PM: TBF

I'm not Jewish but my name sounds like I might be, and I got some interesting reactions in Hungary. When I bought my month pass for the metro, the very old dear selling it to me saw my name and spat at me. In general the older generation - say over 65 or so - were hostile when they learned my name. This was in the early 1990s.

Conversely people under about 45 were deeply embarrassed by the fact of this residual anti-Semitism so went too far the other way. "Oh, you must be Jewish. Great! Come round, can I get you something..."

I never clarified that I wasn't in fact Jewish (I made the mistake of doing that in England once, and the guy I was talking to said "Hah thought you weren't your nose isn't big enough and you were quite happy to get your round in" or some such. I decided I'd much rather be thought of as Jewish than feed that kind of crass anti-Semitic bulls**t.)

All this was just after the Berlin Wall had fallen (I was there under the auspices of the World Bank). Of course this was perceived in the West as Communism being swept away, but actually any Communists with half an ounce of common sense saw the way the wind was blowing and switched sides in the months leading up to the change. So in most of the bureaucracy most of the people were actually the same people, with the same corruption and the same nepotism and so on, they just called themselves something different.

Hungary did really well in the decade or two after the Wall came down. I still loosely follow events there and it worries me the way the country has felt like it's going for the last five or seven years or so. I hope they get through it.

Posted By: Old Man, Feb 10, 11:16:06