Rebuilt, and Rebuilt Again

In the mid 70’s I had a colleague in university named Bill Dabas. He used to drink a certain ice tea that came in a green can (He used to collect the cans so we could say Dabas liked to collect the Doboz [Hungarian for can] as a little play on words). He would stack the cans against the wall of his dormitory room. When we would come in after studying as a group, many times after 2 am, we would go up the stairs of the building. The inside wall of his room where he would collect and carefully stack his hundreds of empty cans was the same outside wall that went along the stairway. We would bang the wall of the wood frame building (in California only this construction is allowed because of earthquakes) and the vibration and shock of the blow would cause the cans to fall, making a terrible noise. This usually woke him up and always forced him to restack the cans the next day. He always restacked them in the same place, allowing us to repeat the scene several times.

This is a small parable of Hungarian history isn’t it? As the national anthem tells and since it was written, three times more others came in and devastated the nation. The Hungarians rebuilt, till the next devastation! They rebuilt again, carefully and meticulously trying to restore the original form of what was destroyed!

Just so you know, my Hungarian reader, that we were not so bad willed toward him as he also was a master at practical jokes and this was just part of dormitory life for young men full of energy without much purpose! I will also tell you one of his best jokes. We would leave our doors unlocked, as no one feared anyone would steal from one another. Bill would put on a gorilla mask in the deep of the night, go into colleagues rooms, stand over their beds shining a flashlight on his face and would growl until the poor fellow would wake up and see a hideous face looking over him. Then he would spend days laughing and telling about the different reactions he got from startling them.

In our serious moments, Bill and I would have long conversations about our families. His mother was American but his father was one of the 200,000 Hungarians who escaped the country in 1956. His father would always remind him about his Hungarian heritage and that he should be proud to have a Hungarian name. He always reminded him to behave as a correct person so that he would never bring shame to the fact that he was the son of a Hungarian. That was the first time I understood of the intense Hungarian national pride- that one not only represents himself as an individual (as Americans tend too often only look at the individual aspect) but also one’s behavior reflects one’s nationality. This interested me because I lived as a minority in the U.S., being Hispanic and had heard this many times from my relatives also though I must confess, though both were intertwined, it was more often toward the reflection of my family than nationality.

Until talking with Bill, I knew very little about Hungary. I heard that there were gypsies there. I knew from television that the beautiful Gabor sisters, especially Zsa Zsa and Eva came from Hungary and if they represented Hungarian women, then they must be some of the most elegant women on the face of the earth!

I vaguely knew about the revolution in 1956, since they taught us in school that communism was the greatest evil on earth and that the Hungarians were lonely heroes in fighting totalitarianism. I don’t want to get too political in this book, but of course they neglected to tell us that the U.S., under Eisenhower, supposedly the great opponent of communism, did nothing to help the Hungarians, except through Radio Free Europe, encourage them to make this great sacrifice of life and property. Other than those few facts, I am sorry to say that our American education did not inform us so well about the rest of the world.

Hungarian Soul, mentality, roots, values