Assimilation

Following the October 23, 1956 events in Hungary about 200,000 people left the country. As I read the statistics 30,000 came to the US. I always thought it was more but this what the statistics say so who am I to argue?

Hungarians have a peculiar habit, wherever they go they want to blend in, they want to assimilate and that is not a bad thing if one chose to live in a foreign place. This works in most countries except maybe in Africa. But who knows? Anyway assimilating, blending in is a long process but we are pretty good at it.

Many single Hungarians married non-Hungarians, became "lovers" of baseball and American football. They loved hamburgers, hot dogs and rare steaks. Marrying non-Hungarians brought forward a situation I am taking issue with.

Some people had very bad experiences while living in Hungary and made every effort to forget where they came from. This resulted in not speaking their native tongue. Ok, when one has a non-Hungarian spouse, it is understandable that English is the one always spoken. I for one always had a Hungarian wife but with the exception of my short dishwasher career never ever worked in a Hungarian speaking environment.

Now, after all this babbling what is it that I want to say? What I want to say is that the result of all the attempts of assimilation most of the children these people have do not speak Hungarian. The parents never thought it was necessary to teach them. I had friends, Hungarian couples whose children were never thought the language and I find it interesting.

I always believed that more languages a person speaks the wider his/her intelligentsia is. Granted, Hungarian is not a world language like English, French, German, Chinese or Spanish but still, learning it is not a shame or a hindrance.

Many times I met people with obvious Hungarian names and when I inquired, I was told that their parents or grandparents were Hungarians but themselves never learned the language. I could never understand this. In my family, Abigail grew up in this country and speaks perfect Hungarian so do my wife's other two grown up kids. Actually, Abigail took Spanish in school so she has an inkling to that language. 

In my younger years I went to a school where they thought French then Russian. I also took some courses in German and English. Now only Hungarian and English remained in my brain. The others must be there somewhere but if they are they are buried deep.

Speaking for myself, I think I assimilated pretty well in all these decades even though I still don't understand American football and do not like baseball.