• My Generation

We both left the country in the same year. There was an itractable crisis in the government, Kádár’s (the then Federal President) lies came to light, the one-party-system came to a fatal standstill. The people wanted more than something to eat, they wanted to be free. There were no chances being admitted at the Academy or to survive as an artist if you didn’t have any connections or patronage. We didn’t know yet, it doesn’t work somewhere else in a different way, but we believed in us, in our skills, and we did know „no prophet has honor in his own country“. That was our only chance, the plus, we could take with us by leaving. Being an exotic stranger in a foreign state. We didn’t have time to wait for anything, there was no outlook for anything, so we left the sinking ship of crumbled communism. Short before his departure we met in Budapest, but H.Z. didn’t tell me anything about his plans. /Not even me!/ Independent from him I left six months later. I was admitted at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. He arrived after long waiting in Paris in the USA. Not only we both, but everybody left, who could. If I tell, Hungarian language is a world language, that’s no joke, because it is spoken in the whole world. Even if you’ll get among aboriginies, there will be somebody, who speaks Hungarian. It was a mass migration in 1987, almost like 1956, although without an (anti)revolution, but right before the Iron Curtain fell, which happened, totally unexpected, overnight, so nobody could have seen that coming. We scattered to the four winds. To Germany, France, Canada, Italy, Holland, USA. To change the country is not easy. Although I dreamed about living in the USA originally, I only managed a 43 miles jump but even so I landed in a quite different world. My parents were getting old, and I suspected, that they would need me soon.

THE WHO • MY GENERATION