Heritage

The two concerts I attended within the last couple of weeks raised questions about my cultural heritage. Marta Sebestyen sang old Hungarian songs going back to the sixteenth century. I knew none of them, but there was a sense of the familiar in the idiom. Last night Amelia Hall played Bartok's Second Violin Concerto with Orchestra Wellington. Listening to both of these concerts made me regret the heritage that was stolen from me. My father and my grandmother wallowed in Hungarian folk music, as well as kitschy operettas and popular hits of their time. Hungarian music was an integral part of their personality. They knew hundreds of songs. My father played them all on the piano that was given to him for his Bar Mitzvah. His piano playing, his music defined him, the charming, lovable man sitting at the piano while the rest of the company danced and sang. 

Sixty people saw us off when we left Budapest on 18 October 1948, a hall full of people who attended Bartok's last concert in Budapest sang 'El indultam szep hazambol', 'I left my beautiful country behind' and this homesickness never left Bartok. It cropped up in his Concerto for Orchestra and it was foreshadowed in his Second Violin Concerto which he wrote just before he left for the United States. Unlike Bartok, I didn't leave happy, beautiful memories behind. The mid 1940s was not a happy time in Hungary. But this sense that the antisemites, the Nazis, stole my heritage lingered below the surface. When these antisemites  came to power they declared that Jews, who were so much part of Hungarian society and contributed so much to the image of Hungary, to Hungarian culture, music, literature were not real Hungarians. Serbs, Moldavian, Slovaks, Germans Romanians were all OK, real Hungarians, but Jews were an alien element. I lost this Hungarian heritage, but did not acquire a British, New Zealand heritage. Perhaps the great thing about New Zealand is that I was honored for for what I did, my contribution to the Jewish community and music. Others were recognized for their contribution to a variety ethnic or minority groups. This is something about New Zealanders that my father recognized and this is why he chose to migrate here.