoók (1868-1945) also forged a unique path: she attended university in Budapest, Paris and Berlin, to become a writer and a member of the Sunday Society. She found her intellectual home and peers there, developing especially close ties with Balázs and Lukács. By the end of 1918, however, while Lukács and most of the others began their road to Communism, Ritoók took a sharp turn to the Right. With Cecile Tormay, she became one of the founders of the National Association of Hungarian Women, publicly denounced her old friends and played an important role in shaping the post-war period’s viciously anti-Semitic discourse.

In this paper I explore the relationship of Lesznai and Ritoók in the crucial revolutionary and counter-revolutionary months. While their personal relationship can be traced in their respective diaries, their autobiographical novels, Lesznai’s In the Beginning Was the Garden (Kezdetben volt a kert) and Ritoók’s A szellem kalandorai (The Adventurers of the Spirit), both romans à clef, provide highly conflicting views of their shared past. They managed to mutually erase one another out of the history of the Sunday Society, demonstrating, in the process, the fatal fissures dividing the post-1919 Hungarian intellectual scene and the power of memories in creating lasting legacies.

Although the events of the Shoah took place in Central and Eastern European locations, its memorialization has become a global phenomenon. Regarding the amount of institutions and artistic representations concerning the Shoah, we could argue that the United States has grown into the absolute center of Holocaust memory.
With the imminent disappearance of witnesses, authors of the successive generations form the contemporary literature of the Holocaust, but in the center of their works, it is not the representation of historical events, but rather their distance from them. While in countries directly affected by the Nazi persecution, this distance is marked by the post-generations’ ambivalent experience of being-born-after, in the United States, the distance is both spatial and temporal.
This paper will focus on differences between the contemporary literatures of Holocaust memory in the United States and in Hungary, by comparing works of US-based authors, like Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss and Michael Chabon with Hungarian texts written by Gábor Zoltán, Pál Závada and Krisztina Tóth. While American novels tend to engage in topics, such as immigration experience, language and Jewish identity, the discussed Hungarian books rather focus on post-Holocaust history affected by the recent trauma and the afterlife of the landscapes of persecution. Both literatures are strongly marked by indirectness, however in American prose, it manifests mostly in the virtuoso use of imagination, as opposed to Hungarian texts, which are often characterized by their creative use of documents and data.

The Collections of the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution preserve the papers and oral histories of several influential Hungarian born artists. My project examines the role of Hungarian heritage in the lives and works of these key artists.

This documentary film is about growing up in an exile community in the West, developing a double-identity, and becoming a hyphenated-somebody. It's about learning to have two homelands at the same time - one in real life, and the other imagined and maintained by parents who were forced to flee. It is about a first generation of children whose parents lived abroad longer than they originally expected to, and who never really assimilated. Neither here nor there, the children of this generation find themselves, adults, trying to decide where they belong, what their nationality is, where their allegiance lies.

The story is told through an unlikely, albeit dramatic reunion - one which involves a Hungarian rock opera performed in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California by a cast of 40-something Hungarian-Americans. They meet in the same exact spot they performed Stephen, the king 25 years ago, as
Hungarian scouts during summer camp in 1984. That summer the Soviets still had tanks stationed in Hungary, and the country was isolated behind the Iron Curtain. Many of these scouts had never been to Hungary, where their parents were born.

The reunion of this original cast, now living all over the world including Budapest, makes for an emotional and hilarious portrait of one of many 'incubators' operating in the U.S. over the years. They're meeting, not only to reminisce, but also to figure out just who they've become, twenty years after the 'Motherland' was liberated.

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.