MARCH 22, 2021 – One day when I was a little kid my sister Elsa told me how to spell Hungary. I’m not sure of the circumstances, but in her usual, authoritative way, she informed me that although the country name sounded like “hungry in the stomach,” it was spelled with an “a, as in Gary.”
One Christmas a year or two later, my parents gave me a big, hard-cover book published by Reader’s Digest and full of stories, puzzles, and word games. I spent many hours reading and re-reading it cover-to-cover. The piece I remember best was a true story about an Hungarian who escaped Soviet rule by posing as an Austrian and playing a good game of chess against a Soviet general aboard a train bound for Vienna. Ironically, given a part of my own story below, the Hungarian couldn’t remember his fake name until he was in the clear. The title was, “Your Move Hungarian!” Yesterday, I Googled the title and found the story immediately https://caperebel.com/blogs/news/your-move-hungarian. (The internet’s a beautiful thing.)
In 1981 I visited Hungary, though I would’ve gone hungry trying to find “Hungary” anywhere. It was called Magyar Népkötársaság (“Magyar People’s Republic”). I spent two or three days in Budapest for a quick look around. Amidst the notable museums and architecture, parks and restaurants, old quarters and post-war, Soviet-style high rise apartments, I observed two remarkable features: 1. Lots of people carrying violin cases; and 2. Numerous people with an arm in a sling. I tentatively concluded that playing the violin in Hungary was contact sport. Kidding aside, music flourished in Budapest; not sure about the arms in slings.
Now, decades later, my memory wanders back to my hometown where a certain Hungarian refugee was a fixture.
I’d say his name was “Lou Holtz,” but that can’t be right. With white hair, short gait, feet pointed outward, high-water pants, and most distinguishing of all, his horrifically intense and constant facial twitch, “our Hungarian” couldn’t possibly be confused with the famous Gopher Football coach. Maybe our guy’s name was “Lou Holt” or “Hertz.”
I vaguely remember mother mentioning that he was Hungarian; that like the guy in Your Move, Hungarian! he’d fled Communist rule. Perhaps Mother’s comment provided the context for Elsa’s corresponding lesson about “hungry” vs. “HunGARY.”
What I remember clearly is that “our Hungarian” always appeared on foot, alone, and that he exhibited that awful twitch, visible even when we zoomed by in the car. I know too that Lou sold Fuller brushes door-to-door. Mother was one of his main customers. She felt sorry for him.
Then one day as Dad and I drove past Lou, Dad told me something fascinating about the lonely Hungarian. “Dja know that Lou is a highly accomplished organist and that when he sits down to play a Bach fugue, the twitch completely stops?”
“I had no idea he played organ,” I said, too astonished to picture Lou without his trademark twitch.
As I reflect on these snippets of memory, I’m thinking “our Hungarian” had quite the untold story.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
