Hungarian Rhapsodies: Essays on Ethnicity, Identity and Culture

Like the renowned American writer Edmund Wilson, who began to learn Hungarian at the age of 65, Richard Teleky started his study of that difficult language as an adult. Unlike Wilson, he is a third-generation Hungarian American with a strong desire to understand how his ethnic background has affected the course of his life. "Exploring my ethnicity", he writes, "became a way of exploring the arbitrary nature of my own life. It was not so much a search for roots as for a way of understanding rootlessness -- how I stacked up against another way of being". He writes with clarity, perception, and humor about a subject of importance to many Americans-reconciling their contemporary identity with a heritage from another country.Teleky, Richard is the author of 'Hungarian Rhapsodies: Essays on Ethnicity, Identity and Culture', published 1997 under ISBN 9780774806244 and ISBN 0774806249.