I have been in the United States for a week to promote the launch of my new book, Living In Wonder. In a car to the Dallas Fort Worth airport this week, after my final media appearance, I thought, ‘I’m so happy to be going home.’
Home? Away from the country where I have lived all my life, and to Hungary, a country where I have only been living for three years, and where I don’t speak the language? How is that possible? Why is it that when I get into a taxi at the Budapest airport, and listen to Magyar spoken on the radio, I feel a sense of calm, even though I don’t understand a word of it?
Hard questions. I first came to Hungary to live in 2021, on a journalism fellowship at the Danube Institute think tank. I quickly warmed to the country, which was so different from what the U.S. media had led me to think. Budapest was beautiful, the streets were safe, and people were friendly. Where were the fascist stormtroopers? The police monitoring everyone’s moves?
In truth I knew that the American media, being liberal, had surely exaggerated. And yes, I had been to the country briefly, to research my book Live Not By Lies, about the experiences of anti-communist dissidents, and the warnings they had for us in the contemporary West about the rise of a new kind of totalitarianism. Budapest had been a pleasant surprise then, but you can’t really tell much about any country from only a few days, especially when you don’t have time to explore it.
But in 2021, I was back, and living in Hungary for a four-month period. I got to know the capital the only way one really can: by walking its streets, sitting in its pubs and coffee shops, and observing how its people live. One day that warm spring, I was walking up Andrassy Avenue, and texted my friend Tucker Carlson, the prominent conservative U.S. journalist.
‘This is an amazing country,’ I told him. ‘It’s conservative, but not at all what Americans think it is. There’s a big story here. You should come see for yourself.’
Tucker said he had been wanting to come with his television team, but the bureaucracy at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington made it difficult. I told him I would see what I could do at my end.
I met soon after with Balázs Orbán, the prime minister’s political director, as part of my fellowship. ‘Do you know about Tucker Carlson?’ I asked. Of course he did. Well, I said, he wants to come check Hungary out, but he’s having trouble with all the bureaucracy. Can you help?
He could, and he did. In late August, Tucker and his crew came over, and spent a week broadcasting his Fox News program live from Budapest. It changed everything for Hungary in the eyes of ordinary American conservatives (though not among the Republican Party elites in Washington). Back in America later that fall, I attended a National Conservatism conference in Florida. There I saw some Hungarian friends from Budapest.
‘This is incredible!’ one said. ‘It’s the first time I’ve been to a conference where people find out I’m from Hungary, and they are happy to meet me, and want to know more about my country!’
That’s the Tucker Effect. Since then, more and more American conservatives have made their way to Hungary, some wanting to build ties to Hungarian conservatives, and others simply wanting to satisfy a new curiosity. Since I moved to Budapest permanently in 2022, it has been my pleasure—indeed my pride—to show them around the city. My city. My home.
The truth is, my settling in Budapest came out of a tragedy. My marriage had been in trouble for a decade. My wife and I had tried to save it, but finally, nothing more could be done. She filed for divorce while I was in Budapest in the spring of 2022, on a second fellowship. The divorce was messy and painful. The Danube Institute asked if I wanted to come back. I did, and brought my older son with me.
It was a broken man who moved into an apartment in Buda, near Batthyány tér, that autumn (my son joined me months later, after he finished his university degree). I was hurting, but somehow, looking out the window and across the river at the incomparably beautiful parliament building was a comfort.
PHOTO: Pixabay
I knew enough Hungarian history by then to know that the Parliament had been finished in the first years of the 20th century, when Budapest was at the apex of its cultural power. The Hungarians looked to the new century with hearts full of hope and pride. This was going to be their time to shine. But it didn’t work out that way. First came the Great War, then political turmoil, and after that, World War II, the Nazi occupation, and a devastating siege that destroyed or severely damaged 80 per cent of the capital. After that, four decades of Soviet occupation and dictatorship.
And yet, there stood the Parliament, in all its glory. It was still a sign of hope, but not hope in a brilliant future, but the kind of hope distilled by endurance. The 20th century had thrown its very worst at the Hungarians, yet they had survived—and not only survived, but were thriving. Maybe there was a lesson in that for me.
My son arrived, as sad and disoriented as his father was. We helped each other begin to heal. Eventually he found a Hungarian girlfriend, who offered him love and solace. Buda is beautiful, but a young man in his twenties prefers Pest. So after a year, we crossed the river to where life is more lively, and settled in a flat in Belváros.
After some months, we began taking Hungarian language classes together. To say this has been a challenge is like saying climbing Mount Everest is a bit of a hike. But at least now I can pronounce the alien-looking words on the storefronts. Hey, it’s a start. That said, there has been a surprising blessing in not speaking the language. When I go out and leave my laptop behind, the inability to speak or read the language means I can be alone with my thoughts, despite the vivid urban tableau filled with chatty people. Some would find that unbearably lonely, and I get that; me, I find it relaxing. We all want to know and be known, ultimately, but for some of us, we’re happier, at least for now, in being a stranger in a strange land.
My son and his girlfriend deepened their relationship, but I carried on a more modest and solitary life. Normally I am cheerful and outgoing, but my days and nights have been decidedly more melancholy since my life fell apart. Nevertheless, I found pleasure and comfort by meeting Hungarian friends at a neighborhood wine bar throughout the spring and summer, and bathing my broken heart in fröccs.
Magyars have a reputation for being pessimistic, it is true, but I found that the lack of enforced cheerfulness of the sort I’m used to in America was actually good for me. Why? I’m not quite sure, but I suspect it has to do with the absence of an expectation that one will be optimistic at all times. That gives one space.
Rod with 5th district deputy mayor (KDNP) Csilla Jeneiné Rubovszky at the ruling parties’ Election Night event on 9 June 2024
I’m not sure if this is a virtue particular to the Hungarians, or if it’s simply a matter of living in a foreign country, but it is a gift to someone of my temperament to live in a place where nobody (or almost nobody) knows you, and you don’t have to explain what happened to you, unless you want to. We Americans have a habit of establishing instant intimacy—I’m no different from my countrymen in this—but in my case, the loss has been so great that most of the time, I don’t want to talk about it. That’s fine with Hungary.
In this past week in America, I’ve had a number of conversations with old friends and newly met ones, in which people share their anxieties about how life is falling apart in our country. An old friend from high school, a man I had not seen for decades, came to a book event, and wept telling me how his teenage son had fallen into transgenderism. It seems like my beloved homeland is having a nervous breakdown.
Not Hungary. Yes, Hungarians are mad at each other over politics and other things, but what they may not perceive is what a blessing it is to live in a country that is comparatively stable. Western Europeans who come to visit usually remark about how Budapest feels like Europe used to be, before the migrant invasion wrecked urban life. In Alabama last week, I overheard an American friend who visited me two years ago in Budapest, with his young son, telling a neighbor, Budapest is unbelievable—I could let Bo run all the way down the street by himself, and not worry about it. Nobody does this in an American city, even the relatively safe ones.
Before I left for America on this trip, I complained to a Magyar friend about how stubborn Hungarians are, and how they refuse to change their ways of doing things, even when there is a plainly better way. ‘You’re right, we are like that,’ she said. ‘But consider that our hard-headed temperamental conservatism is also the thing that makes us willing to stand up to Brussels and tell them to go to hell.’
Touché.
As we move towards my third winter in Budapest, I find that I’m standing on solid ground again. My son moved to Vienna for grad school, so I’m once again living by myself. Yet a desire to start cooking again has surprised me, and sitting here in the American Airlines departure lounge, I find myself looking forward to getting off the couch and taking late-autumn walks along the Danube. The leaves are turning in Budapest, and they are also turning inside me—not towards dying, but towards living.
Maybe this could have happened to me had I settled in Madrid, or Lyon, or Vienna. But I didn’t settle there; I settled in Budapest, which turns out to have been a fine place to rest and recover, and learn to love life again. A hostess in Alabama served me a slice of cake, and without thinking, I said, ‘Köszönöm szépen.’
‘What?’ she said.
I smiled. ‘It’s Hungarian for ‘thank you very much,’’ I said. She laughed.
‘I guess you feel at home over there, right?’ she said.
Surprising myself, I replied, ‘You know, I really do.’
It remains true, though, that I am a man of the American South, and it delighted me to be once again in a familiar culture. My friend and host Ed took me to a local barbecue joint called Miss Myra’s, where I ate ribs, beef brisket, cornbread, and stewed turnip greens.
The lunch at Miss Myra’s
It’s pretty hard to find turnip greens along the Danube, and honestly, nothing in the world tastes more like the rural South than greens and cornbread.
Everybody asked me if I was planning to move home to the South one day. I don’t know, I told them honestly; maybe. My life has been upended so often these past years that I can’t make any promises to anybody else, not even myself. But for now, though I adore the South and its people—my people—on this hot autumn day in the heart of Texas, I am headed over the Atlantic Ocean, and east, toward home.
Unless otherwise indicated, all photos in the article are courtesy of Rod Dreher.