In my presentation I will focus on some guided compositions of students with Hungarian background and trace how their identity is implied between the lines of their essays.

The ECL language exam system offers language assessment of Hungarian as a foreign language. Candidates from all over the world try to pass this exam evaluating the candidates’ communicative competence of Hungarian. One of the exam skills is an essay to be written by the candidate. The length of the text is varying according to the level (A2, B1, B2 or C1 levels are offered). However, on each level in the assignment 4-5 topic elements are provided to make prompts about what to be written thus guiding the candidates to reach a certain degree of content complexity required by the level. That is to say it is a relatively free writing task framed by the restrictive prompts.

The guided composition task gives an opportunity for the writer to write about his/her personal life, opinion and view of the world segment defined by the prescribed topic. In an analysis of compositions of higher levels (B2, C1) I intend to reveal the students’ (of Hungarian origin) clear-cut references to their Hungarian identity and how these identity elements are mingled with the cultural features of their homeland they are presently living in. As an outcome I am going to show what are the most frequent areas of life where their Hungarian identity is utterly manifest.

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.

Separated by almost ten years, two films produced after Hungary’s entry into the European Union explore identity, separation, and loss. Both use the concentration camps as the setting for an examination of how an individual loses identity, recreates it, and then struggles to return to a previous identity in a changed world.
The 2006 Fateless begins in a somewhat conventional pre-war Budapest, and ends in the same location, changed because of the war. The concentration camp serves as the central non-Hungarian landscape, inhabited by inmates from throughout Europe. The road to, and then from, this descent into hell cannot but change the trajectory of the human lives that have undertaken the journey. The war proves a catalyst by which Hungary, and Hungarians, must mutate to survive.
Son of Saul (2015) presents a bleaker vision of human possibilities. Viewed entirely from the perspective of the inmate, the viewer knows almost nothing of his past life, only his present function within the multi-national concentration camp. From the dramatic moment when his past joins him in the camps in the form of a dead boy, past and present identity cannot be clearly separated. Identity appears only as a collective entity through ritual, but by film’s end it is precisely this renewed identification which proves hopeless.
In both films, Hungarian Jews negotiate their identity in extreme circumstances as they struggle to survive.

Sovereignty, compromise, and the making of modern Hungary is a concept that can be applied not only to modern Hungary, but also to émigré Hungarian communities in the diaspora, as well as to individuals trying to learn the Hungarian language independently, for the construction of identity always involves some compromise with language barriers and with assimilation. The Hungary Initiatives Foundation is a program funded by the current Hungarian government and is one of several programs designed to strengthen the identity of Hungarian communities abroad; one beneficiary of a recent HIF grant was Cleveland State University, which has seen a rebirth of its Hungarian program. Tracing the development of its fully online course for beginners, the course pedagogy and methods are detailed, as well as its use of short teaching films using everyday interactive Hungarian language filmed at locations throughout Cleveland’s Hungarian community, including on campus and at Hungarian businesses such as bakeries, a butcher, churches, and a restaurant. With students from California to Nova Scotia and everywhere in between, the course offers an easy introduction to the Hungarian language for the learner starting from scratch, and is fully accessible online from across the globe. Yet despite its ease of use, it is also an appropriate first step or a useful review for those wishing to gain an advanced understanding and knowledge of the Hungarian language.

Ilona Duczynska (1897-1978) was one of the most significant Austro-Hungarian revolutionary figures of the 20th century. She was a comrade of Lenin and of the men and women who made the 1917 Russian Revolution. She was most certainly the spark plug that lit the fuse of the 1918-1919 Hungarian revolutions, which hammered the final nails into the coffin of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She is the most important female Hungarian representative of the "professional revolutionary” for whom the fight for social justice does not have a national identity, has no territorial boundaries. She is the type of revolutionary that revolutions tend to devour. Duczynska was always a puzzle, an irritant in the eyes of the Bolsheviks. She was kicked out of every Communist Party that she ever joined. Had she not left Russia in 1920, she would have been surely executed along with her closest comrades, lovers and admirers who stayed behind or went to Russia to seek safe haven from the Fascism sweeping through Europe after WWI.
This presentation will examine a small but significant part of Duzyinska’s revolutionary “identity” - her role in the short lived 1919 Hungarian Republic of Councils. Was she an obedient servant, a local propagandist for the Russian Bolsheviks or an independent Hungarian warrior for social justice, committed to the transformation of her country’s unjust, unsustainable socio-political system?

The Armenian ethnic group appears on the linguistic landscape of Transylvania and of the Carpathian Basin in the 17th century when Mihály Apafi (1632–1690), Prince of Transylvania allows this ethnic group, having fled from the East across Moldavia, to settle in the principality. This paper tries to answer the question regarding how the Armenian, as an ethnotype, emerges in the Hungarian common consciousness and, within this, what kind of ethnic and cultural Armenian-related images of alterity the Hungarian literature has produced. My research is mainly conduct on a Hungarian literary corpus, starting from the 19th to the 21st century. After a brief examination of this corpus I draw conclusions regarding the variations of the stereotypical Armenian hetero-image.

The paper presents a peculiar phase of Hungarian immigration history to North America, examining the period between 1917 and 1929. This was a time of major restrictions in the United States and new opportunities for immigrants in neighboring countries, especially Canada (and to a lesser extent Mexico). The paper introduces changing trends in immigration patterns in an inter-American context, primarily focusing on how the immigration policies of countries in the region were intertwined (especially in the minds of Hungarian immigrants) and how they influenced Hungarian migration patterns. While in the United States East-Central European immigrants faced increasing rejection and closing gates (with the country introducing a literacy test and later national quotas that practically ended the period of New Immigration), immigration policies in Canada (whereby Hungarian immigrants were finally included in the same category as immigrants from Western European countries, thus leaving behind their “non-preferred” status) resulted in major changes in Hungarian migration patterns. Besides an international policy overview and the discussion of the historical background of changes (in the US, Canada as well as Mexico), the paper also looks at other forces influencing decisions of Hungarian emigrants at the time, including the changing images of countries in North America and immigration propaganda.

Immigrant Integration and Identity Maintenance by Education -- Helen Horvath’s special educational method for Hungarian immigrants in Cleveland, 1901 -1940
The problem how to find the balance between assimilation and identity maintenance of the migration process to lead proper integration in a new society was a crucial question in the history and is the present age as well. This issue raised different problems for every waves of Hungarian immigration in America depending on the historical, economical and cultural conditions. There are, however, human factors as well being the same and valid among all conditions and for all generations: the problems of human dignity, partnership, understanding and acceptance at both sides. The recognition of the importance these values mean the basis for Helen Horvath’s philosophy and for her successful educational program arranged for Hungarian immigrants in Cleveland in the first decades of the twentieth century, a unique model for adult education of her time. This paper attempts to present her special approach and methods carrying this idea and applied in the classroom of her language schools or citizenship courses and outside the classroom in the community as well. It is worthwhile to study her dual role in the Cleveland Hungarian community and the American society in the Americanization program of the City of Cleveland. She was well known and remembered from time to time by the next generations, but her approach and attempt and value system needs more research and deserves more recognition even today.

Nineteenth-century speakers argued that Hungary’s geographical position as well as the nation’s eastern origins defined its historical role in Europe and Asia. My paper examines some of the arguments related to the economic and political advantages Hungarian thinkers recognized in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy’s Oriental politics from the Congress of Berlin in 1878 until the beginnings of World War I. It focuses on two main aspects of fin-de-siècle Hungarian foreign politics: imperial attitudes vis-à-vis the Balkans and other “Turanians.” The German linguist Max Müller created the ethnological and linguistic category of Turanians and included in this category every non-Semitic and non-Aryan language like Hungarian, other Finno-Ugric languages, as well as Turkish, and even Tamil. By the 1870s, Müller’s linguistic classification proved to be unscientific and misleading and its validity was completely refuted. Nonetheless, Hungarian nationalists who believed in the glory of the Asian forefathers kept referring to Hungary as the westernmost and most advanced nation of the future, great Turanian commonwealth. Turanism remained an important concept in Hungarian politics, and based on the “experience” of the Bosnian occupation from 1908, Turanism became a political movement fostering imperial designs. The paper sheds light on the curious dynamics between nationalist, colonial, and imperial desires manifesting in Hungary’s eastern politics. It argues that World War I finally dissolved the illusion that those imperialist dreams could ever come true.

This paper aims to present the potential effectiveness of using learner-centered methods in Hungarian teaching contexts, concentrating on the so-called weekend or Sunday schools. Instructors who teach at these kinds of schools must deal with different language levels, age groups and learning styles, all at the same time; this makes it difficult to achieve a great deal of progress, especially in those circumstances when lessons are organized and held only every second weekend.
Learner-centered methods, such as Project Based Learning (PBL), Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), could be a solution for these schools, and to those groups of language learners, in or outside of Hungary, which are similarly mixed. Applying these learner-centered methods, originally created for English as a Second Language, requires some modifications, experience for the teacher, and preparation before the lessons. But it is not impossible to teach our language with these approaches.
Since Hungarian language instruction traditionally focuses on teaching adults, in particular university students, there is a finite amount of resource material for teaching children. Application of the methods mentioned above, however, can be adapted for young learners. This is what inspired us two years ago, when my colleague and I volunteered to share our experiences and good practices with teachers of Hungarian on our website: Midkid.org. Our purpose is to create a collection of ideas of how these learner-centered methods could be used during Hungarian weekend school lessons, and to support teachers of Hungarian worldwide.

Hungarian-born Imre Kiralfy (1845-1919) had created such success with the popular Earl's Court exhibitions in London, staged between 1885 and 1903, that he was given the task of leading the Franco-British Exhibition in 1908, for which he devised and created the White City site. This was to be the first of a string of Kiralfy-led White City productions which went on for some six years.

Kiralfy was a recognised showman and promoter in England, the United States and continental Europe. He utilised a formulaic approach to the successful creation of the spectacle, and by the time of the Japan-British Exhibition in 1910, he had a number of fairs and exhibitions to his credit.

He was fully cognisant of the potential of Japan's popularity with Western audiences. The craze for all things Japanese was at a high point, and crowds arrived in 1910 at the White City site from all over the United Kingdom, as well as from continental Europe.

In this paper, I will examine Kiralfy's extraordinary showmanship skills as they relate to the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910. During the period from May to October of that year, Kiralfy was able to attract over eight million visitors, exceeding even the numbers which turned out for the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, which was widely acknowledged to have set the standard by which all other expositions were judged.

The paper is to be presented by Steven B. Vardy and Agnes H. Vardy.

In the course of the four decades before the outbreak of World War I, well over a million Hungarians [Magyars] emigrated to the United States, mostly to the northeastern industrial cities of America. Among these cities was Cleveland, Ohio, which by 1914 had over 60,000 Hungarians, working in the steel mills and factories of that industrial city. Most of theses immigrants came as guest workers, but for several reasons at least three fourths of them remained here permanently.
The life and labors of these Hungarians has been chronicled by Susan M. Papp in her monograph, Hungarian Americans and their Communities of Cleveland (1981). What was still needed was the description of Cleveland as a “living city,” with two major centers of Hungarain life. These included the Buckeye Road Area on the East Side, and the Lorain Avenue Area on the West Side. Both of these were classical Little Hungaries that survived into the late 20th century.
The man who took on the task to describe these Little Hungaries was Imre Sári-Gál (1923-2006) -- a poet and amateur historian -- who did this in two separate volumes: Az amerikai Debrecen [The American Debrecen] (1966), and Cleveland Magyar Múzeum [The Cleveland Hungarian Museum] (1978),
Born into a peasant family in Füzesabony in eastern Hungary Imre Gál managed to rise above his original social class by virtue of his ability and willingness to study. He enrolled at a nearby Teachers’ College, where he earned a Teache’s Certificate in 1945, the year that brought Soviet Communist domination to Hungary. Although his social background should have been an advantage for him, because of his dedication to his nation and to his people, he could barely survive in Soviet-dominated Hungary.
After the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, Imre took the chance to leave his country and try his luck in the United States. After several years of training he became a heart surgery technician at the famed Cleveland Clinic, where he worked until his retirement in the late eighties.
In addtion to portraying life in Cleveland’s Little Hungaries, Imre also wrote poetry in which he described his struggles and his attachment to his two countries. After much soul-searching he repatriated to Hungary, hoping to find happiness in the country of his birth. That was not to be. By the early 21st century Hungary was not the country he had left behind. He also missed his America that had given him so much after his flight from Hungary. We encountered him in Budapest a few months before his death, where he revealed his yearning for the United States and the city of Cleveland.

The paper is based on the two years of research conducted by Jeffrey Kaplan and his colleagues at the Danube Institute in Budapest from 2019-2021 on the topic of contemporary anti-Semitism in Hungary. The study included personal interviews with over 30 leaders of the Hungarian Jewish community, Hungarian and international NGOs, and relevant scholars in the field. The research produced an international conference in 2021 titled “Anti-Semitism in Hungary: Appearance and Reality” in which every leader of the various streams of the Hungarian Jewish community, Hungarian and foreign NGOs and a representative of the government spoke, as well as an eponymous two volume anthology and several academic articles. The presentation would summarize the findings of the research as well as point towards the future of Hungarian-Jewish relations.
The paper is relevant to the theme of the conference in that it will focus on the current relationship between the various Jewish groups with the Hungarian government, with Israel both in terms of government and religion, and with the diaspora community in Israel. It will also document the alliances made after the wave of anti-Semitic attacks in 2011-12 with the Fidesz government, between the Orbán government and that of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, as well as internal alliances within the Hungarian Jewish community.

This research focuses on the comparison of school structure between The United States and Hungary. The goal is to advance exploration into finding the most suitable environment in education that allows students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to flourish in academia. Changing the understanding of ADHD and moving away from medicalization results in viewing this condition as a unique way of living. School procedure, an area where many children with ADHD struggle, should be considered a priority in treatment plans and adapt to changes in society and the current needs of all students.
Even with the stigmatization around learning disabilities, Hungary innately incorporates doctor recommended changes for this lifestyle. Where there may be a lack of funding or facility, Hungary makes up for in daily routine such as the use of food and play; two important areas for managing ADHD. Making a connection between Hungarian and American education systems can boost the quality of life for those with ADHD. The research employs semi structured interviews with teachers, administration, and school psychologists to gather insights on teaching strategies, mental health understanding, and views on free time. Data collection consists of surveys conducted
with students in grades 5-8 in both countries. The literature review is based on biological studies of social cognitive theory, epigenetic modifications of gene expression by lifestyle and environment, researched through the practice of rhythmanalysis. Viewing ADHD as environmentally based leaves room for the belief that ADHD advances the world rather than struggles to keep up with it.

The paper will deal with the physical, ideological and psychological aspects of dislocation in migrant and emigre communities, specifically Hungarians who had to flee their homeland in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and settle in the United States. As a child witness who lived through that cataclysmic time, I offer unique insights into the dynamics of ethnic communities and the process of acculturation.

Vannak nők, akiknek az élettörténete első pillantásra filmvászonra kívánkozik. Ilyen nő volt Alma Mahler, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, és ilyen a félig magyar, félig indiai származású festőművésznő (az indiai Frida Kahloként emlegetett) Amrita Sher-Gil #8222;életregénye” is. Ezen az "emlékezet-felidézésen” megismerkedhetünk a 20. század első felének izgalmas, az európai és az indiai mentalitást/hagyományokat sajátosan ötvöz? személyiségének életével, világával. Avagy ahogy saját életmottójában minderről ? maga írt/vallott volt: „Indiában tudok festeni. Máshol nem vagyok természetes, nincs kellő önbizalmam. Európa Picasso-é, Matisse-é, Braque-é és másoké. India csak az enyém.”

While the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and related Exodus are well-known, the critical role of Hungarian American community to the successful resettlement of over 36,000 Hungarian refugees is understudied. Drawing upon records of the President’s Committee for Hungarian Refugee Relief and local Hungarian-language newspapers, this presentation argues that local diasporic communities played a pivotal role in the US resettlement program. These sources reveal that local Hungarians worked to aid both their American and Hungarian counterparts in Austria, inside Camp Kilmer, and in local communities across the US. Recovering these actions requires two interconnected interpretative steps.
First, recognizing that while the refugee resettlement programs were global in scale in the US they were executed locally; thus, detailed attention to disparate local actions is required. Unfortunately, hyperlocal activities are also most easily lost to the unknowable past as they leave fewer and less-preserved records than national bureaucracies. However, local diasporic newspapers provide a lens into the actions of local Hungarian communities, albeit an incomplete one.
The second interpretive step is recognizing that Hungarian contributions were documented but coded. The most common encodings involve language with staff and volunteers labeled as “Hungarian-speaking” or “translator.” Then as now, there is negligible interest in learning magyarul outside of the diaspora, meaning that these terms can be understood to represent diasporic contributions.
By combining hyperlocal, Hungarian-language sources with decoded, English-language, ones it is possible to reconstruct the critical and overlooked contributions of the Hungarian American community to the work of the US government-led resettlement program.

Two contemporary novels, published within a year of each other, transport us back to life under Soviet control in Kádár's Hungary and Ceauşescu's Romania. Ferenc Barnás's The Ninth (A Kilencedik) and György Dragomán's The White King (A Fehér Király), published in 2006 and 2005 respectively and rendered into English by the gifted translator Paul Olchváry, are initiation or coming-of-age novels that can also be classified as trauma literature. Since the novels are semi-autobiographical with narrators about the same age as their authors were at the time the stories take place, they are historically important as literary forms of “bearing witness”. The narrator protagonists of these novels are young boys, aged 9 and 11. They are “outsiders”, not because of anything they have done, but simply because of who they are: sons of fathers deemed “unreliable” by the all-powerful Communist Party. Thus, their crises have existential dimensions. If they are literally going to survive, they must find some way to adapt. However, their environment offers little in the way of acceptable options. How are they to cope in a world which seems to offer them no viable future?
Basic to their predicament is an unjust legal and social system, based not on “the communal establishment of universal values”, but on the will of a small group of Party members whose chief function is to promote themselves and perpetuate the system. To keep the Party in power, it doles out perks and privileges to the Party faithful and terrorizes anyone who might object. Long gone is the world of the classic education novel (Bildungsroman) Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre), where the process of maturation leads to a more or less harmonious integration into society. Instead, these protagonists live in a post-Nietzschean world of lost values that has more in common with the experience of the Absurd in Camus's The Outsider (L'Étranger)or Beckett's Waiting for Godot than the more harmonious world of Goethe's masterpiece.

Experiential learning (EL) is a constructivist learning theory in which following reflective observation learners create new concepts. In a 4-stage model for EL (Kolb cycle), new knowledge is created through transformation of in-person, hands-on experiences. Learners a/ encounter critical new experiences, b/ asked to reflect on those, c/ formulate their own concepts and d/ test them at their next round of real-life encounter to allow refinement of these. We were interested if serial Kolb cycles could lead to deeper learning. Authors showcase two successful examples of EL in medical education to illustrate its spectrum. One is a semester long Cancer Survivorship class for pre-clinical US medical students: following a series of real-life encounters - learners create and evaluate their thoughts in 4 domains: aspects of survivorship, inter-professional teamwork, caregivers’ issues and the illness experience. Testing how newly formed ideas perform when meeting real cancer survivors, allows a practical assessment of their knowledge and skills. Experiential learning was also utilized during a clinical pediatric elective, where following initial patient encounters, Hungarian pediatric residents are asked to create their own conclusions and guiding principles, then evaluate them during subsequent patient visits. Authors will present their experiences in a tertiary neuropediatric center in Budapest, collected through observation of 25+ new-residents on short term neuropediatric rotations. By the conclusion of the talk, audience will recognize EL, as a form of powerful constructivist learning both in pre-clinical and clinical settings in medical education across different educational systems in Hungary and the US.

Building on the pioneering translations of László Krasznahorkai's novels by the poet George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet's versions of Krasznahorkai's Seibo There Below (2013) and, most recently, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming (2019) have firmly established him as by far the best-known Hungarian writer in the English-speaking world. The critic Rita Horányi has called Mulzet's early translation of the very short but dense text ÁllatVanBent (2010) as Animalinside, "the most successful English translation of Krasznahorkai's work", while pointing out that sometimes "the translation suggests that the original text uses language in a manner that is more deliberately strange than is actually the case." (Horányi 2018). This paper is a detailed, holistic examination of Mulzet's treatment of the text of ÁllatVanBent and makes a clear case for the truth of Horányi's latter statement (and, more broadly, against Mulzet's aggressive foreignization of the text), thus also challenging Horányi's former claim.