The volume contains examples of how the mother tongue is lost and how strategies are made to preserve it at individual, family and communal levels. Mixed marriages and practical dilemmas, such as choosing a school, are prime models. How is it possible for languages to be swapped, whether spontaneously or intentionally, within one or two generations? In several post-1956 émigré families, it was taboo to speak English at home. In fact to the present day some Hungarian scout troops overseas do not accept new members unless they speak basic Hungarian. Mass linguistic division between generations, though, is largely a result of the real dividing line: education.
Emotional and cognitive ties are just as important as language, illustrated by America’s Irish, Italians or Swedes. Which ethnic groups does the Hungarian émigré see as positive and negative models for the Diaspora? What kinds of image do their communities retain of “Hungarianness” and of the mother country? How do they view themselves?
One contributor responds to the first question by taking a socio-psychological approach. American Hungarians take the least assimilated communities of the Jewish, Greek and Armenian diasporas as their models for the successful assertion of self-interest (Poles and Romanians too are often cited) and put themselves higher on the moral scale. This is hardly surprising: as the editor points out:

The ethno-social identity of American Hungarians lies closer to that of Hungarian ethnic minorities in Transylvania (and elsewhere in the Carpathian Basin), whereas the Hungarians of Hungary are often considered to be either unpatriotic or insufficiently patriotic.

Discord, envy, intrigue—the Hungarian “curse” as some call it—are ever present even in the New World.

In California fondness for the law manifests itself in constant litigation and there is a great tradition of that between Hungarian organizations [...] We hear of dreadful conflicts in Cleveland, with the North- and Southsiders having nothing to do with each other.

The cause or pretext of such conflicts may be generational, political or social, regional or local, strictly personal or financial, trivial matters of taste and preference, or a combination of any of these. As far as the first three go, it would have been helpful to have at least an outline of the successive twentiethcentury waves of emigration from Hungary to America. Distinct groups made up the Hungarian Diaspora of the interwar period and similarly the DPs (displaced persons) of the 1945 “nationalist” and 1947 “democratic” wave sharply distanced themselves from each other. Likewise it would have been helpful to examine the impact the mass arrival of post-1956 emigrants had on the existing American Hungarian community, to which were added many thousands of new Kádár-era “orphans”—many of them “economic refugees”—during the Seventies and Eighties. The book leaves aside the two-way traffic after 1989 (some resettled in the country of their birth) and those who make up the second, third and nth generation of American Hungarians (a good 90 per cent by now), or the sociological characterization of an even later trend, that of the dispersion of the ethnic Hungarian minorities in the Carpathian Basin.
The interviews suggest that the differences in political and ideological attitudes that marked the earlier waves of emigration are fading as the generation holding them leaves us. The new dividing line is drawn between the older established “Americanized” populace and whoever makes up the current wave of immigrants, the fobs (“fresh off the boat”). It is also conspicuous that

whereas in the case of the leading bodies— presumably due to the higher political stakes—the subjects of our interviews reported almost exclusively on conflicts in local communities, any conflicts seemed to be counterbalanced by cooperation.