We've got the TikTok generation listening – Innovative literature lessons at the New York Café
Excited student chatter fills the New York Café's Red Room, as eighth-graders from rural Taksony primary, waiting for literary scholar and cultural manager Anna Juhász to start her lesson. Since the 2017 start of her program, Anna held over 100 of these innovative literature lessons at New York Café, to considerable popular acclaim.
There are so many applicants at the start of each semester, it's a challenge to fit in all the different schools. These include rural and Budapest classes too, and many will travel hundreds of kilometers for this unique opportunity. Anna and the class teachers get together and plan what other events the lesson could dovetail with, any locations relevant to literature.
We hear the names Kosztolányi and Karinthy, the two celebrities who met here to become famous friends and writers. We also learn of many famous magazines that set up their editorial in this building. Anna spices her lesson with a repertoire of stories and curiosities, while we progress from seats in the Red Salon to strolling through the Hotel lobby to the vintage Café interior.Class groups of all ages come to attend.
"Many high school classes will time their Café visit before the final exam period, for the added bonus of a historical perspective, and gain an insight from experience to that period in literature” says Anna, who never holds the same lesson twice.
Sometimes she'll need more anecdotes, or more reading out loud, depending on what books she'll be presenting to the class, besides mainstays like the lit café anthology New York to Hungária. "There were classes with a visual attitude, so we went over poems that presented imagery and vistas of Budapest. In some cases I illustrated my presentation using photographs made by Mihály Babits's wife Sophie Török, or those by Ilona Tanner." Lesson content will therefore vary somewhat, but some core elements and characters remain solid mainstays not only at New York Café back in the day, but also essential to literature class material today.
This program is special and personal, for Anna as well as for the Café.
says Anna, adding that by the end of a lesson, everyone will see how this is more than just another café. "Today we call these offline spaces, while back in the day, cafés were the hubs of social life, and everything would be happening here."
And what is the students' view of all this?
An extraordinary Hungarian lesson can be game-changing. Many tell us how impressed they feel to even enter this space, where they wouldn't have even considered you could actually go. It brings students closer to turn-of-the-century authors, and find it easier to open up this way.
"This means I have an active connection with a lot of students. It's really a big deal, sending their poems to a total stranger and asking for tips, as teenage kids," says Anna. In her mind, the world is still a good place, because so many of us are writers expressing ourselves using real words and not just emojis. "To quote the poet Gyula Juhász: "words, words, amazing words", that give real insights, bring people peace and genuine healing. So there is still hope, and we feel it at many of these literature classes."
