This is the translation of the original interview, published in Magyar Kurír on 19 November 2022.
Teacher Anna (Panni) Kertész, who came from a Greek Catholic family of 11 children in Sárospatak, Hungary, and is a resident of Garfield, New Jersey, has been easing her 40-year-long homesickness by preserving Hungarian cultural values. She founded the Lant és Toll and Lantocska tradition-preserving groups, co-leading them for the past 18 years with a former parent of the local Hungarian weekend school, Ildikó Tarnóczy.
***
Panni’s and Ildikó’s Stories of Immigration
Panni was born in 1955 in Csengerújfalu, Hungary, and spent her childhood in Sárospatak. Two of her much older siblings immigrated to America in 1957, and she visited them in 1981. ‘I was the kind of person who could never have imagined living abroad,’ she says emotionally before revealing the reasons behind her decision to settle in America. Her father was a Greek Catholic priest, and under the Communist regime, their family faced many difficulties—for example, her siblings were initially denied admission to high school. At school, only the Hungarian national anthem, the Himnusz melody, was permitted, but Panni taught her class the lyrics, which led to a summons from the vice principal questioning why she was ‘acting differently’. It’s no surprise that when she arrived in America, she was struck by the sense of freedom experienced there. When love also found her, her fate was sealed. She met her husband, Csaba, at St. Stephen’s R.C. Magyar Church in Passaic, New Jersey, and they’ve been happily married and lived in Garfield ever since. She began teaching at the local Hungarian weekend school. Soon their children—Kinga, Miklós, and Borbála—were born. She recalls an emotional moment when, after a Trianon-themed performance, a woman approached her in tears, saying she had intended to stay in America but, moved by the program, decided to return home. ‘That could have been me, if I’d had such an experience before getting married,’ she laughs. Ildikó commented: ‘Without you, there would be no Lant és Toll or Lantocska. You have a mission here!’
Ildikó was born in 1966, grew up in Kassa (Košice, at the time Czechoslovakia, now Slovakia), and attended a local Hungarian school that followed the Slovak curriculum. Her father valued Hungarian identity deeply, so he sent his three daughters to a high school in Debrecen, Hungary. After graduating, they returned to Kassa but found no opportunities for university studies—neither their Slovak proficiency nor their Hungarian degrees were officially recognized. After the regime change in 1990, a colleague informed her that Hungarians from the other side of the border could also enroll in teacher training colleges without entrance exams. They applied, intending to later teach Hungarian at the local Hungarian school in Kassa. However, fate took a different turn—one that had already intertwined her life with Panni’s via Sárospatak, even before they knew each other. In Debrecen, Ildikó met her husband, an American who had come to Hungary as a Peace Corps volunteer to teach English. They got married, taught in several Hungarian cities, and in 1996, just before their first child was born, they decided to move to America together.
Founding Lant és Toll and Later Lantocska
When Panni first encountered the Hungarian literary club in New Brunswick, New Jersey, she was inspired to create something similar for teenagers living in her area. Thus, in 2001, she founded the Lant és Toll tradition-preserving group. ‘I walked into the Garfield Scout House and enthusiastically presented my plans—singing, reciting poetry, reading, and analyzing short stories and poems. I was surprised at how excited the second- and third-generation youth became. They had heard firsthand from their parents and grandparents about the hardships they endured; these stories were etched into their skin. They were genuinely interested because they had grown up hearing these stories,’ she recalls.
At first, the teenagers Panni gathered mainly sang and analyzed poetry. Along the way, they had many discussions about history, leading to their first performance, a tribute to Hungarian soldiers who fell in the World Wars. Following the success of that program, they continued to commemorate fallen Hungarian soldiers every year and expanded their repertoire to Christmas and Easter performances, then to Hungarian national holidays. On 6 October, they sang historical songs in St. Stephen’s Magyar Church in Passaic, and during Sunday Mass, they regularly performed after communion. Panni recalls how much they loved singing poetry. For their Easter program, they included Mária-siratók (Mary’s lamentations). The younger girls admired the older ones performing these beautiful folk songs and wished to sing them too. But Panni didn’t allow it, reassuring them: ‘Your time will also come.’ ‘When they grew up and finally got to perform them, they were overjoyed, and they sang them as worthily as their predecessors,’ she says proudly.
‘The younger girls admired the older ones performing these beautiful folk songs and wished to sing them too’
A few years later, Ildikó—whose daughter was studying in the Hungarian weekend school with Panni’s children—along with other parents, frequently asked Panni why she didn’t create a similar tradition-preserving group for the younger ones. So, Panni founded Lantocska. As a parent, Ildikó had already been instrumental in helping Panni with Hungarian school performances, which led her to join Lant és Toll—bringing along her guitar, too. ‘Ildikó introduced us to Kaláka (a Hungarian band famous for composing music for poetry). I was amazed by their choice of words and sentence structures; we taught all of their children’s albums to our kids, significantly expanding their vocabulary,’ Panni recalls. At Lantocska, they sang a lot, performed puppet shows, and adapted folk tales into plays. The children loved the plays so much that they even created their own story, Vasvirág (Iron Flower). Altogether, they produced eight or nine plays, into which Panni incorporated circle games and children’s songs. She designed the stories so that every child had a role to play. The plays captivated the parents as well—not only did they drop off their children, but they also stayed for the sessions and joined in the performances.
Preserving Hungarian Folk Traditions
The community was incredibly close-knit; the children were always together—not just at scouting and Hungarian school, but beyond as well, they recall nostalgically. The Lantocska sessions were initially held in the church basement, then later moved to the Kuckó (Cottage), the attic space of a building next to the church. Asking Panni about why it was important for her to keep these organizations within a church framework, she replies: ‘As a devout Hungarian, I cannot think or pray in any language other than my mother tongue—I can only do so as a Hungarian Christian. I could never have imagined it any other way.’
As an example, she recalls that at one point, within the first Lantocska group, they even held a kind of religious education session after Mass. She invited a teacher from the Hungarian school, and later a Lantocska-mother with a theology degree, to guide the children through the church, introducing them to the altars and Hungarian saints. Afterward, they had lunch together, and only then did the Lantocska sessions begin, which, besides singing, puppetry, and storytelling, also included learning about folk traditions. During Advent, they baked gingerbread; at Christmas and Easter, they performed folk traditions as part of the older children’s programs. Panni requested that every family joining Lantocska attend church regularly. She even managed to agree with one non-religious family that they would at least attend Mass on the days of the sessions.
Although the content for festive performances was largely overlapping with that of the previous year, the presentations were never identical; Panni always made some changes. At the request of Imre Lendvai-Littner, president of the Hungarian Scout Association in Exteris (KMCSSZ), she’s been organizing joint national holiday performances with the Hungarian weekend school and the scout troop of Garfield for the past two years. In 2022, their program was attended by Judit Varga, then Minister of Justice in Hungary, Szabolcs Takács, the Hungarian Ambassador to the US, and István Pásztor, the Hungarian Consul General in New York. Panni smiles as she reveals that by the time she found out who’d be in the audience, the rehearsals were well underway. The beautiful performance was not explicitly created for the distinguished guests, though she was, of course, very pleased with their positive reception. She attributes this to the fact that the children in Lantocska today have exceptionally good singing voices. ‘I believe that beyond the undeniably beautiful choreography and singing, the standing ovation was also due to the fact that all traces of the American accent disappeared during singing,’ I remark. She nodded in agreement: ‘That’s absolutely true.’
Sources of Inspiration
When I asked Panni about her sources of inspiration, her face lit up. ‘There was an elderly precentor in the church in Sárospatak—she was called “Vastagderekú Varkoly néni” (Auntie Varkoly with the thick waist). She had a powerful, resonant voice that enchanted me, and she knew an incredible number of folk hymns,’ she recounted. When elderly Hungarian Americans told stories and showed photographs of Marian Crownings, a tradition started by Hungarian immigrants at the turn of the century—where mothers dressed up beautifully and sang on Mother’s Day—she felt this was a valuable heritage worth preserving. She began recalling Auntie Varkoly’s hymns, combining them with folk songs she had learned from Ilonka Nyisztor, a Csángó folk singer from Romania. She transcribed and recorded many of those songs and taught them to her group.
‘I cannot think or pray in any language other than my mother tongue—I can only do so as a Hungarian Christian’
Another major influence was Ilona Budai, a Kossuth Prize- and Hungarian Heritage Award-winning folk singer from Hungary, whom the scouts once invited to their summer school camp. ‘I seized the opportunity to ask her everything I could,’ Panni recalled. As they were washing the campers’ soaked clothes together, she asked Ilona to sing. ‘She sang songs I’d never heard before, not even during my time in music school. So, while she sang, I quickly jotted them down,’ she says. The scouts also invited Ilonka Nyisztor, and as a result, Lant és Toll took on the responsibility of sponsoring the education of two Csángó children, Eduárd Katona and Valéria Pusztinai, for several years. Later, Panni and her sisters traveled to Transylvania (Romania) to visit Ilonka Nyisztor. ‘There, we met Aunt Erzsi László, Ilonka’s mother, who sang us the Golden Lord’s Prayer (Aranymiatyánk). It was magical…’ She pauses, her voice catching with emotion. ‘One of my sisters recorded it, but unfortunately, the recording didn’t turn out well. So now, the song only lives on in my cells,’ she said softly.
‘At the time, Aunt Erzsi’s husband was still alive, and they told me about Father Teodóz Sándor Jáki, a Benedictine monk who often visited them. He was the one who discovered the Csángó version of the Aranymiatyánk,’ she continued. ‘The other version was collected by Zsuzsanna Erdélyi, a renowned Hungarian ethnographer and recipient of the European Folk Art, Kossuth, and Hungarian Heritage Awards,’ she added. Encouraged by them, Panni tried to visit Father Jáki in Győr, Hungary. Although their paths never crossed in person—whenever Panni traveled home, the priest was away—they corresponded until his death. ‘He deeply appreciated folk hymns and shared his experiences with me, while I wrote to him about Lant és Toll,’ she recalled.
Ilona Budai was the first to hint to Panni the name of Éva Ferencz, a Székely folk singer who had accompanied Zsuzsanna Erdélyi on her folklore collection journeys. Panni researched the archaic texts and songs that had been collected, transcribed those that had not been written down, and taught them to her group. When she learned that an old classmate from Sárospatak, whom she frequently updated about her work, had a daughter, Zsuzsa Tóth, who made a documentary film about Zsuzsanna Erdélyi titled Rácson kívüli vadrét (Wilderness outside the grid), she showed it to the young people in her group. ‘For the first time, they saw what they had only heard about before. They understood why it was important to preserve these traditions. This is how I gathered these crumbs of folk traditions…For me, it was crucial that they learned folk hymns, texts, and songs, and that they knew who Ilona Budai, Éva Ferencz, Ilona Nyisztor, and Zsuzsanna Erdélyi were. Over time, these values became part of them. They felt them as their own. I managed to instill in them a deep appreciation for our cultural treasures and the understanding that no matter where they live in the world, as long as part of their soul remains Hungarian, this heritage must be cherished and preserved.’
Passing the Torch to the Next Generation
At its peak, Lant és Toll had around 20 members, and Lantocska had a similar number. In its current ‘second generation’ format, led by two former Lant és Toll members, Olga Marshall and Bíbor Kelemen, there are now more children in Lantocska than adults in Lant és Toll. Panni revealed that for some time now, she has known that she must let young people take the lead. When she saw how passionate these two young women were, she decided to pass it on to them. She still wrote and directed a successful folk tale play, A Rest Lány (The Lazy Girl) last year, but this fall she fully stepped back. ‘I let them go with a full heart, though I still feel that my soul is there,’ she concluded our conversation.
Related articles:
