Tag: history

The Evolving Ethnic Character

November 5, 2024

During the late 1950s, I worked alongside Steve as a draftsman at the Buildings and Grounds Department of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Although we were recent Hungarian immigrants, we differed in our behavior in the office; he used to bring his breakfast to work unlike me, I ate at home. He spread some grease paper on his drafting table and ate his breakfast of smelly, garlicky sausage with a thick slice of brown bread. The powerful smell permeating the room bothered the rest of us working there, but nobody wanted to tell him to eat his breakfast at home and save us from the unpleasant smells. Eating a smelly breakfast at work was not Canadian, and still is not. I am not sure if that behavior was Hungarian. However, I heard Steve became a successful architect and integrated into Canadian society in a few years.

In contrast to Steve, some individuals never assimilate into the local culture and instead choose to return home. A Hungarian friend’s mother embraced women’s freedom in Canada and entered the workforce. Her husband was not as successful, and he felt he had lost his masculine dominance in the household, so he returned to Hungary, but the wife stayed in Canada with the children.

I do not know how others in Vancouver perceived my ethnicity when I arrived in Canada in the late 1950s, except that they noticed my English language skills and accent. I improved in record time and assimilated into local culture in many other ways.

One strategy I used was always to try to fit in and go with the flow; for example, I acquired a taste for beer when I drank with my classmates while finishing architectural projects at all-night sessions at the UBC School of Architecture.  I was not too fond of beer then, but drinking with my classmates led me to develop a taste for it.

Other opportunities for cultural assimilation arose when I attended concerts with Elvis Presley at the PNE and Dave Brubeck at the old Georgia Auditorium in Vancouver. Later on, I acquired a taste for rock music. My father could not understand why I listened to The Grateful Dead, The Bachman Turner Overdrive, Credence Clearwater Revival, and their ilk; he thought music was only classical.  

I further embraced local culture when we started camping and canoeing after marriage. Later, we traveled widely in a tent trailer across Canada with our children and a dog. After getting tired of hauling a tent trailer, we bought a cottage. And cottaging is a Canadian thing; only a couple of immigrants own cottages out of a hundred neighbors where our cottage is (I realize immigrants may not have the money for a cottage).

While I have been in North America since 1957 and consider myself part of North American culture, I am always intrigued when I hear Hungarian being spoken. My language abilities in Hungarian are equivalent to that of a sixteen-year-old, the age I was when I departed the country. While traveling in France last summer, I heard a group talking in Hungarian in Arles. I introduced myself to them, and we spoke about Hungary today compared to the one I left. I had to search for some words since my fluency in Hungarian was spotty, but it was a satisfying conversation.

A recent event drew me back to my ethnic background. Kathy met a Hungarian woman at a grocery store who recommended that we join the Hungarian Community Center in Ottawa.  I followed up and decided to attend a social event celebrating the anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. I hoped to listen to conversations in Hungarian and perhaps meet some people from Sopron from where we fled, so I looked forward to the event. I was somewhat fearful of how I would react to my countrymen and whether I could intelligently converse with them, limited by my sparse vocabulary and lack of practice speaking the language.

Upon entering the building, nobody welcomed us. We found our way to take a couple of seats and looked around. All age groups were there, from children to grey hairs, and they all seemed to know each other. And I heard only Hungarian spoken. There was a celebratory feeling in the air; some people were informally dressed, while others wore pin-striped suits. Nobody showed interest in us.

The MC asked the Hungarian Ambassador to Canada to speak. She spoke in Hungarian, and I whispered to Kathy and explained what was happening.

Although we were in Canada, curiously, there was absolutely no French or English spoken, and there was no acknowledgment of land rights by the Indigenous people of Canada, a custom in all public events now. That made me think that the Hungarians have a thousand-year history occupying the land of Hungary. The Ottomans took over the land at one time and the Germans at another time, but there had never been an acknowledgment of previous land ownership and compensation for taking the land. To my knowledge, the concept of compensation to earlier landowners has no currency in Hungarian thought. That made me think of how people interpret history in different parts of the world.

After the Ambassador’s speech, we enjoyed some poetry and dancing by third-generation Candaian-Hungarians, indicating that some families kept their culture intact. When the Ambassador asked people who came to Canada after the 1956 Revolution to stand up, I counted half a dozen out of fifty, including myself. So, most of these people were second—and third-generation Hungarians who maintained their native culture.

One of the celebration’s highlights was serving “langos,” a Hungarian breakfast food similar to doughnuts, fried dough covered with cheese, cinnamon, and/or garlic. I lined up to get a couple of langos and limited by my language skills, I ended up with two plain ones. There is not much taste to plain ones, so I returned for another one with cheese and garlic to enhance its flavor. I put on too much garlic that burned our mouths, and we took it home, not wanting to throw it away in front of the Hungarian crowd, showing our dislike of it.

Frankly, the event disappointed me because nobody welcomed or showed interest in us while we sat in the audience. Of course, we could have approached people, but they all seemed either to know and talk with each other or to be occupied with moving chairs around and other official matters.

The people were not unfriendly; they seemed to accept and ignore us. For some reason, I felt quite at home, understanding the language, although Kathy felt ignored. I felt as if I was on an island with my old countrymen. When I lined up for our langos at the kitchen, I heard the women working there talking to each other; one kneading the dough and cutting portions to fry, another frying, and the third putting the cheese and/or cinnamon on and serving it. The entire atmosphere felt homey. Based on our strange experience with this celebration, we decided to try again and attend a party next week with dinner, a concert, and dancing. I hope we won’t. be disappointed.

The Flag Raising

October 25 2024

I had mixed feelings about going. It would evoke nostalgic memories—neither negative nor positive, just neutral emotions. I may meet people with my ethnic background. Ethnic individuals tend to display increasingly ethnic behavior as they age. I was not one of those people; I escaped Hungary because there was no future for me there, or at least, that is what my parents thought.

Upon learning about the flag-raising ceremony at Ottawa City Hall to commemorate the 68th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, I decided to go downtown and see what it was all about. Perhaps I’ll encounter elderly and weathered Hungarians, eavesdrop on Hungarian conversations, and cross paths with someone from Sopron, a small town close to the Austrian border where we lived and from where I walked to Vienna shortly after the October 23, 1956, Revolution.
At the base of a flagpole, I spotted the Hungarian flag and approached a clutch of people congregating. Speaking in English, I asked a bald and paunchy character if he was Hungarian. He said no, mentioning that he was part of a Member of Parliament’s staff from Wascana, Saskatchewan. He also informed me that the MP would speak briefly during the presentation. Ok. And then the Liberal MP from Wascana, seeing me talking to his staff, came over, shook hands, and explained that he was one-quarter Hungarian. I responded that I am 100 percent Hungarian. I inquired about his absence from the caucus meeting this morning, where numerous MPs were anticipated to call for the Prime Minister’s resignation as head of the Liberal Party. I cannot recall his answer, but he was a nice young fellow, and we exchanged a few words about the beauty of his province.

Turning around, a blonde woman in a business suit introduced herself as the Commercial Attaché for the Hungarian Embassy. We switched to speaking Hungarian, and suddenly, I noticed that all the people were well-dressed: the women wore business attire, and the men wore suits. I realized I was underdressed, I wore a red windbreaker, jeans, running shoes, and a baseball cap. If only I had shaved and dressed more formally this morning. Come to think of it, it is a major annual event to celebrate the Hungarian heroes who fought Russian tanks with handguns and risked their lives.

In just a few days and the weeks that followed the uprising in Budapest, the Russian tanks arrived and crushed the Revolution. Three thousand individuals perished, and 200,000 fled to foreign nations as refugees. Thirty-five thousand Hungarian refugees came to Canada after the Revolution.

We were greeted and addressed by the Deputy Mayor of Ottawa. As we sat down, I noticed at least fifty people had attended the event. I felt I was in a multicultural milieu already – Canadian and Hungarian –  especially after the Deputy Mayor started his speech by thanking the Anishinaabe people for using their unceded land, a standard introduction for public events in Canada recently. It is a small token for reconciling the injustices Canadians meted out to the Indigenous people in the past. I find this practice gratuitous, odious, and dishonest; I never heard that we Canadians would ever return the lands to the indigenous people. So, what is the purpose of this note of thanks? And, of course, it had nothing to do with the Hungarian Revolution half a world away, sixty-eight years ago.

The two MPs spoke next before the Hungarian Ambassador to Canada talked about the Revolution. She mentioned a few Hungarian Canadians who had become famous internationally, including Alanna Morrisette, whose grandfather came to Canada after the Revolution, and John Polanyi of the University of Toronto, a Nobel Prize winner who attended high school in Toronto in the early 1940s, when his parents sent him to Canada for safety during the rise of Nazi Germany.

The other curious thing was that the Ambassador spoke in English and French, Canada’s official languages, but not in Hungarian. I am sure there must be some protocol for speaking in public in Canada, but this was a Hungarian event celebrating a historical event, so I thought she could have given a trilingual presentation greeting us.

While listening to the anthems of Hungary and Canada, the Ambassador raised the flag, and that was it. I looked around for some kindred souls but saw mostly suited men and well-dressed women. If they were Hungarians, they were the second generation following the Revolution.  A clutch of embassy people spoke in Hungarian next to me when I noticed three scruffy looking, wizened old folks who turned out to be Hungarians. They all knew each other, and their facial expressions seemed to exude some impatience with all these well-dredded folks, all the officials present without direct experience of the Revolution.

The irony of this celebration did not escape me: Victor Orban, the current Prime Minister of Hungary, is friendly with Putin’s Russia, while here we are celebrating the freedom fight against the Russians sixty years ago.

I was in grade eleven in 1956, when the Uprising broke out. Our small town had no news except that trouble was brewing in Budapest. It was big trouble, it turned out, and my parents worried about my older brother Peter, a first-year medical student in Budapest. Not having cell phones, we had no news of Peter. It took three or four days, I cannot recall exactly, when Peter showed up at the apartment house where we lived, dirty and tired after walking from Budapest to Sopron, a distance of some two hundred kilometers (circa 120 miles).

As soon as Peter showed up, our mother prepared a couple of sandwiches and ordered us to walk to Vienna with the name of a Jesuit priest who had been a classmate of my uncle at the University of Vienna. We were obedient boys, and Peter and I started walking on the highway to Vienna, where we joined an exodus of wall-to-wall people escaping the country. It was a time when my brain did not seem to function with understanding; I felt like a robot, without thinking, a state of mind that saved my sanity. We had no idea where our journey would take us and what we would do when we arrived. So yes, the flag-raising event did stir up some memories, which had faded over time. The walk to Vienna was a significant event in my life and made me think about what could have happened if we had stayed back home in Hungary. I recall a film I saw once that tracked the lives of people who made a career decision and compared their lives to what could have happened if they had made another career decision. In real life, one cannot return and take another fork in the road. My immigrant story has been a challenging but highly satisfying experience. I would not have missed it if I had a choice.

What is Canadian Culture

February 7, 2024

During a lively discussion with friends, I asked: what is Canadian culture? After a surprising period of thoughtful quiet, someone suggested that Canada has musicians, authors, and artists who combine to define Canadian culture. But I said that many of these have made their career in the US. For example, Celine Dion, Joni Mitchell, and The Guess Who (Burton Cummings) have become famous south of the border. When it comes to writers, Rohinton Mistry, although a Canadian author, wrote about India, Michael Ondaatje, another Canadian author, wrote about World War II (The English Patient), and Margaret Atwood’s novels have also enjoyed wide popularity south of the border. So, why would we call them examples of Canadian culture? What is Canadian about their work, except for their citizenship?

I brought up our difficulty when visiting friends and family in Europe; what should we take as gifts that would appear Canadian? We have often taken coasters and shawls with native Canadian themes but not much else. We could not think of other items. Canadian native themes represent a small portion of the Canadian art fabric, although considered very Canadian abroad.

When I think of Canadian culture, the McKenzie Brothers come to mind; Bob and Doug, acting as two dimwitted brothers, swilled beer, and every second word coming out of their mouths was “have another beer” and “eh,” on their popular show called The Great White North. There is something about drinking beer that is Canadian, whether in a ballpark or at hockey arenas during games. Bob and Doug have certainly become Canadian favorites, and I would label their popularity as part of Canadian culture.

Another part of Canadian culture is hockey. It is widely popular, and most children start playing when they are big enough to lace up a pair of skates. One of the most popular hockey commentators on “Hockey Night Canada” was Don Cherry, whose flamboyant suits and analyses of hockey games charmed many Canadian homes.  

Rick Mercer is a Canadian icon whose show was on air for over twenty years. His humor and rants pleased Canadians. His travels in the US interviewing famous people and asking dumb questions to embarrass interviewees were enormously popular in Canada (including one with then-presidential candidate Bush – Rick asked Bush about Canadian Prime Minister “Jean Poutine”). I appreciated his humor but did not like the idea of embarrassing people. But apparently, his wit pleased Canadians, which tells me something about Canadian character.

Founded by the ex-hockey player Tim Horton, the coffee shop chain of his name has become a Canadian institution. Although many Starbucks, Second Cups, and other coffee shops exist, Canadians gravitate to a local Tim Horton for their morning fix. I would call the chain part of our Canadian culture today.

We also enjoy the unique throat singing by Inuit people. In Canada, you hear throat singing on national holidays. I would call it a part of the Canadian cultural mosaic.

So, you may ask: what is culture? I am not an expert on this subject, but to me, it is a pattern of behavior of people living on a usually contiguous piece of geography with common traditions acquired over generations vis-a-vis work, diet, clothing, social interaction, language, religion, likes, and dislikes. For example, think of the French culture of Quebec, their joie-de-vivre, their history with les habitants (the original settlers from France in what is now Quebec), their love of hockey, and their language. And do not forget their food: poutine, tourtiere, feve au lards.

What spawned the discussion on Canadian culture was whether we are losing it. Whether the influx of immigrants, refugees, and the vast numbers of foreign students dilute Canadian culture, and whether the Prime Minister, advocating the concept of the “trans-national state,” supersedes traditional Canadian culture.

While the US embraced the “melting pot” concept for their newcomers, Canada favored “multi-culturalism.” We love the different cultures immigrants bring with them, their ethnic restaurants, and their ethnic community centers, and we support them financially to celebrate their national holidays. We encourage foreign cultures to thrive in Canada; we celebrate them on July 1 each year, Canada’s birthday. The more we do this, the more we dilute Canadian culture with foreign cultures. We forget who we are and what we stand for, except for Canadian society’s equity, diversity, and inclusion slogan.

Let me describe a day when I met three newcomers to Canada that made me think about their knowledge of Canada. A cheerful young fellow took my passport pictures at a pharmacy. Arriving six months ago from Sri Lanka, he has not secured a job in his field, civil engineering. Nobody in his home country told him during his application process he might need to requalify in Canada to work as an engineer. And so, he worked as a cashier and passport photographer at the pharmacy. Hoping for a better future, he has already rented an apartment to welcome his wife and two-year-old child in two months.

The fellow sitting beside me waiting to get his social insurance card at a Canadian service center (I  was there to renew my passport) came from Zimbabwe two months ago. As a pharmacist, he already has a job and awaits his family’s arrival in a few months. He told me he learned how to dress for the cold in Canada in January. He informed me he would stay for twenty years and then return home. He may change his mind in the next twenty years, and I am sure he will learn a lot about Canada that may attract him to stay.

The agent who did the paperwork to renew my passport was born in France to African parents. Bilingual and with a federal government job, he may be Canadianized to a degree, but I wondered how he feels as a black bilingual person in English-speaking Ontario.

These are just three examples of Canadian newcomers I met one day, and I wondered what they knew about Canadian culture. They will undoubtedly learn. Two have experienced the cold Canadian winter for the first time, which involves tuques, mukluks, down-filled gloves, and parkas. Years ago, I worked at the federal immigration department when a program existed with funding to assist immigrants in adjusting to Canadian life. The program does not exist anymore.

Personally, camping in the wilderness, canoeing, and picking wild blueberries on land recently devastated by forest fire, with bears around, is part of Canada. Cottaging around the lakes in Ontario, listening to the buzz of the chainsaw and the hammer sound, is also typical of Canadian culture. Unless we provide time and opportunity for our newcomers to learn to live in our country and engage in activities that have become traditions in Canada, I am afraid that we’ll gradually lose parts of our cultural identity.

Forty-six percent of Toronto is foreign-born. And twenty-three percent of Canada is foreign-born. How can we not lose part of who we are with these numbers? But immigrants are welcome in Canada; immigrants built this country. It could be that our success with immigrants will cause our changing culture.