In Memoriam Nándor F. Dreisziger (1940–2024)

It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that Nándor (“Nándi”) Dreisziger, prolific scholar of Hungarian studies and Canadian-American relations, a co-founder and longtime member, as well as supporter, of the Hungarian Studies Association of Canada (HSAC), and longtime editor of the Hungarian Studies Review, died suddenly on October 10, 2024. This is a great loss to his family and his many friends and colleagues. His general importance to Hungarian studies in Canada and North America is reflected in the fact that HSAC’s 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 János Arany 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, Ontario, 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 BA, MA, and PhD degrees as well as a postgraduate degree in Russian and East European Studies. During 1966–67 he worked as a 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.Professor Dreisziger wrote and edited numerous books and anthologies, and his many scholarly articles 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 professors 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 it is to this day the definitive publication on the topic. While he wrote and/or edited several other volumes (on the 1956 Revolution; Canadian-American relations; Oscar Jászi; the Hungarian minorities; the tolerance of ethnic groups in Canada; Hungary in World War II, 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 HSAC’s past president Steven Jobbitt, along with Árpad von Klimo, put it in 2020: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 all of us will miss him very much.