The sweet, smoky intoxicating smell of goulash soup — the variety of meat and vegetable dish spiced with paprika — hung in the air at the American Hungarian Club of the Palm Beaches’ annual goulash cooking competition in Lake Worth Beach.
The event was held to celebrate six decades of Hungarian heritage in Palm Beach County.
The non-profit club was established in 1963, a few years after the 1956 failed revolt against the Hungarian government and Soviet Union forces. More than 200,000 Hungarian refugees later fled the country, with more than 30,000 resettling in the United States under the federal government's "Operation Safe Haven" refugee assistance program.
Since the late 1950s, decade after decade, generations of Hungarians have come to the United States to make it their new home.
Today, the United States is home to nearly 1.4 million Hungarian-Americans, including an estimated few hundred people with Hungarian ancestry in Palm Beach County.
Gyula Kovacs, current President of the American Hungarian Club, said his family arrived here in 1988, a year before Hungary’s communist system came to an end.
"We went through borders. We were the only ones with families, so we were a little scared,” said Kovacs, who spent two years in Germany and lived in Canada for 10 years before emigrating to the U.S. and becoming a citizen.
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That immigrant experience motivated Kovacs to help other immigrants. He now wants to open the club to others, while educating people on his Hungarian heritage.
"We have Brazilian families, Hispanic, quite a few different nations who, husband or wife or both, are not Hungarian,” Kovacs said. "We welcome anybody."
The club was recently recognized by the Palm Beach County commission, with Commissioner Michael Barnett presenting the organization with a proclamation.
Commissioner Greg Weiss said his father's family, who is of Jewish Hungarian ancestry, came to the United States after escaping World War I in 1911.
“I’m glad we have a Hungarian club,” he said. “Maybe I can go and sample your food and remind me of my grandmother’s cooking.”
Other club members have also shared their experiences as immigrants in the U.S.
Attila Csakanyos, who works in construction, said his family eventually emigrated to the United States in 1982, escaping then communist Hungary. He was 21 at the time.
"I was in a refugee camp in Austria for one whole year,” Csakanyos said.
Now, one of his children is an American-born daughter with a Haitian mother. On this day, she was the only biracial child playing games and running around with her young peers.
Csakanyos said Hungarian is spoken at home to keep the language alive and to embrace bilingualism.
Csakanyos has been involved with the social club for more than two decades.
“Even with my second child now, I only speak Hungarian at the house. It's mandatory. English is easy for her because she goes to school. She's a first grader,” said Csakanyo as he ate his hearty goulash soup amongst friends and family and slicing up dobos torte — the famous Hungarian sponge cake.
"And she enjoys Hungarian," he said. "To me, it's easy. Some people say it's difficult because some of the spouses don't want to because they say it's harder on the kid. On the contrary, the more they know, the better.”
The cultural and familial bond with Hungary remains strong though, Csakanyo told WLRN.
“What I usually say when I go back to visit, I say, ‘I came home from home.’ Because literally this is my home now. But, my heritage is back there,” Csakanyos said. “You have to stick to what you learned from your parents, from your surroundings. And then you adjust to America.”
Hungarian archery is another way to maintain heritage at the American Hungarian Club.
Attendees at the goulash soup competition went outside for a demonstration on thousands of years of Hungarian history. The whoosh of arrows from the Magyar (Hungarian) bow connecting with the thud sound of arrows hitting a target kept members entertained and curious.
A group known as Hun Archers came down from Sarasota, Florida — which boasts thousands of people with Hungarian ancestry — to give a presentation on ancient Hungarian archery.
Stephen Csicsek helped lead a group of archers who wore traditional attire and brought to the club handmade bows from Hungary. The men demonstrated how to shoot multiple arrows at once, reenacting the Huns — their ancestors, who were nomadic groups from Central and Eastern Europe.
"The hat is called a sheveg, which is very traditional that they still wear in Mongolia. A lot of the Hungarian culture comes from Eurasia into the Carpathian Basin over time,” Csicsek told WLRN. "And the hat and the shoes, which we call chizma are kind of traditional to Mongolia and to the Huns."
Csicsek, who is originally from Massachusetts, said maintaining his heritage wasn’t easy because the pressure to assimilate into the broader American ethos is a pressure to discard parts of one’s ethnic identity and cultural heritage.
“We grew up in Boston where everybody was Irish or Italian. So nobody could pronounce our name. We were that kind of outcast kind of name. Everyone would call me Polish or Polak, you know, and I'd be like, no, I'm Hungarian,” Csicsek said.
“I'm very proud of it. My father was extremely proud of it. And at a young age, he started speaking Hungarian to me and I took to it.”
Csicsek said some people reacted to the cultural peer pressure in strong ways. He said his 94-year-old grandfather had died without learning “one stitch of English here in the country.”
Balazs Busniak, whose father is part of the archery group, said being Hungarian “is a big part of who I am.”
Busniak, a 26-year-old creative director for a media company, said he immigrated from Hungary when he was one year’s old but he knows how to speak, read and write.
Now, his biggest challenge, as a new father of a one and half year old, is maintaining that language consistency with his son. “Maintaining that where my partner isn't Hungarian, so that language barrier, I have two people to teach now,” Busniak said.
"I live in western New York, and I'm not surrounded by a lot of Hungarians. That's why places like this [American Hungarian Club] are important — you gotta find other Hungarians to surround yourself with so you have that support, because the dominant language in the US is English."
Edith Torma, a retired businesswoman and volunteer for the club, said as people marry and assimilate to the dominant English speaking culture, closing the generational and cultural divide is an ongoing challenge, especially for those who don’t have a refugee background, which had sparked an intense demand for community participation during the early waves of migration to the city.
"We are trying to have some younger people, so everything we built and the older generation built, it's gonna continue in the future. For the young ones," Torma said.
"The people who emigrated to the U.S, they came in 1956. So they are very old. And unfortunately we lost a lot of them.”
She said the club is working hard to cater to people's needs through music, food, and social activities like games and private parties — and she's betting on the club’s longevity, hoping it's going to be around "for another 60 years.”
She said the unique Hungarian character of the club and its immigrant history is actually what attracts people from various backgrounds.
Club president Kovacs agrees. He said that although it’s hard to attract younger Hungarians due to marriage and change in cultural habits, he sees the club "adapting to the situation like other clubs, German club, Finnish club.”
Kovacs said the American Hungarian Club stays afloat through memberships, donations, and grants — with some support from the Hungarian government.
“We welcome other cultures, but the name rightly fit ‘American Hungarian Club’ not Hungarian American club’ — maintaining the [heritage] celebrations, while we welcome anybody,” he said.
