From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Hungarians/Nandor F. Dreisziger
For years after their arrival in Canada, many Hungarians were concerned more with the affairs of Hungary than with Canada’s. Hungarian peasants, especially before 1914, were rarely involved in political activity. They had a saying that wars and politics were the concern of gentlemen. Nevertheless, even they had nationalist pride and had been taught about the struggle for independence against the Habsburgs. Their leaders – the few middle-class individuals who entered the country – definitely had well-formulated views on such matters. And most Hungarian immigrants to North America at the time favoured separation of Hungary from the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire.
When Hungarians got involved in Canadian politics, they gravitated towards the Liberal Party, which they seem to have equated – quite incorrectly – with the radical European liberal parties. This probably explains why leaders of the first national federation of Hungarian Canadians turned to Laurier’s governing Liberals for support. This informal alliance became a tradition.
Hungarian immigrants’ everyday lives, however, were influenced by developments in this country. Immediately after the outbreak of war in August 1914, immigration from Hungary ceased. Many young men of military age wound up in internment camps. Other Hungarians lost some of their freedom to travel and to communicate or to deal with relatives in the old country. Some secular institutions had to disband for the duration of the war. Before 1917, while the United States remained neutral in the war, some Magyar leaders left Canada for the American republic, where they felt more secure.
As well, Canadian nativism grew during the war. While it was directed mainly against German immigrants, Hungarians also felt its impact. One result was that the prairie provinces prohibited bilingual (Hungarian-English) schools after the war. Magyar immigrants also experienced subtle discrimination in the workplace. All these factors contributed to stagnation or decline in Hungarian community life, though some immigrants prospered, since the war had helped pull western Canada out of an economic recession.
Hungarian-Canadian political life became more complex and acrimonious after the war. Many new arrivals had experienced much more intense exposure to leftist and nationalist propaganda and/or had participated in Hungary’s post-war revolutions and counter-revolution. Still others had been displaced and/or dispossessed following post-war territorial changes. The interwar arrivals were refugees, and refugees tend to have keener political awareness than economic immigrants.
Homeland politics encouraged ideological rifts in Hungarian-Canadian communities in the 1920s and 1930s. Leftist propaganda became common in industrial and mining centres, spread by participants of the postwar leftist revolutions in Hungary. The nationalists also had political causes, especially the reversal of Hungary’s dismemberment by the peacemakers. Agitation for treaty revision – redrawing of Hungary’s post-war borders – became common. Admiral Horthy’s regime encouraged these sentiments and activities by sending high-profile visitors to Canada. It also created publications for Hungarian organizations that were disseminated through consulates in Montreal and Winnipeg set up in the 1920s.
During the Depression, disillusioned Magyar immigrants flocked to the Communist movement, especially in central Canadian cities. Some new recruits tried to take their entire immigrant club or social circle with them into the Hamilton-based leftist mutual sick-benefit federation. Many Hungarian-Canadian associations splintered or disbanded as a result.
The nationalists meanwhile rallied around a plan for a transoceanic flight to Hungary in order to call international attention to treaty revision. They, with American and British sympathizers, purchased and outfitted a plane, and in August 1931 “Justice for Hungary” flew from Grace Harbour, Newfoundland, non-stop to Hungary, breaking more than one world record. In contrast, the Hungarian-Canadian left was recruiting young men to fight in the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s forces. Most Hungarian-Canadian recruits fought alongside other Canadians (many of them also immigrants to this country) in the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion.
World War II brought new and graver concerns. At first not all news from central Europe had seemed bad, especially for the “patriots.” Starting in 1938 Hungary had regained southern Slovakia, southern Ruthenia, and northern Transylvania, lost after 1918. These gains, however, merely entangled Hungary in the Axis net. When war broke out, Hungary managed to stay out of the conflict for a time. Leftists in Canada fretted that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police might intern them as potential saboteurs.
In 1941 Hitler’s Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and Canada’s Communists thereby became allies in the war effort, although the release of internees took inexplicably long. Now the patriots were worried. When Canada declared war on Hungary in December, the government amended the harsh Defence of Canada Regulations. The result was that Hungarians escaped their most Draconian provisions, although a few Hungarian sailors in Canadian ports spent the rest of the war in prisoner-of-war camps. Hungarians were not shielded from wartime anti-alien sentiments, yet many unemployed or underemployed Hungarians did find well-paying jobs in war-related industries.
Late in the war Hungarians worried about their homeland as the battlefront moved through it amid great devastation. Hungarian-Canadian organizations of the right and the left launched the United Canadian Hungarian Relief Committee, which collected clothes and canvassed for money for food and medicines to be sent to Hungary through the Red Cross.
During the Cold War, and with the arrival of thousands of immigrants who had fled the Soviet armies or, later, Communist Hungary, the influence of the left declined. The old Marxist immigrants remained, but new recruits were few. Hungarian-Canadian politics now became dominated by anti-Communist leaders, who hoped for the liberation of Hungary and the restoration of its “rightful place” in a new, post-Communist world order. The new arrivals created organizations that sometimes sought to cooperate with other “captive nations” – as when representatives from all ethnic groups with homelands under Soviet rule marched in Toronto to demand freedom for Hungary in November 1956. However, émigré Czechoslovak, Romanian, and Yugoslav leaders mistrusted Hungarians’ latent revisionism. After all, many Hungarian organizations did display in their halls maps of pre-1918 Hungary and some explicitly strove for the “liberation” of Magyars outside Hungary in the Carpathian Basin.
The 1956 refugees confounded the situation. Though anti-Soviet, they had a concept of a liberated, more egalitarian, possibly even socialist Hungary and were less interested in treaty revision. They were therefore reluctant to join the political organizations of the post–World War II exiles and so created their own. The Hungarian Freedom Fighters’ Federation proved the most durable.
Hungarian-Canadian politics continued to be acrimonious. During the 1970s and 1980s some liberalization occurred in the homeland. Some dissenting voices were allowed, tourism from the West was encouraged, and Hungarian Canadians were urged to spend their holidays (and dollars) in Hungary. Furthermore, Budapest began seeking contacts (“bridge building”) with émigré leaders. Performing artists and literary figures were sent on tours to the “capitalist” West, while leaders of the emigration were invited to “cultural events” in Hungary. On a limited scale, and under the supervision of the Communist Party of Hungary, exchanges of ideas were encouraged.
Hungarian Canadians’ reactions varied. Some felt that the regime’s efforts should not be shunned and accepted invitations to Hungary to participate in joint cultural ventures. Others, especially from the post-1945 immigration, thought that “bridge building” served only Communist purposes and tried to discourage contacts, castigating those who ignored their advice. The result was acrimony, which some ardent anti-Communists thought had been the aim of “bridge building.”
The debate was unresolved when Soviet-style communism collapsed in Hungary in 1989. Most Hungarian Canadians rejoiced, and for some time no anti-Budapest diatribes appeared in the Hungarian-Canadian press. Eventually, however, some community leaders began to criticize the new government for failing to represent the “true” interest of Hungarians and Hungary. They bemoaned Budapest’s “reluctance” to prosecute those responsible for human rights violations under the Communist regime and its “overly accommodating” attitude towards the country’s neighbours. Tranquillity is not likely to return to Hungarian-Canadian editorial pages in the foreseeable future.
Relations between Gentile and Jewish immigrants from Hungary have been strongly influenced by events in east-central Europe over the past 150 years. In the second half of the nineteenth century a large number of predominantly Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox Jews moved to Hungary from the the neighbouring province of Galicia within the Habsburg Empire. Decennial censuses indicated an increase of over 100,000 persons in the country’s Jewish community. By 1900 nearly a quarter of Budapest’s residents were Jewish. Around the turn of the century Jews rose rapidly to prominence in commerce, industry, and the professions. Some Jews in Hungary said – not without justification – that Hungary had no middle class or intelligentsia, only aristocrats, peasants, and Jews. Jews were regarded by some with envy, often bordering on resentment. In Hungarian popular culture the Jew often conjured up the image of both the usurer and the exploiter and, paradoxically, the radical intellectual bent on destruction of the established order.
The overwhelming presence of Jewish radicals in the leadership of the 1919 Commune – including its Red Guard detachments that terrorized the conservative-minded Magyar peasantry – heightened anti-Jewish feelings, while persecution of supporters and even suspected sympathizers of the Commune during the subsequent counter-revolution left the country’s Jewish community aggrieved. With the growth of Nazi influence in central Europe and the coming again of war, new laws restricted Jewish influence in commerce, industry, and the professions, and Hungarians were perceived as collaborating in the persecution of Jews. Gentile Hungarians point out that Hungary, until its occupation by Hitler’s armies and security forces in March 1944, was the safest haven for Jews in Axis-controlled Europe and that Budapest’s large Jewish community escaped mass deportation to concentration camps because of Hungarian resistance to Nazi orders. After the war Jewish radicals – including some prominent in the 1919 Commune – gained power in the Communist government and security agencies, which ruthlessly persecuted opponents; most of the regime’s victims were Gentiles.
In Canada some Jewish and Gentile Hungarians have little or nothing to do with each other. Many, however, interact amicably, as Christians and Jews used to interact in peacetime Hungary. Many Hungarian Jews consider themselves Magyars in nationality (and Jewish in religion) and have participated in the activities of Hungarian-Canadian organizations. Some have taught Magyar to their Canadian-born children. But a few lobbied to make sure that Hungarians who had collaborated in the deportation of Jews from the Hungarian countryside in the late spring of 1944 were brought to justice in Canada. The war-crimes trial and eventual acquittal of former police officer Imre Finta during the late 1980s have probably rekindled unpleasant memories among both groups.
