From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Hungarians/Nandor F. Dreisziger
The family has been the primary instrument of group maintenance for Hungarian Canadians. Whenever it was frail or broke down, Hungarian culture often failed to be passed on. For a few Hungarians who married outside their ethnic group, children grew up to be bi- or even tri-cultural. Outside the family, Hungarian culture was sustained and promoted in ethnic churches (with their weekend or Sunday schools), social clubs, self-improvement circles, and mutual-benefit associations and through the ethnic press. Pre-1914 and inter-war immigrants were especially keen about these institutions, which strongly emphasized cultural maintenance. Many second-generation Hungarian Canadians on prairie homesteads acquired and retained a good command of the Magyar language, whereas those in urban areas usually used English at home.
Hungarian Canadians have striven to maintain other aspects of their culture as well. High on this list were Hungarian culinary art and folk culture, including singing and dancing. Peasants who arrived at the turn of the century soon abandoned their folk costumes and wore them only on special occasions. Recent urban newcomers possess such folk costumes only as family heirlooms or memorabilia.
Village tradition upheld men as masters of the home, who handled important matters, such as finances. This arrangement was no longer appropriate in Canada, particularly when women worked outside the home. Consequently in most households women began collaborating in financial decision-making. Later newcomers had no problem accepting women’s equality, especially in the workplace. Many post-1956 female immigrants entered professions such as forestry, engineering, and medicine – areas reserved mainly for males in Canada at that time.
Close family ties – characteristic of Hungarian, especially peasant society – continued among pre-1945 immigrants, and in some migration chains second and later generations found it relatively easy to get a good start in Canada. Regional ties (the földi network) meant that co-villagers were treated almost as relatives and could join migration chains. After 1945 these links began to wane. However, some of the refugees of 1956 were welcomed by complete strangers as if they had hailed from ancestral localities.
Most Hungarians, especially those from the countryside, love singing, dancing, music-making, and storytelling. Villagers who emigrated three or four generations ago were more likely than urban arrivals to enjoy singing traditional Hungarian folk songs and performing regional folk dances. Pioneer farmers often passed these traditions on to their children. One researcher has collected ancient folk songs sung by “old timers” and by people born in Canada; another has discovered epic folk poetry depicting pioneering on the prairies. Newspaper reports testify that some Hungarian folk music and much folk dancing survived for decades in the early communities.
More recent immigrants have often failed to transmit folk traditions to their children. Some in the post-1945 or post-1956 immigrations, and many second- and third-generation Hungarian Canadians, learned these traditions as a conscious expression of their ethnic identity. In the past thirty years certain young people have revived their ancestral culture – for instance, in folk-dance (and a few folk-music) groups. Some participants have studied the art with master practitioners invited from Hungary. They or others have gone to east-central Europe to learn folk dancing, which still survives in unadulterated form in isolated ethnic Hungarian villages. This preservation effort has become a powerful instrument of ethnic group maintenance and has led sometimes to cultural reacquisition.
Theatre has also promoted cultural survival. Especially before the 1950s Hungarian Canadians entertained themselves with amateur theatrical productions. Though not steeped in Hungarian cultural traditions, the plays allowed many young amateurs to perfect their knowledge of the ancestral tongue and audiences to improve their comprehension. The thirst for being entertained in Magyar probably helped sustain this art form, and each immigrant wave boosted demand. The 1956ers, for example, were a catalyst for creation of Toronto’s Hungarian Art Theatre, which for decades produced professional-quality plays using refugee actors. Theatre – whether amateur or professional – also fostered ethnic unity, transcending ideology or religion. In the Hungarian Art Theatre, for example, Gentiles and Magyar-speaking Jews enjoyed entertainment the way it used to be savoured in Hungary in peacetime.
Most Magyar immigrants have brought their love of sports with them and pursued their interest as participants or spectators in Canada. Since the 1920s Hungarians in urban centres, and even in a few rural districts, have often gathered to play soccer, Hungary’s unofficial national sport. They formed teams and competed against those of other European groups. Occasionally they formed teams in other sports, including water polo. And they sometimes established clubs for sports such as gymnastics, fencing, or tennis. Some communities also have had chess clubs. Interest in such activities tended to increase with each new immigration wave, along with the quality of sportsmanship. The 1956 refugees included many fine athletes and coaches, among them several members of Hungary’s 1956 Olympic team.
Highly qualified Hungarian sportsmen have also helped develop sports in Canada, mainly as instructors and coaches. Because members of the second and third generations may play soccer, even if they do not speak Magyar, this activity is more an instrument of group than of cultural maintenance.
Through the ages Hungarians have also maintained their culture in a more formal, often institutional setting. Turn-of-the-century attempts to establish Magyar-English bilingual schools had little success in the Canadian west. After 1918 provincial authorities banned such institutions, but in some settlements Magyar was taught to children in weekend schools. Early Hungarian churches in central Canada did the same; volunteers – for example, Sisters of Social Service or ministers’ wives in Protestant congregations – instructed children in basic Hungarian. Beginning in the 1960s some school boards introduced heritage-language instruction in Hungarian. In Toronto a Hungarian school board, lending help with heritage-language training, has been functioning for years. Previously, programs were funded by the community, through donations from organizations promoting Hungarian culture.
From the early 1960s on, Hungarian Canadians have extended such efforts to post-secondary institutions through generous gifts. In Montreal, such a program existed in the 1960s and early 1970s at Loyola College (now part of Concordia University), and more recently McGill University has periodically offered instruction in Magyar or in Hungarian history. The University of Toronto has had a permanently endowed chair in Hungarian literature since 1978.
Hungarian-Canadian literature has flourished in Canada, usually in Magyar. From the 1950s to the 1980s, some of the finest Hungarian poetry emanated from Canada, produced by older émigrés, such as György (George) Faludy, Ferenc Fáy, Tamás Tuz (pseudonym: Lajos Makkó), and Robert Zend, and by younger men whose intellectual development was completed mainly in the emigration, including László Kemenes Géfin and György Vitéz (pseudonym: György Németh). Writers of prose have been similarly prolific, whether in Hungarian, as with novelist Éva Sárvári, or in English, as with John Marlyn and Richard Telcky, who explores Hungarian-Canadian subjects, and George Jonas and Stephen Vizinczey, who have dealt mainly with Canadian or universal themes. Writers publishing in Canada in Magyar have often lived in intellectual double isolation, producing in the language of a small, distant country works that were banned in their native land by Communist authorities who considered them at best dissidents and at worst traitors. Only since the 1980s, and especially since 1989, could people in Hungary read their work. In general, the Hungarian-Canadian immigrant community, with its attachment to most facets of the ancestral culture, is in decline and can be expected to continue to decline in the foreseeable future. Unless the community is replenished and revitalized by another wave of immigrants, Hungarian-Canadian society will complete the transformation from an immigrant to a post-immigrant culture. Nevertheless, although efforts at cultural maintenance may collapse, resulting in the loss of the Hungarian language as well as in the abandonment of most Magyar customs and traditions, the group may survive. The transition from immigrant to post-immigrant culture has already taken place in some communities, most notably where English has replaced Magyar in community church services. Elsewhere, such transition has taken place in a few folk-dancing and sports clubs. Second- or third- generation Hungarians’ interest in such activities as folk dancing and soccer carried out in a Hungarian social context suggests the possibility of group survival even in communities that do not maintain the language. The cities abutting the western end of Lake Ontario have a “critical mass” of Hungarians (including Hungarian speakers), who sustain at least some elements of the ancestral culture. It is possible, therefore, that this region may act as a magnet for future Hungarian newcomers should they ever come to Canada in large numbers.
