cover image Hungarian Rhapsodies: Essays on Ethnicity, Identity, and Culture

Hungarian Rhapsodies: Essays on Ethnicity, Identity, and Culture

Richard Teleky. University of Washington Press, $35 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-295-97582-5

North America, for the most part, has been extraordinarily welcoming to immigrants and tolerant of their longings for home, with the result that some of its citizens have made a fetish of their ancestral affiliations, ruminating endlessly about their ethnic identities. This well-written collection falls into that camp, with essays ranging from personal recollections of language, church and family to enigmatic discussions of postmodern Central European fiction. A professor of creative writing at York University in Toronto, third-generation Hungarian-American Teleky opens with an article about his learning the language of his grandparents, and ends with an account of his visit to Hungary and a perusal of what ethnicity means to him. Clearly a sensitive man, Teleky is disturbed by Hungarian anti-Semitism but he never indicates that it is his upbringing in North American attitudes that makes him uncomfortable. Teleky says his exploration of his ethnicity grew out of his ""dissatisfaction with much of North American culture, its assumptions and its materialism,"" but he encounters an even more cynical form of materialism among young Hungarians. So the ultimately foreign ""mother country"" never feels like home, and the grandchildren of immigrants are left hanging, belonging neither here nor there. (June)