{"id":1147,"date":"2019-01-21T15:10:10","date_gmt":"2019-01-21T15:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/?p=1147"},"modified":"2020-07-03T01:24:42","modified_gmt":"2020-07-03T00:24:42","slug":"stigmata","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2019\/01\/21\/stigmata\/","title":{"rendered":"Stigmata"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"No, the fear and ambivalence of Hungarian Jewry was not because of 50 years of communism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My parents left in 1948, when I was three.
\nI had been baptized in Budapest,
\nand I didn\u2019t learn that I was jewish till I was nine,
\nin Montreal.
\nOther jews of Hungarian origin in Canada did not learn till they were adults
\n\u2014 and some are still in denial to this day.<\/p>\n

Nor did it start with the Shoah.<\/p>\n

Bigotry, oppression and \u00a0pogroms had been ongoing for centuries.<\/p>\n

My father converted when he was 19, in 1919,
\nbecause of numerus clausus<\/i>,
\nchanged his name from Hesslein to “Harnad,”
\nthen my mother<\/a>‘s from (J\u00fcdin) S\u00fcss to “Simoni”.
\n(Nor did it save them from having to go underground with a false identity in 1944.
\nAnd forty members of my family on both sides were exterminated<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

No, the fear and ambivalence of Hungarian Jewry was not because of 50 years of communism.<\/p>\n

One lifetime in Hungary will do that for you,
\nor even just its aftermath.<\/p>\n

\n

Postscript:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many years ago, in the 1970s, when I lived in Princeton and my brother was visiting, we went to a Hungarian bookstore in nearby New Bunswick (NJ) where there has been a Hungarian emigr\u00e9 community since the early 1900s<\/a>). We shook hands with the owner, a Mr. Somodi, who immediately began to address us \u201cper du\u201d (tegez\u00e9s), delighted to hear that Hungarians who had emigrated at a young age so long ago (1949) still spoke Hungarian.<\/p>\n

(I remember that in browsing the books that was the first time I came across a book about the Scythian origins of Hungarian\u2026)<\/p>\n

Well, we got around to inquiring about Hungarian restaurants in New Brunswick \u201cbecause there are quite a few Hungarians living in Princeton.\u201d<\/p>\n

He asked: \u201cReally? Who are these Hungarians?\u201d<\/p>\n

I cited, as an example, Eugene Wigner<\/a> (Wigner Jen\u0151, a Nobel laureate).<\/p>\n

I can still remember Somodi\u2019s words, from 40 years ago (no need to translate them into English):<\/p>\n

\u201cWigner? H\u00e1t az nem Magyar, az Zsid\u00f3!\u201d<\/p>\n

(Enlightened, by inference, about our likely ethnicity, I think he suspended the \u201cper du,\u201d and we suspended our browsing\u2026)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, the fear and ambivalence of Hungarian Jewry was not because of 50 years of communism. My parents left in 1948, when I was three. I had been baptized in Budapest, and I didn\u2019t learn that I was jewish till I was nine, in Montreal. Other jews of Hungarian origin in Canada did not learn … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Stigmata”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1147"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1421,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions\/1421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}