Page 14 - Microsoft Word - 01_A MÁSIK OLDAL English.doc

Zenegimnázium (High School of Music) for a long time, despite
having had the chance of becoming a prominent figure in the
Ministry before. As Chief Superintendent of Education of
BudaPest County and spokesman of the Ministry, he could have
reached the highest of ranks. As he put it: “the table share
turned”, and those on the other side came to the fore, so he did
not want to participate in this anymore.
Along with some teacher colleagues, he founded a
language school, which he named Élő Nyelvek Szemináriuma
(Living Languages Seminar), in order to have some additional
income. They named it a working community of teachers. In
those days, lawyers were forced to form working communities
of lawyers, so that the new power structure could oversee them
more easily. The idea came from here, and Living Languages
Seminar could get along like this until 1963, when the People’s
Commission of Control decided to find that the working
community is in fact none other than a suspicious private
“hodgepodge in their eyes” and the case went to court.
There were attempts to integrate the school into one of
the state language schools. My father responded by saying that
he believed that it would not damage the sea if you poured a
bottle of champagne into it. Merely the champagne will go to
waste.
To our huge surprise, the undersecretary of the Ministry
of Culture spoke in favour of us, saying that half of Váci
utca/Street (a prominent shopping street) consisted of private
businesses, and that the seminar did some serious work in the
field of teaching languages. This was true by that time actually.
Not to mention that I also started to make myself useful at the
school about that time.
To those few wanting to learn foreign languages, there
was nowhere else to turn to other than our Living Languages
Seminar and the two state language schools, which were
founded later. There were quite a few students surnamed Szabó

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