I would like to congratulate the Hungarian Human Rights Foundation on its 50^th anniversary.  I was googling HHRF to make sure I was up to speed on its officers and I found out that there’s another HHRF here in the US.  The other HHRF is the Horses and Humans Research Foundation. I don’t see any horses around, so I must be in the right HHRF dinner cruise. Well to be serious … At a time when we are witnessing, in increasingly intensifying ways, the wholesale trampling of human rights around the world, destruction of cultural heritage, and flagrant violations of international laws, it’s good to be able to pause from all that doomscrolling on our cell phones and remember that there’s an abiding movement like HHRF that, despite all obstacles, continues to fight for human rights, cultural heritage, and the rule of law. I first got acquainted with the HHRF, not quite at the beginning, but close, some 44 years ago.  This was through the late Dr. Zoltán Ováry, then in his 80s and the world’s oldest immunologist working full time whom I met through my brother who was working in the same NYU Pathology Department. I had the chance of editing and publishing Zoltán’s book of memoirs entitled Around the World in Ninety Years.  The book starts with his early years and education in Kolozsvár in the early 1900s, then still a part of the Kingdom of Hungary, where his mother held a celebrated salon that hosted leading Hungarian and international artists, writers and scientists.  That stint as an editor started my life-long interest in Hungarian culture and history. Dr. Ováry was an enthusiastic supporter of  HHRF and I had the privilege to meet the HHRF’s visionary and indefatigable founder László Hámos, his parents Margit and Ottó, his wife Zsusza, their children Daniel and Julia… and the ever approachable and warm Emese Latkóczy. I also was blessed to meet the HHRF’s patron and a true saint, verily a patron saint, Memi Néni Elizabeth Mauthner.   Zoltán would often take Memi Néni and me to the Caravelle restaurant and after we would bring back Memi Neni to her apartment on the Upper East Side, Zoltan would say, if you want to see real class, then you need look no further than Ms. Mauthner … now Ms. Mauthner, that is real class … in the deepest sense of the word. Among the projects that the HHRF initiated and that Zoltán supported was the founding of the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania.  Whenever I go to Kolozsvár, I never fail to visit the central offices of the university in the old Bocskai mansion where they have named the auditorium the Zoltán Ováry Hall. Through HHRF, I met one of my bestest of friends, Zsolt Moldovan who was then an intern at HHRF New York and now the HHRF and Reconnect program chief in Transylvania.  Together, we have tried to keep the historic 19^th century house of the Purjesz-Ováry family in the historic central area of Kolozsvár a center of Hungarian culture in its heyday and part of the atmospheric fabric of old Kolozsvár.  Attempts and threats have been made to confiscate it, to build a massive brutalist hotel or a huge driveway, both destructive to the character of the historic area.  We have so far managed to frustrate bureaucratic intimidation and developer greed in our attempts to help keep part of the Hungarian legacy in Kolozsvár.    I must admit that while growing up among coconut trees in the Philippines, protecting an old Hungarian house in Transylvania from demolition never figured on my bucket list.  BTW, Dániel (Indri), I have some NY baseball caps that Zsolt said you could bring over for him. Whenever I visit Kolozsvár and see Zsolt and other Hungarian friends, I still like to refer to the names of the streets by both their current Romanian as well as their original Hungarian names.  Just a small way, but also fun way, in resisting the erasure of Hungarian culture and history there.   Strada Motilor, where the house is, we would also call as Monostori utca, Strada Iuliu Maniu, where I usually stay, also resonates as Szentegyház utca.  And Strada Napoca still has its literary double life as Mór Jokai ut. Talking of Mór Jokai, thanks to my having been introduced to Hungarian culture, I have read almost a dozen novels by him, alas all in English translation.  I have found him to be among the most fervidly imaginative and romantic novelists of his time, and I must admit sometimes so fervid, his prose could wilt anything within sight.    However, he also manages to produce sustained feats in an almost modernist vein, like the psychological realism and timelessness of Eyes Like the Sea.  And for getting inspired by sheer prolificness, he is hard to beat.    More modernist is Krudy Gyula, who has exerted such fascination that I have read all his novels and short stories that have been translated into English.  I’ve also been blessed to have read the Transylvanian Trilogy of Count Bánffy Miklós, a regular at the salon in the Ováry house, as well as huge chunks of the works of Zilahy Lajo whose widow Piroska later languished in an elderly home in Rhode Island and Zoltán would support financially and anonymously. I still need to get more acquainted with the works of writers who were close friends of the Ováry family, like the novelists Moricz Zsigmond and Márai Sándor.  Among Zoltán’s files were hundreds of handwritten letters and postcards from Márai.  Instead of consigning the letters and books to an interested institute like the Morgan Library, I thought it would be more appropriate for them to go to the Petőfi Literary Museum in Budapest.  I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon at the Lizst Institute with Noémi, Ádám and Fruzsina in sorting out the legacy to prepare them for transport to the Petőfi Museum. A few months ago, I heard from Zsolt that the Református Kollégium in Kolozsvár received a grant from Budapest that would enable them to renovate and name its biology laboratory after Zoltán, one of their outstanding science alumni.  Zsolt, his wife Andrea, and I then set up an endowment for a modest prize for each year’s most outstanding graduate in the biological sciences at the Reformatus.  I am grateful to Hungarian culture and science for how much it has enriched the world, me included. And I’m grateful to the HHRF for keeping human rights and Hungarian culture present and relevant including for those like me who though not Hungarian by birth, are, if I may say so, Hungarian by heart. Köszönöm szépen.