Hungarian Studies Review Spring-Fall, 2006 [antikvár]

Preface: Perceptions of Hungary and Hungarians Throughout the Centuries Nândor Dreisziger 2006 is a special year in the evolution of the Hungarian communities of North America, and especially, Canada. It marks the fiftieth anniversary of the coming of the refugees of the 1956 anti-Soviet revolution in Hungary. With the arrival of those refugees, the writer of these lines included, the life of Canada's Magyar colonies was revitalized. With over 38,000 additional Hungarians settling in Canada, a new era began in the Magyar neighbourhoods of metropolitan centres such as Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, as well as smaller settlements. With this event commenced what has been called the "golden age" of the Hungarian ethnic group in this country.1 To celebrate this anniversary we plan to publish two volumes of our journal, both of them bulkier than has been our tradition in the past. For the first of our "1956" commemorative issues we present a volume of essays that, on first impression, contains a selection of articles on an assortment of subjects with no manifest correlation to each other. Nevertheless, the papers have one over-riding theme, since to a greater or lesser degree all of them deal with the image Hungary and/or Hungarians at home or abroad projected to the outside world. For this reason we feel entitled to call the volume "The Image of Hungary and Hungarians." The very first essay in the collection, by George Bisztray, our journal's former co-editor, treats the subject of what impression Hungary made on foreign visitors from late medieval times to the middle of the nineteenth century. The following paper, that of Zoltán Fejős, the C.E.O. of Hungary's Museum of Ethnography, examines the evolution of "mother tongue" education in early Hungarian-American communities and concludes that, among other things, the ethnic schools Magyar immigrants established at the turn of the last century, bolstered above all their self-image — and by doing so contributed to the preservation of their ethnic consciousness.