Digging for musical gold. ( Archived) (6)

This is one I am very familiar with for a number of reasons. For starters, like the artist Bela Babai I too am Hungarian. I grew up within the Yorkville section of Manhattan, a veritable hotbed of Hungarian culture. My mother spoke fluent Hungarian. Being born in Budapest, she emigrated to the US at age 13 or so. She didn't speak a word of English when she disembarked from a coal powered steamship at a dock on the lower West side of Manhattan. This was a couple of years before the outbreak of WW1. Looking back from today, I think she was lucky to have made that trip when she did, or she may not have made it without learning to swim thanks to a torpedo from a German U boat. 30 years, and 3 husbands later, yours truly slid down the ways of her birth canal. Of course my father was the best looking and most intelligent of the 3.