Review of Marrying Hungary

Marrying Hungary

This past weekend, I finally finished reading Montreal author Linda Leith's autobiographical new book, entitled Marrying Hungary. I started reading it for the purposes of a review (Leith resides in NDG and therefore makes for a perfect Monitor article), but became engrossed in it for reasons that had nothing to do with my editorial duties and everything to do with the feeling that I was being treated to the musings of a kindred spirit. As an allophone and as someone who has lived a good chunk of her life abroad, it's sometimes hard for me to explain to others how I feel about Montreal --the place of my birth and my earliest childhood memories-- and why I love this city so fiercely.

Reading Linda Leith's explanation of why someone such as herself (born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and subsequently living in London, Brussels, Basel, Paris, Budapest and finally, Montreal) feels most at home right here in la Belle Province, made me shake my head in fervent agreement. Finally! Someone had articulated my feelings and had done so in such an eloquent and true fashion, that it made me want to cry.

"Montreal is human in scale while being a real city, a city big enough to support theatres and orchestras and festivals and good restaurants and all the other things you want to have available to you even when you have no immediate interest in going," she says. "It has a sense of its place in the world, and a recognizable personality, diffident and ironic. It's human in its contradictions, its mix of peoples and languages, and in its acknowledgement of people's frailties and of their desire for fun. And it's a French-speaking city. That is not incidental. I love the fact that the city will always remain in some ways foreign to me."

If that paragraph is not a love letter to our city, I don't know what is. And those who fall in love with our vivacious, bizarre, downtrodden, manic mess of a metropolis are usually the ones who've travelled and experienced other cultures, norms and ways of life and have come to appreciate this marvelous mix, these clashing cultures we know as Montreal.

Not having one singular place to call home, is both a blessing and a curse. It can be lonely always being the 'outsider'; never quite feeling "de souche" enough, not having (or knowing) of a family tree that has roots that extend deep into a city's makeup. But, being an outsider also frees you up to be who you want to be, to define yourself and your surroundings on your own terms, to associate with who you want to and discover that you love the place you call home, not because you have to, but because you want to.

A rootless past can make for an insightful vagabond, someone who's empathetic to people's --and a city's-- frailties and mysteries, someone who consciously chooses to fall in love with the foreign. If, as they say, "familiarity breeds contempt" living in a place that will always feel a little foreign and a little unfamiliar, might perhaps have the makings of a life-long love affair.


The Monitor

More Reviews of this title

Marrying Hungary

Marrying Hungary by Linda Leith is a memoir partly about marriage and partly about Hungary, but mainly about the formation of a writer's identity. For this reason, the self-consciousness of the writer is especially acute and rewarding. Leith's parents were members of the Communist Party in Belfast (part of a tiny minority in a highly sectarian culture) who abandoned their roots in 1952 to live first in Basel, Switzerland, and then in Montreal. There, at age 18, Leith fell in love with her future husband, Andy Gollner. He was himself the product of a politically troubled background, and quite literally a displaced person, having come to Canada at age 11 during the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Both embark on successful academic careers, which take them to Paris and London, then back to Montreal, and eventually to Hungary. Leith enrolls her sons in Budapest schools, and gamely tries to learn Hungarian, conscious all the while of a certain uprootedness. Indeed, she is aware throughout her story of the indelible marks that can be left upon the soul by public events and political strife, even when these reside deep in the past. It is only when she returns to Belfast as a mature woman (flying in from Budapest, somewhat in congruously) that she begins to make sense of the tangled threads that have comprised her life. The incongruity is seemingly the point — at least, it is the contrast between the familiar and the strange, the sense of being at home and the sense of being foreign, that liberates Leith to write the first of her three novels. Ironically, the intensity of her life as a writer creates a rift in her marriage that cannot be repaired, and her story concludes with a new beginning of sorts: the re-establishment of her career in Montreal as Andy returns to Budapest. Marrying Hungary is remarkable for the sureness and clarity of its authorial voice; Leith examines herself and her career in the context of the politics of gender, class and nationality. She does not minimize the difficulty of being oneself amid the complexities of modern life: "Most people, regardless or their other qualities, belong to a mindset, a club, or a school or thought. Most people, and this includes most intellectuals, think what their friends and associates think, venture opinions on nothing more controversial than their favourite brand of peanut butter or their favourite movie."

Over and against the safety that lies in conformity, Leith posits the risk and the loneliness of being a writer: 'For me, it is not merely difficult to write; it is impossible to write. It has always been impossible for me to write. I do it anyway, and the very difficulty of writing is always my subject. I wrote myself out of the catastrophe of divorce.' There is no other way, one concludes, for the writer to have or to become a true self.


Event

Marrying Hungary

Linda Leith is well known in literary circles, and deservedly so. She created Matrix magazine and the successful Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, and she has written three novels: Birds of Passage, The Tragedy Queen and The Desert Lake. Marrying Hungary is a memoir about her rather rootless life. Born in Northern Ireland, she left the country at 13, before she had a real chance to enjoy it. Her family lived in Switzerland and then in Montreal, where she met her husband, a young Hungarian immigrant. She subsequently lived in Brussels, London, Paris and Budapest, although she settled in Montreal, teaching for many years at John Abbott College.

The title is something of a misnomer, because this book's most striking element is neither her marriage, about which she is discreet, nor Hungary, whose earthy character was more richly displayed in Birds of Passage. The most dramatic element is her father, whose sarcasm and rage filled her childhood with fear.

As she tells it, he was a man of contradictions. Belfast physician Desmond Leith and his wife, Nan, were sophisticated bohemians and card-carrying Communists. They broke with the party in the late 1950s. To support his family, Desmond worked quite successfully for a Swiss multinational, but he remained at heart an angry socialist.

However, his socialism didn't prevent him from being a pedant, one of those tiresome parents who like to score points off their children on matters grammatical. He was a snob who wanted desperately to be thought of as an English gentleman. Indeed, one of the few things he seems to have liked about his posting to Pointe Claire in the 1960s was that he had finally found neighbours who were impressed by his lordly ways.

Like her mother, Linda Leith seems to have been compliant. She tried to appease the household tyrant, escape his wrath, and protect him when he succumbed to mental illness and alcoholism.

While she doesn't dwell on how her marriage ended, she suggests that the two years spent in post-Communist Hungary trying to learn the language and the cuisine - charmed but often taken aback at the manners - put her at a disadvantage compared with her husband, who was thrilled to be in his homeland.

Despite her struggle to establish her own identity through a turbulent yet secretive upbringing and become a writer in the midst of a busy life as a mother and teacher, she never mentions feminism or tries to generalize her own experience.

This is wise. We don't live our lives as sloganeers. We simply muddle along, trying to do the right thing by our own lights, please those who love us, make sense of the obstacles to our own deepest longings and face them down.

Marrying Hungary is a deceptively quiet book. Leith is a fastidious writer (all those grammar lessons from her father, perhaps) who never overreaches for effect, but many readers, especially of her own generation, will see points of similarity with their own lives. Her thoughtful summing-up of her life may even inspire some readers to write autobiographies of their own.


The Montreal Gazette

Marrying Hungary

When two people with different backgrounds marry, which culture predominates and how does that decision affect the marriage? Such are the questions tackled by Montreal writer Linda Leith in her absorbing memoir, an unblinking glimpse at her marriage to a Hungarian refugee and its influence on the trajectory of her life.

An academic and former editor, Leith is the author of six books, some of which focus on displacement. Her 1993 debut novel, Birds of Passage, tells about a man writing his first novel amid the political upheaval in Hungary. Published in 2007, The Desert Lake is the tale of a female journalist who travels to China without her lover. Marrying Hungary, published by a Winnipeg small press, begins in Belfast, where she was born in 1949 to parents who were Northern Irish communists.

Even as a young child, Leith sensed that her family was different. Her beautiful mother, Nan, was nurturing for the most part, but her father, Desmond, a medical doctor, ruled the family with "a reign of terror." When communism fell into disfavour in the 1950s, her parents reinvented themselves. Desmond's solution was to keep relocating the family, first to London, Basel, then London again and finally to Montreal. During this period, he succumbed to alcoholism, manic depression and several nervous breakdowns. No great surprise that Leith's upbringing was hellish. Some aspects are eerily reminiscent of George Fetherling's boyhood in his memoir Travels by Night.

At 18, she met Andy Gollner, a Hungarian refugee. Their families couldn't have been more different; while her parents were embracing communism, his parents were running away from it. Attracted by his exotic background, Leith married Andy in 1974. However, it soon became apparent that he was from a different world, one that she later experienced first-hand during the two years they spent in Budapest in the early '90s. Leith struggled valiantly to fit in, but experienced much frustration in her efforts. Andy's desire to remain in Hungary ultimately ended their marriage.

Written in candid, eloquent prose, the narrative is divided into five separate parts: childhood, the first years of their relationship, married life, divorce and new beginnings. One of the most interesting sections describes Leith's experiences as a foreigner in Budapest; for example, her attempts to find a relative's apartment and her ambivalent feelings about the culture."I wanted to belong, and I was sure that if I just tried hard enough and worked at it, I would manage to cross the divide between me and Hungary," she writes. "And still I found the country mystifying, the people disconcerting, and the language an insuperable barrier."

As well, she documents the immigration story of Andy's parents. In 1956, they were among more than 37,000 that Canada accepted as refugees after the Hungarian Revolution. Her depiction of the Gollners' early struggles in Canada is often touching and occasionally humorous.

In writing this memoir, Leith has not only chronicled her emotional journey, but she has also articulated an outsider's point of view on the culture into which she married. Marrying Hungary is a very Canadian story. It is an important contribution that promotes cross-cultural understanding.


The Winnipeg Free Press

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