How I Married Hungarian

My Toughest Opponent

For the next four years I avoided taking up any new languages. I had nothing against any of them (except one). It was just that there were too many gaps in the tongues I'd already entertained and I wanted to plug them up.

The language I had something against was Hungarian. Before a summer weekend with army buddies in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, I went to the post library and checked out an army phrase book in Hungarian to look at over the weekend. The introduction bluntly warned, "Hungarian is perhaps the hardest language in the world, and it is spoken by only about ten million people." I resolved I'd never get any closer to it.

Hungarian was the next language I studied.

When Hungary rebelled against Soviet oppression in 1956, I was invited by the U.S. Air Force to join a team of reporters covering Operation Safe Haven, the airlift of all the Hungarian refugees who were to receive asylum in the United States. That was far from enough to make me want to study Hungarian – yet.

Every child is treated to fantasies like Buck Rogers and his invincible ray gun, Superman, Batman, or, in my case, Jack Armstrong and his "mystery eye," a power imparted to him by a friendly Hindu who, merely by concentrating and holding his palms straight out, could stop every oncoming object from a fist to a bullet to a bull to an express train. By this time I began to note that similar powers – offensive and defensive – could unexpectedly and delightfully accompany the mastery of languages.


No Iron Curtains for Language

Many reporters got to the Hungarian border with Austria during the outpouring of refugees that followed the Soviet oppression of the Hungarian freedom fighters. They went to the Red Cross shelters on the Austrian side, interviewed some refugees and relief workers, and went home. I was invited to join a secret team of volunteer international "commandos" who actually slipped into Hungary by night to ferry refugees across the border canal on a rubber raft.

The center of the refugee operation was the Austrian border village of Andau. I asked a local policeman in German where the refugee headquarters was. It was Christmas night. It was dark. It was cold. There were no tour-bus operators on the streets hawking tickets to the Hungarian border. He told me to go to Pieck's Inn. At Pieck's Inn the bartender said, "Room nineteen." The fact that I was getting all this in German without looking around for somebody who spoke English was a convenience, but that's not what I mean by the power of another language. That came next.

I went upstairs to room nineteen and knocked on the door. "Who's there?" shouted a voice in interestingly accented English.

"I'm an American newspaper reporter," I yelled back. "I understand you might help me get to the Hungarian border."

He opened the door cussing. "I'll never take another American to the border with us again," he said before the door even opened. "No more Americans! One of you bastards damned near got us all captured night before last."

He turned out to be a pleasant-looking young man with blonde hair. When I knocked, he was busy adjusting heavy-duty combat boots. He continued his tirade as we faced each other. "That American knew damned good and well that flashlights, flashbulbs, even matches were forbidden." He went on in rougher language than I'll here repeat to tell how an American with a camera broke his promise and popped off a flashbulb while a raft-load of refugees was in the middle of the canal, causing the refugees and the rescuers on both sides of the canal to scatter. That burst of light, of course, let the Communists know exactly where the escape operation was taking place. He described in valiant but not native English exactly how much ice would have to form around the shell of hell before any other American reporter or any reporter of any kind would ever be invited to join the operation again.

As he railed on, I noticed a Norwegian flag tacked to the wall behind him. "Snakker De norsk?" I asked ("Do you speak Norwegian?").

He stopped, and said nothing for a few seconds. Then, like a Hollywood comic of the 1940s pulling an absurd reversal, he said, "You've got big feet, but there's a pair of boots on the other side of the bed that might fit you. Try ‘em on!"

All night long we stood there waiting for the shadows to tell us another group of refugees had arrived on the far bank of the canal. Then we'd push the raft into the water and play out the rope as our two boatmen paddled across. One would get out and help four or five Hungarians into the raft. When the raft was loaded, the boatman still in the raft would tug on the rope and we'd pull it back over. Then the lone boatman would paddle over again and repeat the process until all the refugees were on the Austrian side. The second boatman came back with the last load.

We had to wait at least an hour to an hour and a half between refugee clusters. I was the coldest I've ever been in my life, and there was no place to huddle behind or curl up inside. All we could do was stand there and wait. Light wasn't the only thing prohibited. So was talk. Normal speech travels surprisingly far over frozen flatland, and it was important not to betray our position to the Communist patrols. We were only allowed to whisper softly to the person immediately ahead of us on the rope and the person immediately behind.

I tried to remember what day it was. It was Thursday. It had only been the previous Saturday night when I'd taken a Norwegian girl, Meta Heiberg, from Woman's College to the Carolina Theater in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we saw newsreels of almost the very spot where I was now standing. When the screen showed Hungarian refugees pouring into Austria, Met had said, "My sister Karen's over there somewhere helping those people." That was all.

The next day I got the call inviting me to fly over with the air force. On Monday I flew. And here I was, freezing and waiting and marveling at the courage of the boatmen who voluntarily put themselves into jeopardy every time they crossed to the other side of the canal.

Eventually I decided to avail myself of whispering rights. The figure in front of me was so roundly bundled against the cold I couldn't tell if it was male or female. I leaned forward and said, "My name is Barry Farber and I'm from America."

A woman's voice replied, "My name is Karen Heiberg and I'm from Norway."

The cold, the power of the coincidence, and the tension of the border all combined to keep me from maximizing that opportunity. All I managed to do was flatfootedly utter the obvious: "I took your sister Meta to the Carolina Theater in Greensboro, North Carolina, five nights ago."

The effect on Karen was powerful. I can't complain, but I wish I'd been quick enough to add, "She sent me over here to find out why you never write Uncle Olaf!"

How I Married Hungarian

You don't launch into the study of a new language casually. But it's not quite as solemn a decision as an American man proposing to his girlfriend after an evening of wine and light jazz. It is, however, something like an Ottoman sultan deciding to take on another wife. It really is like a marriage. Something in you actually says, "I do!" and you decide to give it time and commitment that would ordinarily be invested elsewhere.

My pledge never to try to learn Hungarian was shattered by Hungarian heroism, Soviet tanks, and my agreeing to help Hungarian refugees resettle in Greensboro. I wasn't the only journalist who stayed on that story long after history moved on. Every journalist I know who got involved in any part of the Hungarian Revolution became attached to it.

I started in Munich in the transit refugee camp for those fleeing Hungarians who were destined to go to America. I buzzed from one refugee to another like a bee to blossoms, drawing as many words and phrases as I could from each and writing them down.

The U.S. Air Force gave its Luitpol barracks over to the Hungarians, who promptly plastered their own signs right on top of the English signs on all the doors. The door that once said "Doctor" suddenly said "Orvos." The door that once said "Clothing" suddenly said "Ruha." And so on. It was easy to tell who among the Americans and Germans at Luitpol were genuine language-lovers. They were the one who were not annoyed.

The Hungarian relabeling of everything at Luitpol actually gave me my most explosive language-learning thrill. When I went searching for a men's room, I found myself for the first time in my life not knowing where to go. You don't need Charles Berlitz to take you by the hand to the right one when the doors read "Mesdames" and "Messieurs," "Damen" and "Herren," "Señoras" and "Señores," or even the rural Norwegian "Kvinnor" and "Menn."

No such luck prevailed at Luitpol. The two doors were labeled "Nök" and "Férfiak." I looked at those two words, trying not to let my language-lover's enthusiasm distract from the pragmatic need to decipher which one was which relatively soon.

My thinking went like this. The k at the end of both words probably just made them plural. That left Nö and Férfia, or possibly Férfi. Something came to me. I remembered reading that Hungarian was not originally a European language. It had been in Asia. The Chinese word for "woman," "lady," or anything female was nö – not no and not nu, but that precise umlaut sound that two dots over anything foreign almost always represents. (I lose patience with language textbooks that spend a page and a half telling you to purse your lips as though you're going to say oo as in "rude" and then tell you instead to say ee as in "tree." If you simply say the e sound in "nervous" or "Gertrude," you'll be close enough.)

Following that hunch I entered the door marked "Férfiak." The joy that came next should arise in tabernacles, not men's rooms. To my satisfaction and relief I walked in and found five or six other férfiak inside!

Back in American I went looking for some books and records (there were no cassette tapes in those days) to help me in Hungarian. There were none. Communist rule had so completely cut Hungary off from the West that when you went looking for a Hungarian book, the shelves of even the biggest bookstores leapfrogged Hungarian, jumping right from Hebrew to Indonesian. There was one Hungarian-English phrase book published by a New York Hungarian delicatessen and general store named Paprikas Weiss. To accommodate the wave of Hungarian immigrants who had come to American in the 1930s, they had published their own little phrase book, which was distinguished by its utter failure to offer a single phrase of any practical use whatsoever to those of us working with the refugees. It was loaded with sentences like "Almoban egy betörövel viaskodtom," which means, "In my dream I had a fight with a burglar"!

Finally, like supplies that lag far behind the need for them in wartime, some decent English-Hungarian/Hungarian-English dictionaries arrived – no grammar books yet, just dictionaries. An explorer named Vilhjalmur Stefansson went to Greenland one time and proved you could live for eighteen months on nothing but meat. I proved it was possible, with nothing but that dictionary, to resettle a half-dozen Hungarian refugees who spoke no English at all in Greensboro, North Carolina, to care for all their needs, and have a good deal of fun without one single bit of grammar!

Hungarian has one of the most complex grammars in the world, but grammar is like classical music and good table manners. It's perfectly possible to live without either if you're willing to shock strangers, scare children, and be viewed by the world as a rampaging boor. We had no choice. Hungarians had to be talked to about homes, jobs, training, money, driver's licenses, and the education of their children.

"Tomorrow we'll go to the butcher's," for instance, had to do without the thirty-nine grammatical inflections a Hungarian sentence of that length would properly entail. We did it with nothing but the translation of essential words: "Tomorrow go meat fellow." "A charitable woman is coming by to help you with your furniture needs" became "Nice lady come soon give table chairs."

I learned Hungarian fluently – and badly. Many years later I decided to return to Hungarian and learn it properly and grammatically. It's a little like being back in Latin class, but this time I have a much better attitude.

New Friends

For the next thirty-five years I stood my ground and resisted taking up any new languages. The languages I'd studied up to that point included Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Chinese (Mandarin dialect), Indonesian, Hungarian, Finnish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. I happily applied myself to building competence in those languages and turning a deaf ear to all others.

It was tempting to tackle Greek; so many Greeks I could have practiced with were popping up in my daily travels, but I clung to my policy of "No more languages, thank you!" That policy was misguided; in fact, swine-headed. I was like the waiter standing there with arms folded who gets asked by a diner if he knows what time it is and brusquely replies, "Sorry. That's not my table!"

I could have easily and profitably picked up a few words and phrases every time I went to the Greek coffee shop and in the process learned another major language. But I didn't. In the 1980s immigrants to New York, where I lived, began to pour in from unaccustomed corners of the world, adding languages like Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Farsi, Bengali, Pashtu, Twi, Fanti, Wollof, Albanian, and Dagumbi to our already rich inventory of Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Yiddish, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, and Hebrew. I abandoned the policy. Now I want to learn them all – not completely, just enough to delight the heart of an Indian or African cab driver who never before in his entire life met an American who tried to learn his language.

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