Chestry Oak

Hungary is an interesting and rather complicated country.  After the dissolution of the Roman Empire, it was settled eventually by the Magyars, giving today's Hungarians a non-Indo-European language spoken by no other nation, but related distantly to Finnish and Estonian. 

It became the junior partner in the Habsburgs' Austro-Hungarian Empire, suffered the dissolution of that empire after World War I, became a perhaps reluctant ally of Hitler in World War II, a satellite of the USSR after the war, and eventually -- today -- a small Middle European state with a tendency toward authoritarianism.  It presents something of a problem to its fellow EU members.

In sixth grade -- a year when our teacher still read to us each day for a half hour after lunch -- I listened raptly day by day to readings from a book called Chestry Oak.  I remember my fascination much better than I do the actual plot, but I've always remembered that it was about a boy from a noble family who lived an idyllic life on a Hungarian country estate, a boy who loved horses.  His timing for living his childhood was unfortunate, as the Nazis were establishing control over the country, and nightly he heard the roar of war planes flying overhead.

The boy's family was forced to flee and never return to their estate.  I didn't recall what happened after that, but I now know that he and his family ended up on a farm in the Hudson River valley of New York.

Like other out-of-print books from my childhood -- like so much else from my childhood -- I was never sure how much of this I remembered accurately.  And just as I have no way of reproducing conversations remembered dimly from the past, I thought I'd never be able to recall any more about the book than I've indicated above.  I wasn't sure that "Chestry Oak was really the name of the book, or just a description of the estate on which he lived.  I didn't know the author's name.

But I discovered recently that the book has been re-issued in paperback form by "Purple House Press" of Kentucky as part of their "Classic Books for Kids" series.  It was originally published in 1948, after the Soviets had taken over Hungary, and would have been in print for about three or four years when our teacher read it to us. 

I've just started reading it.  The boy was Prince Michael, and his father was both respected and loved by the peasants under his jurisdiction.  The Hungary the book describes is not the Hungary of cosmopolitan Budapest, but a rural, feudal Hungary that feels little changed from centuries past.  Michael's family takes their hereditary rule for granted, and his father feels a strong sense of responsibility for the welfare of their peasants.

Although the book is anti-Nazi, it might also be a reaction to the subsequent workers paradise imposed by the Russians.  It certainly romanticizes the nobility, but in doing so it helps us understand how rural Hungarian life was lived before World War II.  When published, the book seems to have been perceived more as a children's "horse story" than as a political thriller or a story about refugees.

I've only read the first few chapters of the book.  The story is told from young Michael's point of view.  It is very descriptive, and moves slowly, surprisingly more slowly than I would have expected.  I conclude that kids used to have longer attention spans than I suspect most children would today. 

 I'm grateful to the Purple House Press for preserving this very interesting piece of children's literature  -- and am looking forward to the rest of the book.  Very high ratings on Amazon, primarily from readers who, like me, remembered it from long ago.