ABSTRACT
I was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1919, during the last real Hungarian revolution, short-lived as it was. I grew up in the 1930s under the rise of fascism, which eventually reached and began to dominate Hungary and began to dominate and oppress much of my own life and thinking. I was educated in a very good gymnasium (high school) in Budapest and became very much involved in Hungarian literature and folklore. I spent probably the most rewarding months each year of my teens in various villages in Hungary, living and working with the peasants and trying to learn their culture, their language, their dialects, collecting folk songs, folk tales. So my first academic interest upon entering the university was folklore and literature. I was fortunate since I was always good at what I was interested in but not in other things, so my grades were far from good enough for entrance into the university, which was a highly selective procedure. But it so happened that my school sent me, on the basis of a schoolwide competition and then a districtwide competition, to a national literary competition. The representatives from each high school—the winners of high school competition—competed for the national prize in Hungarian literature. And it so happened that I won the first prize in Hungarian literature, which led to an amusing incident at the end of our baccalaureate, a week-long examination. The day before that final day of the bac86calaureate, the results of this national competition came out and were published in the newspapers.
