Learning My Family's Language Revealed the Mystery of My Roots
Perhaps I love Budapest because it’s a stunning city, with layers of Ottoman and baroque and modern architecture. Or because it’s a place that makes geographical sense to me, with eight distinctive bridges spanning the Danube, bridges I can orient myself by. Or perhaps, like a salmon, I have some kind of homing instinct that draws me to Hungary, to the place where my father grew up, where that whole side of my family lived for centuries. I can say with certainty, though, that the sound of the place is a siren song for me. My sister maintains that Hungarian makes her sleepy, reminds her of falling asleep to the sound of relatives talking. For me it’s both comforting and invigorating, like a song you can’t help singing along to. With the slight complication that I don’t actually know the song.
The thing is: I have two native languages, but I speak only one.
I’m not alone in this. Perhaps you’re like me—immersed from birth in the sounds and rhythms of a language that was never spoken to you, one you never learned to speak. Perhaps, like me, when you travel later in life to the place where that language is spoken by everyone, you find something long-dormant springing to life in your core.
In the crowded downtown streets, you’ll hear a lot of English and German. But up in the Buda Hills, where my father lived out the end of his life—or on the basement level of the Great Market Hall, the level that smells like fish and pickles, or in the literary cafés frequented by generations of Hungarian writers, or in out-of-the-way restaurants serving tourist-unfriendly foods like tripe stew or sour lungs or sweet noodles—you’ll hear only the most beautiful, rolling, harmonious language on the planet.
I grew up near Chicago, speaking English but surrounded at home by Hungarian. My father, a refugee after the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution, spoke Hungarian on the phone, and with the Hungarian cousins and friends who filled our house, and, later, with my stepmother. No one spoke the language directly to me or my sister, which meant that while the cadences and music of the language went deep in our bones, we never learned to speak it. We knew words for food, of course, and how to count; there were songs and rhymes (my favorite was the ancient one that mocked a rotund Turkish pasha); and every night with either my father or my mother, who had learned Hungarian, there was a bedtime prayer.
It would be familiar to most Hungarian children. It starts “Én Istenem, Jóistenem, lecsukódik már a szemem” and means, in its entirety, “My God, my good God, already my eyes are closing. But yours are open, Father. While I sleep, watch over me! Watch over my dear parents and my siblings. When the sun rises again, let us kiss each other in the morning.” In Hungarian, it rhymes and has a lilting rhythm.
Although my father would occasionally remind me of the meanings of songs or rhymes (this one is about spring flowers; this is about trotting soldiers), mostly it all came at me as a mob of sounds. I knew every syllable, but I had no idea where one word stopped and the next word started.
Over time, the lullabies and nursery rhymes and prayers fell by the wayside. I don’t have much cause to mock Turkish pashas these days, and as an agnostic, I haven’t raised my own children with memorized bedtime prayers.
After my father moved back to Hungary in 2014, though, I began returning to Budapest regularly. On my first trip to see him, my first visit there in many years, I was exploring the Christmas market in Vörösmarty Square with my sister and drinking hot wine from a street cart when I was struck by a word on a restaurant sign: reggeli, which—next to photos of ham and eggs—clearly meant “breakfast.”
This word surely wasn’t from a childhood prayer or a song, so why could I hear it so clearly in my father’s voice? The soft emphasis on the first syllable, the stickiness of the double g. And then I had it: It was the root word, reggel, that I recognized, the ending of the prayer; it means “morning.” “Csókolhassuk egymást reggel”—“Let us kiss each other in the morning.”
I had made many short-lived attempts over the years to learn Hungarian properly but always gave up, overwhelmed. Hungarian is, by all accounts, one of the very hardest languages for an English speaker to learn. Not Romance or Slavic or even Indo-European, it’s related to not much but Finnish, and only barely. There are, conservatively counting, 18 noun cases. The four tiers of grammatical politeness complicate already baffling verb conjugations. There aren’t just different rules; there are different types of rules. The intricate system of “vowel harmony” makes the language beautiful but infinitely more difficult. It’s no coincidence that the Rubik’s Cube was invented in Hungary; to complete even a simple, present-tense sentence, you need to calculate in multiple directions.
On a subsequent visit, this time with my older daughter, I was walking in the residential streets of the Buda Hills—past houses with red-tiled roofs and backyard vineyards and barking dogs. A hand-painted sign on one gate showed a dog in silhouette, beside the word vigyázz. There it was again, on a similar sign. The word rang a bell deep in my body; after a minute I had it, and this word, too, was from my childhood prayer: “Vigyázz reám,” I confirmed on my phone, means “Take care of me.” These signs wanted us to take care: to watch out for dogs who were probably not all that fierce. My old childhood prayer, it seemed, was following me around the city, slowly revealing itself to me.
As an adult, I became resentful that my sister and I had not been raised bilingual. How much easier that would have been! Hungarians love to joke that “Hungarian isn’t hard at all.… I myself learned it when I was only 2!” But in the Iron Curtain era, my father never anticipated that we’d spend time there, or have use for a language spoken only in a region the size of Indiana. I understand why he didn’t feel it was worth the trouble, but still, when I’m in Budapest and I see a young child speaking it fluently, or a drunk slurring it from a bench, I think: Why can’t I have that? I want to be only as fluent as that toddler, as intelligible as that wino.
On those first few visits to Budapest, it was easy, as it is in most cities, to learn the words for “open” and “closed”—nyitva and zárva—but the former was, once again, deeply familiar. As I stood outside the open bakery, not going inside, the other customers probably believed I was staring at the poppyseed bejgli and krémes in the window. In fact, I was repeating the word to myself until I’d placed it in my memory: “De a tiéd nyitva”—“But yours are open.” The same word for the eyes of God and the operating hours of a tobacco shop or a dry cleaner.
My father passed away in January 2020, and my plans to come to Hungary for the memorial service that spring were dashed by the pandemic. During lockdown, I started learning Spanish with my younger daughter on Duolingo. Why on earth couldn’t Hungarian be this easy? In just a couple of months, I was able to have the kind of rudimentary conversation in Spanish that I couldn’t manage even after 40 years of desultory Hungarian study. And perhaps Hungarian, after all, wasn’t even worth it. I wasn’t going to live my life there. My father was gone. And since so few foreigners learn Hungarian, native speakers struggle to understand anyone with an accent.
It was over two years before I could return to sort through my father’s things, to visit his grave. He was buried in the New Public Cemetery. Founded in 1886, it’s still new, I suppose, by European standards. One of the largest cemeteries on the continent, it contains over three million graves, most of them covered in candles and flowers. It’s crowded with the living, as well—people kneeling in prayer, clipping weeds, selling floral wreaths.
On many tombstones and plaques around the cemetery, I saw the word Isten. This one I placed right away in the prayer, and knew without googling what it was: This was the word for “God.” But on others, I recognized another word, Atyám, which I had to look up. It’s a formal way of saying “my father,” more like “my heavenly father” than like “Dad.” Atyám, Isten. This was whom I’d been praying to all those years, without even knowing which words were which. I found this wildly comforting, as if my childhood prayer had suddenly been answered.
You might be thinking now that this is a story about religious awakening—that I realized God was following me around Budapest, watching over me. If that’s your hope, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I remain agnostic.
This is, instead, a story about deciding to run full throttle at the challenge of a language I’ll never speak well but that I can’t let go of. There are people who can’t let go of their parents’ religion, despite no longer believing in it, not really. There are those who can never shake their hometown accents, or their youthful fears, or their love of a food that reminds them of childhood summers in a small, sad town. Because to cling to those things is to cling to the very foundations of who you are.
Every trace of my childhood Hungarian that I find sprinkled around Budapest allows me another slight grasp of vocabulary and grammar, another reassurance that this language does belong to me, however awkwardly. I’m at the point now where I can express some half-coherent ideas. As it turns out, I can understand a lot more than I can say, and often I can’t explain why I can understand. It’s less like learning a language than like slowly, slowly recognizing it.
This is the map those words were making me throughout the city, the message those clues were spelling: You can understand a language you don’t speak. You can take comfort in a religion that’s not yours. If you let yourself, and if you let yourself try, you can remember things you never knew.
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