This panel brings together three short presentations that collectively explore the aftermath and global impact of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Each expose employs unique methodologies and focuses on different aspects of the Hungarian diaspora, yet they are united by common themes of identity, migration, and influence in the wake of upheaval.

Nóra Deák (moderator), Secretariat of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. deak.nora@titkarsag.mta.hu;

Panel:Tamás Scheibner, in "Trailblazers of Change: The Global Impact of the Rockefeller Foundation's Hungarian Refugee Scholars Program," employs biographical and historical analysis to assess the contributions of Hungarian émigré scholars. He highlights their role as cultural mediators and agents of change, significantly impacting global academia and politics.

Kinga Constantinovits' "Preserving Identity: The Hungarian Diaspora in Sydney" adopts an ethnographic approach. Utilizing oral history and archival research, it delves into the maintenance of cultural identity among Hungarian Australians. Focusing on language, traditions, and the collective memory of the 1956 revolution, this study reveals the methods employed to sustain heritage within a diasporic context.

Zsolt Máté's "Should I Stay or Should I Go? The Hungarian Participation at the 1956 Melbourne Summer Olympics" examines the complex decisions faced by Hungarian athletes during the national upheaval. Incorporating oral-history interviews and secret service records, Máté investigates the interplay between sports, politics, and personal choices amid forced migration. Collectively, these presentations offer a multi-dimensional view of the Hungarian exodus of 1956, revealing the complex interplay between personal choices, cultural preservation, and global influence.

In 2025, 35 years after the fall of state socialism, Hungary faces deep social and economic fragmentation, with one-fourth of the population living in systemic poverty. One of society's biggest challenges is the lack of social solidarity as a resource for building bridges and tackling brokenness from within. Amid this crisis, voluntary organizations, such as the Hungarian Charity Service of Malta, play a crucial role in fostering social solidarity by providing daily help to those in need. This study examines how volunteers engaged in community service negotiate their experiences and identities through personal storytelling, with a focus on the issue of social solidarity. It presents findings from an analysis of 6 focus group interviews with 17 members in three local, small-town chapters of the Hungarian Charity Service of Malta. The study explores how volunteers co-construct their experiences, negotiate their ethnic belonging to build personal agency, and frame the meaning of choice in volunteer work. The focus group setting fosters the co-construction of personal experiences and foregrounds how one’s decision to engage in volunteer work affects their own lives just as profoundly as the lives of their clients. These narratives construct and reinforce storytellers' identities by mapping and reimagining the social and cultural context of remembered experiences. Findings suggest that voluntary community help emerges at the intersection of community narratives and personal stories, enabling volunteers to understand their own life experiences and mentalize and interpret their clients' socially contextualized needs.

In the years following WW II Hungary experienced the dismantling of the traditional social order, bringing about a radical transformation of Hungarian Society. Arrests among the traditional leadership and the exodus to the West were followed by measures to eliminate the existing leadership and replace it with those loyal to the new regime. A major focus of this transformation was the move to eliminate independent organizations of Hungarian youth and to educate a new generation loyal to the new regime and its ideology.
In 1946 a major initiative was begun to form a new more democratic elite with the founding of the National Association of Folk Colleges. NÉKOSZ, intended to educate talented peasant, worker, and urban youth, aimed to create a new generation, the future leadership. This presentation will focus on the hopes engendered by NÉKOSZ for the formation of this new generation, based on “the people,” who would become the leaders of a new democratic regime. Yet the very independence of the 120 People’s Colleges raised suspicions of the regime, leading to its demise with the formation of the totalitarian one party state.

Ebben - a szervező intézmény társadalmi hátterére való tekintettel - röviden értelmezem a szórvány és a diaszpóra kettősséget, az eltérő kapcsolódást és funkciót a nemzetépítésben, utána a kárpát-medencei folyamatokat (szórványosodás-nyelvhatár vándorlása), majd végül a mai helyzetet mutatom be.

In my paper I want to present the history of the Partium Christian University from Nagyvárad, Romania. The university was set up after the events of 1989 in order to help the ethnic Hungarians to study in their native tongue. It was the first Hungarian university after more than forty years of Communism. The beginnings were characterized by many hardships but the founders believed in their dream to have a university where the language of instruction would be only Hungarian and that would give the possibility to the Hungarians from Transylvania to study on their native tongue. I will offer a detailed study of the university. I will present the different specializations from the beginnings till nowadays.

In 2009, Nazareth College in Rochester and the University of Pannonia in Veszprém decided to start up a new joint master’s program in American studies. The two institutions have worked out all the details of the joint program, which is currently in the process of being accredited.
The Master of Arts degree in American Studies is designed to facilitate the academic and professional development of individuals who have studied some aspect of American history, language or culture as undergraduates, and to provide interdisciplinary study and preparation for those who wish to gain entry into broadly conceived applied fields such as education, government or international service. Students receive the preparation needed to be active and informed members of their academic and professional communities, and to have a keen awareness of issues and trends in the US and of global factors in culture and politics. Emphasis is placed on the role of globalization and the need for cultural competencies.
This interdisciplinary M.A. in American Studies will appeal to students with diverse academic interests and career goals. Some may be seeking New York State professional certification. Some students may be preparing to pursue a doctorate in American Studies or in English Language and Literature, American history, American philosophy, Sociology, or International Studies. The international component in Eastern Europe may be particularly attractive to students pursuing careers in diplomacy or in service to international NGOs. The attraction for international students is a degree from an American institution with an excellent curriculum in American Studies and an opportunity to conduct original research in the United States in the upstate New York region, which is rich in archival and cultural resources.
The joint American Studies master’s program is expected to attract a lot of attention. Even though programs in the humanities are normally not considered to be among the most popular ones, an American Studies program, especially a joint one by Nazareth College and the University of Pannonia seems to be an exception as it offers several kinds of advantage for several kinds of potential students: members of the Hungarian communities in any country may find it an excellent opportunity for their children to earn a valuable degree and to learn about their Hungarian roots – a way to learn the language and familiarize themselves with the culture – a unique experience, which would be difficult to do without traveling to Hungary. As a result of this, part of the recruitment will concentrate on Hungarians outside their mother country – this includes a few hundred thousand up to possibly a few million people – via their links to Hungarian minority organizations.
The conference offers a great chance to present this bridge under construction, which will not only bring together Hungarians with Hungarians on the other side of the Atlantic, but with Americans and other nationalities to offer them a unique (multi)cultural experience.

The dish we call “goulash” was born, famously, on the grasslands of Hungary. A filling soup of beef, onions, (usually) potatoes and pasta, and seasoned generously with paprika, it began its career as food for cattlemen: the name comes from the Hungarian gulyas, or “cowboy.” It is the pride of Hungarian cuisine and Hungarian culture’s mealtime ambassador to the world. But Googling a recipe for it today yields version after version containing “un-Hungarian” combinations of ingredients—Worcestershire sauce, “Italian seasoning,” dill pickles, sweet corn, soy sauce—that more evokes Hamburger Helper than the hardy herdsman.

This paper aims to find out how gulyasleves, “cowboy soup,” turned into an anything-goes mish-mash, and to explore the changing cultural significance of the dish as it transitioned from immigrant cuisine to mainstream Americana. How did regional influences shape this evolution? When, where, and in what circumstances did goulash lose its “Hungarianness?” And what does all of this say about how dishes—and entire cuisines—change (or not) as they are passed from one socio-cultural setting to another? To investigate these questions, I will be combing 19th/20th century cookbooks, newspapers, menus, and other sources, mapping out the form and meaning of “goulash” across the U.S.A.

The COVID-affected year of 2021 brought a breakthrough in the research of the history of Hungarian prisoners and civilian internees in Soviet captivity. In 2015 Hungarian government declared that year and the following year as the Year of Remembrance of Hungarian Prisoners in Soviet Captivity during and after the Second World War. Since then, the story of the prisoners has attracted the attention not only of historians but also of the general public. The Hungarian National Archives purchased copies of 682,000 personal files of Hungarian prisoners from the Russian National Archives. Each file contains personal details of the prisoners, the places of captivity in the Soviet Union, and the date of repatriation or death. The Hungarian National Archives made this unique resource available online in February 2021, digitised and accessible to all. The proposed presentation will tell, how this new source has impacted research on the history of Hungarian prisoners in the Soviet Union in general and the longstanding debate on prisoners statistics in particular. It will also talk about the debates on memorial politics on the issue of POWs and civilian internees. The paper will also point the contradiction that, while the government commemorates the Hungarian victims of the Soviet forced labor camps years after year, it blames mainly the Western powers for their tragic fate.

The liberal international order (LIO), created by the USA after 1945, is changing rapidly and massively with the emergence of China as a new potential hegemon, the increase of crises, and the changing of the political landscape. Hungary has been an advocate of a new era in international relations, starting with the concept of the illiberal democracy by Viktor Orban. The Hungarian PM’s ideas have been welcomed among conservatives in the United States, especially after 2021. As a more prepared Trump government takes the helm of the US leadership from 2025, the so-called illiberal ideology can gain more relevance in US foreign policy too. However, even though there are multiple similarities with the future Trump administration, there will be multiple differences too. The material is based on analyzing primary and secondary documents, would look at this new illiberal concept, and how it can change the current international order. It would highlight what the key similarities and differences are between the visions of Fidesz and the Republicans, and how the two political groupings started to have closer contacts and cooperated with each other in recent years.

My proposed paper sets out to examine the representation of the New Woman in Margit Kaffka's fiction. M uch of earlier examination of Kaffka's novels focused on their embeddedness in history, and the decay of the Hungarian gentry, but Kaffka's heroines deserve an equal amount of attention from the perspective of women's emancipation. The heroines of Colours and Years and Maria évei explore the new questions of women's professionalism, access of the public sphere, and they also analyze the position of women in the domestic sphere.

An article on Nicholas Deak published in the June 12, 1964 issue of Time magazine is the source of this moniker. His bio in brief: Nicholas Louis Deak was born in 1905 in Hateg/Hátszeg, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, immigrated to the USA in 1939 and was murdered in 1985. In between these dates, Deak had an exciting life, though not as violent as Bond’s, from joining the OSS during WWII to establishing Deak & Co after the war. His holdings grew from a small export-import firm in 1946 to a financial empire in the 1980s which included currency exchange offices all over the world, banks in the US, Switzerland and Austria, and various other trading houses. As Deak & Co grew newer and newer business were added. From the mid1970s the company was often in the news, but the news were frequently bad. The IRS investigated the firm’s currency exchange operations and was found violating the Bank Secrecy Act (1970) and aiding money laundering activities of drug dealers. The Congressional hearings (1976) on corporate corruption exposed the firm’s role in the Lockheed bribery scandal. As customers “ran” from the firm, Deak & Co was forced into bankruptcy in 1984. In 1985 he was shot dead in his office, by a woman, with no conclusive motive for the murder. Although the following year the firm emerged from bankruptcy, without Deak at the helm, in a couple of years, however, it disappeared from the scene. This presentation will look at Deak’s life and analyze how he and his firm reacted to and tried to influence the changing financial landscape.

Vice President Richard Nixon paid a flying visit to Austria after the first major – 15,000 – quota increase for Hungarian refugees in December 1956, with a mission, which was also called Operation Mercy just like the action to resettle refugees in the United States, to find facts about the refugee crisis and make suggestions for an immigration reform. During his trip to Austria Nixon not only met with Austrian politicians and officials of relief organizations, not only visited refugee camps, but he went on a rather unnecessary night escapade near the border to pick up recent refugees. After Christmas, yet before he finalized his report to President Eisenhower, he made a one-day visit to Camp Kilmer, NJ to meet the President’s Committee and the newly arrived refugees in the Joyce Kilmer Reception Center. His suggestions for a new Immigration Law – unfortunately – were not accepted, yet temporary quotas were added several times by the President.
After two unsuccessful campaigns, Nixon with his family and friends took a Summer vacation in Europe and Egypt, including the only country in the Soviet block: Hungary, in 1963. What were his impressions of the refugees in 1956, and the Hungarian capital in general while walking on the streets of, or visiting a mid-week market in Budapest? I’ll also discuss his contacts with emigré politicians and organizations, and how they might have influenced his attitude towards Hungarians.

A city’s cafes, bars and other semi-public venues constitute a significant part of residents’ and tourists’ everyday geographies of sociality: when friends gather for a birthday, when colleagues meet for lunch, or when tourists search for the best selfie, they rely on—and contribute to—such spaces’ reputations to decide where they might ‘fit in’. Budapest is no exception, and spaces ranging from classical cafes to the so-called romkocsmák continue to attract waves of customers while contributing to significant physical and social transformations in the surrounding urban environment. This paper will draw on ethnographic fieldwork to explore the intertwined and changing landscapes of Budapest and its hospitality venues, focusing particularly on contemporary groups working to re-imagine the cafe/bar as a social enterprise designed to support civil society and activist work. It will also involve looking back at counter-cultural spaces from Budapest’s past—such as Tilos az Á and Fekete Lyuk—to trace lineages and transformations that contextualise Budapest’s current ’scene.’ While Habermas famously described the cafe as an idealised public sphere, the aim of this talk will be instead to explore how the politics, sociality and culture of the public sphere is experienced in different-yet-interconnected ways in the various bars and cafes of Budapest.

As a researcher of Miksa Fenyő, Nyugat and the role played by literary journals in shaping Hungarian literature, in this lecture I will focus on the unpublished correspondence between Miksa Fenyő and Pál Ignotus, editor of the diaspora journal, Irodalmi Újság [Literary News]. From his home in New York City, Miksa Fenyő remained a participant in emigré circles while maintaining contact with figures from the Nyugat circle, such as Anna Lesznai and Pál Igntous, the son of Nyugat’s famed critic and editor, Ignotus. In Fenyő’s oeuvre, his years spent in New York also marked a resurgence in critical and literary works, many of which were published in diaspora journals. While Fenyő was clearly motivated by the need to remain active in the world of Hungarian literature, his little-known correspondence with Pál Ignotus also reveals how Fenyő, the former editor of Hungarian literature’s most prestigious, modern literary journal, supported and guided Pál Ignotus in his attempt to edit Irodalmi Újság. Following a brief overview of the Hungarian-language literary journals published in the post-war era, I will discuss Pál Ignotus and Fenyő’s correspondence in an attempt to reconstruct how Hungarian authors living in the diaspora maintained their authorial identities in an English-speaking environment.

Előadásom a következőket foglalja magába:

A Hírlevél 15 éves múltjának rövid ismertetése, alakulása és fejlődése a mai napig, ahogy az Észak Amerika-i magyar internetes média meghatározó intézménnyé vált.

A Nyugati Hírlevél jellemzése, hozzáférhetősége, szerepe és fontossága az Észak Amerikai magyar kultúrélet tudosításában.

A hírlevél olvasói rétege, az érdeklődők, a kapcsolatok a különböző egyénekkel és emigráns csoportokkal, Magyarországgal. Kik a segítőtársak?

A hírszerzés módja és a hírhálózat , a Hírlevél adatbázisa.

Hogyan tovább?

Blogok és internetes csoportok, az amerikai magyar honlapok hogyan könnyítik a Hírlevél munkáját illetve, hogyan változtatják meg az új alkalmazkodási követelményeket.

www.hhrf.org/nyugatihirlevel
www.hungarla.com

Diaries and notes were written in every place where Jews lived under Nazi rule—ghettos, camps, hideouts, forests—by men and women of all professions. It is impossible today to assess the scope of this written material, for much was lost. Still, it seems that about 400 diaries have been traced so far—more than half of them written in Poland—and that most of the diaries published now were written by adults in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna and Lodz.
(Dina Porat, The Vilna Ghetto Diaries)

As someone first introduced to Holocaust literature through The Diary of Anne Frank, Dina Porat’s examination of the Vilna Ghetto diaries not only opened my eyes to the relative scarcity of extant Holocaust journals, it also underscored my already high consideration of Az elsodort ország. A journal recorded by the Hungarian author and Nyugat editor, Miksa Fenyő, this work details the author’s months in hiding during the Hungarian Holocaust, as set to paper by a vivid personality whose literary skill was only surpassed by an intimate familiarity with Hungary’s art and political scene at this time. While my lecture will draw from examinations of Polish Holocaust journals—including studies by Aharon Appelfeld, David Engel, Robert Moses Shapiro—in an attempt to place Fenyő’s journal within the broader context of narrative techniques relevant to Holocaust literature, it is my intent to interpret Fenyő’s frequent references to “active observation” through the lens of his work as an impressionistic critic for the literary journal, Nyugat. As true as it is that Holocaust diaries form an individual’s struggle to preserve a sense of self in the face of a daily destruction, I would like to pose the question of whether Holocaust narratives can only be analyzed within the constraints of then or possibly after—what about the role of before?

Az Olvasófüzeteket olyan idegen nyelvi környezetben élő, magyar nyelvi gyökerekkel rendelkező felnőttek számára állítottuk össze, akik a magyar alapszókincs birtokában magyar kommunikációs, valamint alapfokú olvasási készséggel rendelkeznek. A nyelv ismeretének ezen a szintjén legtöbbjük már motivált, hogy a tankönyvek mesterséges szövegein túl élő magyar nyelvi szövegeket olvassanak. Ám szembesülnek azzal a ténnyel, hogy a szépirodalmi szövegek komoly - nemvárt - nehézséget jelentenek számukra.
A magyar irodalom néhány célszerűen választott alkotását - a kiválasztott részleteket hallgatóink nyelvi ismereti szintjéhez igazítva – használjuk a tanítás során. Célunk, hogy az irodalmi művel való ismerkedés illúziója megmaradjon, de az írások számukra nyelvileg érthetőek legyenek.
A 2012-2013-es tanévben 2 csoportban, csoportonként 5 hallgató használta az Olvasófüzeteket (1. és 2. füzet). Tanári vezetés mellett, tizenkét, alkalmanként kétórás foglalkozásokon dolgozták fel a tanítási egységeket:
- Olvasmány, mely féloldalnyi, minimális mértékben változtatott irodalmi szöveg;
- Szómagyarázat, a „nehéz” szavak megbeszélése;
- A szókincs bővítése, szólások, szóláshasonlatok és közmondások segítségével;
- Szövegértelmezés, irányított kérdésekkel;
- Írásbeli feladatok, a részlet mondanivalójának megerősítésére;
- Nyelvtani gyakorlatok, a szöveg nyelvtani struktúrájának tudatosítására;
- Kiejtési feladatok, az élő magyar beszéd fejlesztésére.

A hallgatók az Olvasófüzeteket nagy örömmel fogadták. Tapasztalataink szerint a csoportok igen különböző tudásszintű tanulóival is lehetett együtt dolgozni a strukturált, következetesen felépített olvasmány-egységek segítségével.
A 3. és a 4. Olvasófüzet a 2013 őszi szemeszterében kerül kipróbálásra.
Az Olvasófüzeteket ajánljuk egyéni és tanár vezette tanuláshoz.

The Hungarian born Terézia Mora (b. 1971) was 19 when she moved to Germany/Berlin and in a decade time she became one of the leading and most prolific prosaists of contemporary literature written in German. For her works she has already received all of the most important German literary prises. However German critics seems to not being able to decipher the secret of her writing. Beside translating the best Hungarian prosaists into German (i.a. István Örkény or Péter Eszterházy), writting screen plays she is the author of three novels and a collection of short stories. The present paper demonstrates how do the two most important Hungarian prosa traditions influenced her style, and how does Hungarian existencial poetry manifest in the metaphoricity of her work.

As culture, the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group, (Webster, p. 314) is transmitted through language, it should be taught accordingly. Consequently, teaching a foreign language is inseparable from incorporating the teaching of the culture of the target community into the curriculum.
Language use does not only mean linguistically correct use of discourse, it is also of importance that language be used in a culturally correct way. To this end, the cultural competence of the foreign language learner should be developed from the first day of instruction. This is even more so if the foreign language is taught in the host country, and the language learner needs to communicate with native speakers from the very beginning.
Hungarian as a foreign language is no exception in this respect. In my talk, based on my experience of teaching foreign students at the University of Debrecen for several years, I would like to argue that language and culture are intertwined. This is manifested in my coursebook for beginners: Hungarian Language and Culture. After a brief overview of the structure and the language content of the book, I will discuss how the cultural literacy of students coming from a variety of cultures can be developed in a way that helps them master Hungarian as a second language and its culturally correct use. I will demonstrate how various aspects of Hungarian culture are presented in the coursebook.

References:
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster Inc., 1987.
Rácz, Edit. Hungarian Language and Culture – A Coursebook for Beginners. Debrecen: Debrecen University Press, 2012.

That the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s 1955 recording of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is today viewed as a definitive source is perhaps well-known among scholars, performers, and enthusiasts alike, particularly in the United States. But how did it earn that designation, and what does that appellation really mean when numerous recordings of merit exist? For example, the work’s early recording history includes two others that may be considered “authentic editions,” as the conductors each had intimate knowledge of Bartók’s unpublished score and corrections. Koussevitzky’s 1944 live recording holds significance as the first and likely the only surviving one made in the composer’s lifetime, and Reiner’s 1946 recording with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra was the work’s first commercial recording.
Drawing on numerous recordings, historical and contemporary reviews, and Reiner’s own writings and interviews, this paper offers a more nuanced understanding of the CSO recording’s enduring prominence. Improved recording technologies in the 1950s as well as the orchestra’s apparent musicianship certainly eschew potential “distortions,” lending to the recording’s perceived supremacy, but period perceptions of Reiner’s supposed insider knowledge of Bartók’s “intentions” among the musical press likewise bolstered its status as the unadulterated recorded standard. By situating the CSO’s recording in the context of these tangible and rhetorical factors, I suggest a critical assessment of its assumed authenticity, highlighting the concerted and constructed nature of the recording’s legacy and the “finality” of recorded editions themselves.