By Oliver A. I. Botar
It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that Nándor (“Nándi”) Dreisziger, a co-founder and long-time member, as well as supporter and friend of the Hungarian Studies Association of Canada, died suddenly on 10 October 2024. This is a great loss to the HSAC, to his family and his many friends and colleagues. His importance to our organization is reflected in the fact that our prize in Hungarian Studies, initiated in 2015, is named after him (The Nándor Dreisziger Medal).
Born in Csorna, Hungary in 1940, Nándor Dreisziger attended the local Arany János Gimnázium until the family settled in Canada following the Hungarian Revolution, in December of 1956. He, his brother Kálmán (“Öcsi”) and their parents settled in Welland, Ont. where Nándor continued his high school studies. In 1960 the family moved to Toronto and Nándor completed his secondary studies at Harbord Collegiate. Then he enrolled at the University of Toronto where he earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees as well as a post-graduate diploma in Russian and East European Studies. During 1966-67 he worked as an Historical Research Officer with the Library and Archives of Canada.
In 1970 he joined the faculty of the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, where he taught European and Canadian history until his retirement and eventual naming as Emeritus Professor.
Prof. Dreisziger has written and edited numerous books and anthologies, and his many scholarly articles have appeared in Canadian, American, British, Hungarian, Australian and other academic journals, as well as in conference proceedings and other forums. His academic promise was already visible in his PhD dissertation, Hungary’s Way to World War II, which won the 1967 Helicon Prize in Hungarian History and Literature and was published the following year by the Hungarian Helicon Society in Toronto. Struggle and Hope: The Hungarian-Canadian Experience (1982) was written by Dreisziger with profs. M. L. Kovács, Paul Bődy and Bennet Kovrig, each of whom contributed a chapter on the period up to the Great War. The Introduction as well as the five chapters covering the period after World War I, the great bulk of the volume, were by Dreisziger himself, and the volume is to this day the definitive publication on the topic. While he wrote and/or edited several other volumes (on the 1956 Revolution, on Canadian-American relations, on Oscar Jászi, on the Hungarian minorities, on the tolerance of ethnic groups in Canada, on Hungary in the Second World War, etc.), in addition to editing numerous special issues of Hungarian Studies Review, each of them a scholarly anthology in itself, Dreisziger’s magnum opus is Church and Society in Hungary and in the Hungarian Diaspora, which appeared with the University of Toronto Press in 2016. As Historian Tibor Frank described it, “This is the first serious effort to discuss the state of the Hungarian Christian Churches worldwide and thus a pioneering work. At last an accomplished author examines the whole, long history and complex current state of affairs of a global phenomenon.”
Perhaps Prof. Dreisziger’s most important achievement was his work as editor of Hungarian Studies Review, the Hungarian diaspora’s oldest continuously operating scholarly periodical. Founded by Dreisziger in 1974 under the title The Canadian-American Review of Hungarian Studies, and with a name change to Hungarian Studies Review in 1981, Prof. Dreisziger served as editor until 2018, an astonishing 45 years! As our Past President Prof. Steven Jobbitt, along with Dr. Árpad von Klimo put it:
To say that HSR has been a life-long labour of love for Nándor would be an understatement. Recruited by the journal’s co-founder, Ferenc Harcsár, in the early 1970s, Nándor has been the heart and soul of HSR from the outset and can be credited not only for the journal’s many successes, but also its longevity. Nándor helped steer the journal to new heights in the 1980s when HSR became attached to the newly founded Hungarian Chair at the University of Toronto and was key to finding new and often innovative ways to continue publishing the journal after support from the University of Toronto diminished in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From the traditional typesetting of the 1970s, to the advent of desktop editing in the 1990s, to the current digital age, Nándor did more than simply roll with the punches over the years. He adapted the journal in response to often abrupt financial, political, and technological changes, and built a solid foundation for a future generation of editors to build upon. It is an impressive achievement, and as the new editors of HSR, we hope we can live up to—and continue—the legacy that Nándor has left to us.[1]
The fact is that Nándi produced one of the most wide-ranging, and prolific scholarly legacies in emigration, in the field of Hungarian and Hungarian-Canadian studies.
Nándi is survived by his wife, the Budapest-born Zsófia Erdei, his brother Kálmán (Montreal), his daughter Jessica, and three grandchildren. I can also say that he was not only a mentor, a relative by marriage (“koma”), but a dear friend. I and we all will miss him very much.
Oliver A. I. Botar[2]
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[1] Steven Jobbitt and Árpád von Klimó. “HSR: A History of New Beginnings and a Tribute to Founding Editor Nándor F. Dreisziger,” in Hungarian Studies Review 46-47.1 (2020): 1-8.
[2] Thanks to Kalman Dreisziger, Jessica Dreisziger and Zsófia Erdei for their assistance with this text.