In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

FOREWORD I As a visiting professor of history, I taught at the University of California , Santa Barbara, on and off for the ten years between 1987 and 1997. Perhaps the most memorable experience of those years was Hungarian Spring 1991, a major cultural festival focusing on intellectual and artistic achievements in the early decades of the 20th century. Assisted by a group of local enthusiasts, I organized the festival as a symbol of Hungary’s spiritual renewal after long decades of Soviet domination, by way of remembering the rich 20th century spring in Hungary’s cultural history. Excellent people such as Yehudi Menuhin came together for the occasion to remind the world of what Hungarian culture had been and could possibly become again. Some twenty-eight events were organized, exhibitions, concerts, conferences , and as a Fulbright visiting professor I also offered university courses on Hungary. Santa Barbara’s main street boasted of fifty-eight Hungarian national flags, each sponsored by a different person or family. It was there and then that I met Ms. Sally Arthur. “My grandfather was U.S. minister to Hungary,” she said, “he was fond of Hungary so very much.” “Do you have his papers?” I asked eagerly, as I had been attempting to find Minister Montgomery’s papers for many years. “I think my mother may have some of them; she lives in Washington, D.C. and in Vermont in the summer. Why don’t you write her — I will also talk to her” — she responded encouragingly. By the time I could make all the necessary arrangements to meet Jean Montgomery-Riddell, Montgomery’s daughter, it was January 1993. After some correspondence back and forth, she graciously invited me to her lovely apartment in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. She was a fine, elderly lady who remembered Hungary vividly. “My mother was often sick and stayed at home in the U.S. I frequently stood in for her in an effort to help my father and it was there, at the Budapest legation, that I met my future husband who served as my father’s secretary. I spent memorable years at Lovas út 32.” She pronounced the address of the former legation in perfect Hungarian. Ms. Montgomery-Riddell was extremely helpful: she had located her father’s papers long stored in Vermont and brought them to Washington for me to see. “How would you like to use them?” she asked. I told her about my ongoing research concerning U.S.-Hungarian relations and my future plans. Cautiously I asked “How could I study these and perhaps make copies?” “Here they are, why don’t you take them along?” — she replied. Her generosity and openness amazed me. I was almost frightened of the ease and immediacy of my fortune as a researcher. “Would you want me to transfer them to the Hungarian National Széchényi Library in Budapest?” — I suggested. “I am sure they would be more than happy to include them into their vast collection of Hungarica. “Why not?” — came the answer, quickly. “My father loved Budapest.” This is how it happened. I saw her once more, a year later. I had studied the papers in the meantime and we had a lengthy discussion about her memories . She spoke of her father and of her experiences as a youth in Budapest . Of her father’s conviction that Hungary got into World War II unwillingly . That Hungary never liked the Nazis. She spoke of Regent Horthy who had personally disciplined the extreme right wing demonstrators on Hungary’s national holiday in 1939 when she was with her father at the Budapest Opera House. She remembered that her father regularly organized the support of the regent after the war via a small group of Hungarian exiles with whom he was associated. She spoke randomly and enthusiastically of pre-war Hungary, a bygone world, Atlantis. It was only upon departing at the metro station near the Watergate building that I came to realize: her father had arrived in Hungary exactly sixty years earlier. It took months to read all the papers she gave me, though her father had meticulously arranged most of them in neatly bound volumes. It took further time to complete them through the collection at the Sterling Memorial Library in Yale University, an opportunity made possible by my stay in New York City as a visiting professor of history at Columbia University in the ominous fall of 2001. It was a lurid...

Share