As mentioned in my last post, I am in Pennsylvania, having attended a family wedding. Trips back to one’s birthplace can often be times of reflection and self-discovery, and it was during a conversation with my paternal grandmother that I learned something rather shocking about my family’s surname. It is a fraud.
I had known that our name was shortened after my great-grandparents expatriated themselves from Hungary. Erroneously, I had assumed that this happened during the immigration process (my mother’s maiden name was similarly butchered). Not so.
It makes sense why native Hungarians don’t recognize my surname as being Hungarian. Our family’s real last name is actually Muzsai (pronunciation: muzs-a-i; m, u as in duke, zh as in azure, a as in law, i as in machine; accent on the first syllable). However, the really implausible part of the story continues after the break.
[Sidenote: I’m not bothering as much with the veil of anonymity anymore; it wasn’t as effective as I had hoped, considering the uniqueness of my background.]
My grandfather’s older sister did not speak any English when she began school in America in the early 1920s. When she tried to communicate her last name to her schoolteacher, the teacher lacked the intelligence and the patience to understand what her name really was. The teacher recorded what she thought this little Hungarian girl’s name was (or should be?) and registered her into the school system as such.
Because they did not speak English, her parents did not fight this. What is inexplicable, though, is that she continued to use this bastardized spelling and pronunciation of her last name for the rest of her life, as her brother still does. However, these two siblings never legally changed their name (I still don’t understand how this is possible), and their parents continued to use the correct spelling for themselves.
So my even though his name was still legally Muzsai, my grandfather passed the bastardized name onto his children, and these children passed that name onto my generation. When one thinks of how meticulously modern identity records are kept, it seems inconcievable that something like this could have ever occurred in twentieth-century America, but it did, and such is our legacy.
:-)) My last name is also Muzsai, and i’m a real hungarian, from Budapest. It’s a beautyful and rare old family name, with so many tangencies with the transilvanian history. By the way the baron Muzsai-Vittnyédy, near Zrínyi Miklós, and et cetera. But!!..the meaning is mot-a-mot: from the Muse… For me, as an artist, it’s a perfect name.
Thanks for the comment, Steve. Muzsai is such a beautiful name. I really wish that my grandfather and his sister had kept that name instead of letting it be bastardized as “M u z z i e.”
I had no idea about the meaning of Muszai. Köszönöm szépen!
One of these days I’d like to visit Hungary and find the motherbook from my great-grandparents’ hometown (unfortunately, my grandmother did not know the town’s name when I asked her).
MUSZAI means ‘you must’ at least that is what my grandmother told me. I am also Hungarian and have a very repected name. Both my parents were from Hungary. Moved to Argentina between the two wars and then to the US.