The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: Hungarian and Canadian Perspectives

Appendix: Conference Notes

Appendix: Conference Notes There were a number of presentations at the conference that are not included in this volume either because they were to be published elsewhere or were not intended for publication at this time by their authors. A few words should be said about these here. * The conference was opened by Dr. Mark Pittaway, Senior Lecturer in European Studies at Great Britain’s Open University. Pittaway, a specialist in twentiethcentury Hungarian history, gave a keynote address, in which he examined the 1956 revolution from the perspective of social history, focusing on how these events unfolded in a specific county in Hungary. * Complementing this social history approach, Dr. Peter Pastor, a professor of History at Montclair University in New Jersey, employed the methods of political history in comparing the 1956 uprising to the Hungarian revolutions of 1848–1849, 1918, and 1919. Professor Tadeusz Kopys of Poland’s Jagellonian University took a historiographical approach and examined how Hungarians in Canada and Western Europe commemorated the revolution on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. * Susan Papp-Aykler of Toronto’s Rákoczi Foundation presented an oral history project she had conducted in collaboration with the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, involving the taping of interviews with hundreds of Hungarians who arrived to Canada as refugees in 1956–1957. Papp-Aykler’s presentation was supplemented by an exhibit, entitled Hungarian Exodus, on the arrival and integration of about 38,000 Hungarian refugees to Canada. 292 The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: Canadian and Hungarian Perspectives Eniko Pitter, a Ph.D. candidate in Theory and Policy Studies at the University of Toronto, brought a multimedia component to the conference, with a video presentation of the interviews she had conducted as part of a documentary film on Hungarian-Canadian philanthropist and prominent civil engineer George Vari. * The last session of the conference was devoted to an exploration of the contributions made by Hungarian refugees to Canadian cultural expression. Four panelists, representing four artistic disciplines, had been asked to review some of the creative works produced by 1956 refugees in Canada. They were also asked to discuss some of the issues that arise when we consider the participation of immigrant writers, visual artists, filmmakers, and musicians in the diverse cultural life of Canada. Since this session was more of a round-table discussion than the formal presentation of papers, a summary is provided in the following paragraphs. Perhaps because the 1956 Hungarian refugees integrated so well into Canadian life, not much research has been undertaken on their integration and contributions to Canada in comparison to those of earlier waves of immigration. This is even truer for the arts, despite the fact that significant contributions have been made by Hungarians in many artistic domains. The panel attempted to make a stab at filling this void. Oliver Botar, a professor of Art History at the University of Manitoba, gave an illustrated presentation about two Modernist Hungarian-Canadian artists and their differing styles in the memorialization of the Hungarian Revolution. Gyula (Julius) Marosan’s Revolutionary Series of paintings were placed in their context—modelled on Picasso in some measure—and contrasted with sculptor Victor Tolgyessy, whose work drew on American abstract sculptural models. In analyzing works relating to the revolution, Botar raised the question of what the stylistic choices of the individual artists tell us about their intentions, ambitions, and alliances in their creative lives. Professor George Bisztray, until recently Chair of Hungarian Studies at the University of Toronto, spoke about the contributions of a number of Hungarian Appendices 293 refugee writers to Canada. He specifically dealt with writers who continued to use their mother tongue for their work, noting that there was a “flourishing” of Hungarian Canadian literature for two or three decades after 1956. Biobibliographic works on this aspect of Canadian writing include Bisztray (1987) and Miska (1990). Professor Bisztray raised the question of the integration of such writers into Canadian literature—as compared to those usually second- or third-generation writers who use English or French and whose work clearly belongs to Canadian literature, both in content and in form. William New’s Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002) includes Canadian writers of Hungarian origin as part of Canadian literature in several sections of the volume, such as “Exile,” “Cultural Plurality,” and “European Influences,” and it has a separate entry on “Hungarian,” which mentions the following: Tamas Dobozy, George Faludy, John Hirsch, John Marlyn, Eva...