Hungarian Review, 1977 (23. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1977-01-01 / 1. szám
Г" Uzár: Mrs Ignác Barta, née Julianna Kobrák Aunt Barta and 1 are sitting at an old brown table in a farm house at the edge of the village. She has put before me some roast duck, sausages, pickled cabbage and bread. I watch the face that I haven’t seen for twenty years; the twenty years blur to a mist, as if I had been sitting at this table only yesterday. Her face sends me back into my childhood. “You know,” she says, “I sometimes go and stand at the corner of the house, at the edge of the maize-field, and catch myself with tears in my eyes as I gaze towards Alsórácegres.” “What is it, Aunt Barta, that brings those tears to your eyes?” “Why, it’s the puszta. I liked it very much there.” Ignác Barta was hired as a farm hand in Alsórácegres in 1940. He and his family moved into the one-room flat with a communal kitchen at the upper end of the middle servants’ hall. The family consisted of his wife, his father-in-law, his mother-in-law and the five children: Juci, Feri, Manci, Miska and Pista. Their youngest boy Jancsi was born there later on. The breadwinner’s annual wages as a carter amounted to 60 pengő, 15 quintals of bread-grain, 2 quintals of maize, 24 kilos of salt, 8 cubic metres of firewood or 200 bundles of lop-wood, one and a half acres of maize field and less than a 100 square yards garden plot, as well two litres of milk a day plus half a litre for every child. Approximately the same wages were earned by his father-in-law who was first a hired hand and later a swineherd. In 1945 they were allotted 75 acres of land which they worked till 1950. Then they offered their land to the state and became agricultural labourers at the state farm established at Alsórácegres. They left the puszta for good in 1960. They bought themselves a house for sixty thousand forints at Sárszentlőrinc. Uncle Barta joined the local co-operative farm. Today he is a pensioner receiving 1,369 forints a month, but he continues to work for the co-op for 8 forints an hour. The Alsó-ácegres people mostly settled down at the md of Sárszentlőrinc nearest to the puszta. It is called the Árpád settlement. “How did the villagers receive you when you moved here?” “Well, they didn’t like us too much, that’s for sure. Once when I went and bought fifty kilos of salt at the shop ...” “How much?” PHOTOS: TAMÄS URBAN Nowadays Aunt Sana buys all her bread from the baker