Alex Jalso’s Hungarian father wanted his children to grow up as typical Americans. So he didn’t share much of his family’s history from before he came to the United States in 1956. They know he finished his seminary studies in Pennsylvania, became a minister and started his new life. Jalso has met other Hungarians, and with their help, he has been filling in those empty family history pages.
Noémi Borsay Hall’s Hungarian experience has been different. Her father, also a minister, and her family immersed themselves in their history and culture as she grew up in McKeesport. She remains connected to her ethnic community and is fluent in the language.
Both have contributed their family stories and photographs to “Hungarian Roots & American Dreams: Tracing Personal History,” a second collection that follows one released at the University of Pittsburgh’s Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Programs last October.
Co-authors Anna Fenyvesi, a linguist and associate professor at the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Szeged, and Réka Bakos, a senior consultant and family history researcher with nearly two decades of experience in multinational business environments, have gathered, reviewed and edited the 58 submissions. The volume will introduce readers to 30 significant Hungarian American historical sites, “framing the personal narratives in both time and space,” according to a news release.
It will be released in English and Hungarian in digital and print form this October, with launches planned for Oct. 15 at the Hungarian House, New York City, and Oct. 17 in Washington, D.C.
The initiative began in February 2024 as a grassroots Facebook group, which has since grown into a more than 1,300-member community, according to the release. The group provides a space for Hungarian emigrants’ descendants — on both sides of the Atlantic — to share memories, exchange research tips and help one another uncover forgotten family histories.
The authors kept microhistory as the second volume’s focus, presenting personal stories showing how major historical events affected individuals and their families.
According to the news release, that means the stories “carry within them the breadth of nearly two centuries of Hungarian history: the 1848-49 revolution and war of independence, the landless peasantry’s struggle for survival, the indebtedness of smallholders or owners of small-acreage farms following the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, World War I and the Treaty of Trianon concluding it, revisionist movements, World War II, the Holocaust, deportations, the 1956 revolution, blacklisting of ‘kulaks’ and forced collectivization, as well as post-regime-change restitution efforts.”
The co-authors believe this volume is important because “collecting 50 immigrant stories didn’t paint the whole picture of immigration,” Bakos said. Fenyvesi added that every life is different, and recounting the stories helps explain “how people’s lives get caught up and are formed by the big forces of history.”
Both the Jalso and Borsay families’ stories provide proof of that.
Jalso said his father, the Rev. Alexander Jalso, never shared with his children what his life was like from the onset of World War II to when he and his brother left Hungary during the 1956 revolution. Both arrived in New Jersey – his father by plane and his uncle by boat – sponsored by an uncle, and they ended up in Pennsylvania.
He does know his family lost everything several times during that war and then the communist takeover but not much else about their Hungarian life. “That is an empty part of his history,” Jalso said.
His father finished the studies he had started at the Lancaster Theological Seminary. He first served as a pastor in Morgantown, where he met his wife. The family moved as his assignments changed: Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Jalso was born, then Buffalo and Homestead.
Rev. Jalso finished his full-time ministry career at the Calvary United Presbyterian Church in Brownsville, where he became active in the community. That led to honors from the Brownsville Area Ministerial Association in 2012 and being named Brownsville’s Man of the Year in 1997 among other accolades. In retirement he ministered in Homestead and Duquesne before moving to Ligonier, where he lived until he died in 2021.
His twin brother, Steven, who studied mechanical engineering at Dickinson College, also stressed to his children that they were American. “He said we speak English here,” Jalso said.
That uncle worked in Cornell University’s science labs, Jalso said. He repaired Saabs and refurnished furniture, too, helping foreign professors with those items as they settled in Ithaca or served as visiting lecturers.
The younger Jalso graduated from Brownsville Area High School and California University of Pennsylvania. He worked at West Virginia University for 30 years before retiring as chief information security officer in 2023.
He said he had a great trip to Hungary in 1990, visiting his aunt and grandmother.
His Morgantown neighbor, who taught in the university’s linguistics department, told Jalso about Fenyvesi coming to WVU last year as a Fullbright research fellow focusing on bilingualism, linguistic heritage and identity preservation. They met and he told her all the places she needed to visit. That included cemeteries in Brownsville, Connellsville, Johnstown, Vintondale and Hooversville in Pennsylvania, and Enterprise, Wheeling and Morgantown in West Virginia.
“We visited thousands of graves,” Jalso said. Fenyvesi looked at the tombstone inscriptions, explaining how the earlier ones they found were all in Hungarian and later with more English. The third and fourth generations didn’t spell the words correctly, he said.
The Hungarian culture immersion continued with Jalso getting to know a WVU researcher with ties to the country around the same time.
“For almost a year I was able to socialize with ethnic Hungarians again,” he said, adding that he has never been a member of Hungarian ethic or cultural organizations. “It brought me back to when my father and his friends were around. A different generation, but it was nice to experience the culture’s traditions again.”
Hall met Fenyvesi as a very young child when she came to the University of Pittsburgh as a researcher and visited the Borsay family and her father’s church. They connected a second time when Hall spent several weeks in Fenyvesi’s university in a student exchange program. They met a third time last year at WVU.
When Hall, an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Morgantown specializing in coal miners and black lung disease, moved there in 2018, she connected with its tight-knit Hungarian community. Her uncle who worked at WVU for a long time helped her find people, too.
She did not make it to last fall’s book launch, but her mother and sister, Judit Borsay Ganchuk, did. Her sister works at the William Penn Association, the major Hungarian fraternal society in America according to its website, on Pittsburgh’s North Side. Ganchuk just started her first term as secretary of Pitt’s Hungarian Nationality Room.
Their paternal grandparents – László Borsay and Ilona Ivácson – fled Hungary after World War II in the wake of Soviet occupation. They settled in Canada first, an easier place to immigrate. Her father, the youngest of six children, was born there.
The grandfather founded a church for Hungarians in Delhi, a small Ontario town. “This was more than a place of worship: It was a haven for other Hungarian refugees trying to rebuild lives in a new country while keeping hold of the language, traditions and faith that had shaped them,” Hall wrote in her submission. Her grandmother’s parents soon joined them.
In 1956 the Borsay family moved to Springdale when her grandfather served several Hungarian reformed congregations. He earned a doctorate in classical languages at Pitt, too, and when he finished, WVU hired him to teach. He served as pastor to several Presbyterian churches there, too.
After her own father finished his WVU studies, he traveled to Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary on scholarship to study philosophy and sociology. He met Judit Száldobágyi in a library there, according to family legend. They married after a whirlwind romance. Mrs. Borsay arrived here “without knowing much English beyond hello, yes, no and OK. She was brave and determined — qualities I now recognize as deeply Hungarian but also deeply hers,” Hall wrote. Her father served churches in Springdale and Homestead before settling in as the Free Hungarian Reformed Church of McKeesport pastor in 1988. He still leads it.
Hall and her sister would play at the McKeesport YMCA while her mother took English as a Second Language classes. They spoke Hungarian at home, and their father’s church was vibrant then.
“I didn’t realize it then, but my childhood was steeped in a delicate balance — one foot in American culture, the other firmly planted in the world my grandparents had left behind. We sang Hungarian songs, learned Hungarian dances as part of the William Penn Association Magyar Folk Dancers, ate Hungarian foods prepared by our mother or the ladies of the church’s Women’s Guild, and even watched Hungarian children’s cartoons,” Hall wrote.
“Every few years, we would travel as a family to visit my mother’s parents in Debrecen and sightsee in Budapest. Some of my fondest memories involve hot summer afternoons with a cold citrom fagyi (lemon ice-cream) in my hand.”
Descriptions like these please the co-authors. They don’t want family histories to be lists of names, places and dates. The goal, Bakos said, is “helping people write down what they know and create a coherent story that they can pass down to future generations. That’s what’s important in family history – getting to know those family members as best you can, especially [before] family members are gone. When they are gone, you won’t be able to do that.”
Fenyvesi and Bakos are writing and editing more books as they finish this one. That includes two thematic books – one exploring the story of the legendary “Dollar Farm” in Borsod, the story of immigrants to the U.S. who returned to Hungary, and the 1956 forestry students and faculty who fled the University of Sopron and built a new life in Canada. “The mission remains the same: to explore Hungarian emigration from new angles and preserve this rich heritage — together,” the release states.
Hall wants her submission in the book to be a surprise for her parents, who did help her with dates and photographs. Her participation, though, has a mission beyond those printed pages.
“I honestly have felt so connected to my Hungarian heritage my entire life. I take it for granted,” she said. “So many have ties and have connections to Hungarian culture and history. I wanted to be able to tell the story that is universal, knowing who you are and where you come from. My children are growing up differently.”
Last year she took her children, Emma and Gus, on a Hungarian trip that included a get-together with some of the people she has met through WVU.
They don’t speak Hungarian and neither does her husband, but Hall keeps working at hers and practicing every chance she gets.
Jalso’s challenge right now is finishing his pursuit of Hungarian citizenship. Fenyvesi helped him with the application, which requires more proof now that he doesn’t have a direct living descendant. He took all the needed paperwork and documents – birth certificates, high school and graduation records, marriage and death certificates and more – in February to the Hungarian Embassy in Washington, D.C.
That included documenting the name change from Jalsovczky to Jalso on his father’s naturalization papers.
His goal: obtain a Hungarian passport, expected to take a year, and travel there again to find a connection to where his father grew up.
Jalso’s brother married a Hungarian woman, and they visit family there every summer. He wants to do so with dual citizenship.
“You can travel anywhere in the world as a tourist, but how often can you go back as a citizen? At this stage of my life, connecting to a past my father didn’t want me to know about,” he said. “That will be really cool, an experience.”
A consul at the D.C. embassy, Renata Mateisz, reviewed all of Jalso’s documents. During their conversation, he explained Bakos and Fenyvesi’s book and upcoming new volume.
She reached out to the co-authors, and her family’s story – a great-grandfather who immigrated to the U.S. and then returned with his American-born wife to Hungary, a complex tale – will be included in it as well.
Pre-orders for volume two are now being accepted at
https://thehungarianstore.com/product/hungarian-roots-american-dreams-volume-2/
The U.S. partner in distributing the books is the Hungarian Store, an online business based in Indiana. Owner Liz (Szabó) Vos can be reached at liz@hungarianliving.com. She has also contributed a story for this second volume.
Helen is a copy editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but she's currently on strike. Contact her at hfallon@unionprogress.com.