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In Hot Water

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Széchenyi Baths in Budapest, Hungary

I’ve only been to Hungary once, back in 1977. One of my happiest times alone with my father was the two of us visiting Budapest’s Széchenyi (SAY-chen-yee) baths and chatting for hours in the thermal pools. Of course, an opportunity gained can also be an opportunity lost. During that time, my mother went back to Felcsut in the Fehérmegye countryside, where she was raised as a young girl on a farm by her grandparents. I never did get to see Felcsut.

Although I spent so little time in Hungary, I am proud to say that I still somehow bear inside of me the seed of the Magyar culture and language. When I was a little boy in Cleveland, television was just coming in; so, living in a Hungarian neighborhood, I was blissfully unaware that the English language even existed. Until I showed up for kindergarten classes at Harvey Rice Elementary School.

That set off a whole chain of events, from moving to the suburbs, even though my father always yearned to be back in the old Buckeye Road neighborhood, to my majoring in English at an Ivy League school. But that is another story.

Serendipity: Dépaysement

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Lebanese Restaurant in Paris

The term dépaysement is a French concept which refers to that feeling of disorientation that specifically arises when you are not in your home country nor identify exclusively with it. It’s the way that I, a Hungarian-American who loves to travel in places like Latin America and Iceland, feel as the United States slides down the drain of Trumpism. Juan Goytisolo (1931-2017), a Catalan writer of Basque extraction who lived most of his life in Marrakech, felt that way about Spain, particularly after the Franco régime’s depredations. The following is from his essay “Why I Have Chosen to Live in Paris” from his essay collection Space in Motion:

Q: If I understand you rightly, French cosmopolitanism ….

A: There is no such thing as French cosmopolitanism; there is interculturalism, plurality, osmosis: a universe in miniature. If a person so desires, he can eat in a Cambodian restaurant, drink mint tea in a Moorish café, see a Hindu or Turkish movie in the afternoon—Yilmaz Güney’s The Sheepflock in my opinion is one of the best films of the year—and in the evening, with a bit of luck, attend a concert of the Noss el Ghiwán or Izanzaren. Society is linked to the idea of space, but culture—like the individual—is mobile, drifting like the wind. Culture today cannot be French or Spanish, or even European, but rather mestizo, bastard, fecundated by civilizations that have been victims of our self-castrating, aberrant ethnocentrism. For up until now we have exported the Occidental model with all its props—from its ideology to its drugs and gadgets—we are at present witnessing an inverse process that personally fascinates and delights me: the gradual dissolution of “white” culture by all the peoples who, having been forcibly subjected to it, have assimilated the tricks, the techniques necessary to contaminate it.

Q: So then, Paris for you …

A: Insofar as it abandons its pretensions of being a beacon and accepts its status as a motley, bastard, heterogeneous metropolis that belongs to no country, I will always feel better in it than in any other exclusively “national” city that is uniform, chaste, compact, rid of its angels.