Needless to say, I meant to write "service" as it is the same in English
AND French.

Martha

Cecilia L. Fa'bos-Becker wrote:

>The House
>of Anjou ruled Hungary before the Habsburgs and spoke French.  "A votre
>servis"  (at your service) is a common, ancient French expression used in

Please educate me.  Is this supposed to be the old version of the modern
"A votre sevice" or a simple typo?

Martha

Hugh Agnew asks:

> Is the folksong Bela Batkay mentions in his post the tune that figures
> largely in the soundtrack for the film by Gyongyossy and Kabay called in
> international release "Job's Revolt"?  I remember seeing that once in the
> Singapore International Film Festival in 1985, and I've shown it in a few
> history classes since then.  The action centers around that Hungarian
> Jewish community of peasant farmers, and as I recall in one scene they
> go to place their "qvittungn" on the tomb of the great rabbi.

I haven't seen the movie and haven't read Fenyvesi's book, but the folksong
in question (Szol a kakas mar) does figure prominently in the "Erdely"
trilogy by Zsigmond Moricz.  It is sung by Gabor Bethlen on the last page
of Volume 2 (A nagy fejedelem) in a scene that is bleak enough to have
come straight from the Iliad.  Moricz calls it "the favorite song of Gabor
Bathory".  If Moricz is right, that would make the song nearly 400 years old.
Which, incidentally, would seem to contradict Bela Batkay's theory about the
song having been composed by a 19th century Hassidic rabbi.  On the other
hand, the liner notes of the Muzsikas CD (Rykodisk HNCD 1373) attribute the
song to Reib Eizik, the Tzaddik of Nagykallo, without mentioning any dates:

  Bence Szabolcsi summarized the story as follows: the Tzaddik who loved
  nature and had a poetic vein, once set out for a walk to the nearby meadow.
  On his way he heard a song from a shepherd boy.  He was immediately
  captured by its beauty and felt as if an inner voice was forcing him to
  learn it.  He approached the shepherd boy and offered him two pennies for
  his song.  The moment the deal was made, the rabbi possessed the knowledge
  of the song.  The shepherd boy, however, forgot it forever.

-----
Gabor Fencsik

http://www.cris.com/~Celerity/
requests your consideration.
Thank you.

First of all -- Szalai, stop making your nasty, north-of-the-border
comments about my bat. Second of all -- isn't Doug Hormann cute when he
thinks he's being witty? Best not provoke him, though. He might bore all
of us once again with his life story.
Sam Stowe

P.S. -- Joe, they still haven't figured out what's wrong with my software.
I'll respond in more detail to the Marxism-Leninism thing sometime this
weekend when I get a free minute.

I may be quite wrong about the author of "Szol a kakas mar," but my attri-
bution is not based on a "theory"--I heard it from the current rabbi of
the Debrecen Jewish community last year.  Naturally, *he* could also be
wrong, but both the words and the music to the song can be found in a
recently published collection of Yiddish songs and poetry from Transylvania,
entitled ,,Erde'lyi jiddis ne'pko"lte'szet", Europa Konyvkiado, Budapest,
1994, p. 192.  Unfortunately, there are no endnotes providing any further
enlightenment as to origin or authorship.

Udv.,
Be'la

In article >, Joe Szalai, who
knows more about phlegm than is healthy for a grown man,
> writes:

>At 08:40 PM 3/27/96 -0500, Sam Stowe, while wistfully waiting for the
phlegm
>from his nose to reach the extended tip of his tongue, wrote:

>
>OK, Bat Boy, tell us.  Where has Marxism-Leninism been tried?  And what,
>specifically, did the Marxist-Leninists do that others, i.e., non
>Marxist-Leninists, did not do?
>
>Please be as specific as possible with your answer and make sure that
there
>are NO examples of non M-L'ists doing the same things.  You won't be able
to
>do it.  Are you up to the challenge anyway?

<Snip mushy, strangers-in-the-night-exchanging-glances stuff about George>
>
>Joe Szalai
>
>
Joe:
Let's take Hungary as an example. For over 40 years, a group of people
calling themselves Marxist-Leninists (I think I'll adopt your convention
and just use M-L from here on out) ran the show from Budapest.
Periodically, they imprisoned other people for not being sufficiently M-L
or for deviating from "true" M-L. In 1956, thousands of Hungarians die
after fraternal army of watch-snatchers sails into town to end bourgeois
challenge to M-L utopia. Watch-snatchers stay till 1990s, but allow
Hungarian speakers who claim to be faithful to M-L to run the country.
Now, are we to assume that the true, honest-to-Engels M-Ls were displaced
from the government at some point during that 40+ year run and that faux
M-L "pod" proletarians took control of the government? So what happened to
the true M-Ls? When did true M-Ls get thrown out of fraternal democratic
socialist people's paradise and alien space Marxists take their places? If
alien space Marxists were running things, why not jettison M-L language
and ideology? Why continue to cloak their every action in M-L language
when that just gives fraternal socialist workers in places like Csepel the
opportunity to compare the word to the deed and come to the conclusion
that true M-L proletarian leadership had been replaced by evil alien space
Marxists who act like capitalist imperialists?

Perhaps there were no evil alien space Marxists. Maybe the people running
things in Budapest between 1946-47 and 1989 really believed M-L rhetoric
they tossed around. In that case, they did try to honestly implement M-L
and it didn't work. Or they didn't believe any of what they said and just
raped the masses for four decades and used M-L to try and disguise the
fact. Them's your choices, pal, unless you're into rabid conspiracy
theories. So, you really want to give political power to what constitutes
either a group of wankers, lying thieves or space aliens? Oh, Canada!
Sam Stowe

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