America is the country of the future. America is the land of promise. America is the land of opportunity. A fairy tale, especially compared to the penniless existence in early 20th century Hungary. In the hope of an easier future, hundreds of thousands of poor peasants, farm hands, day labourers and servants left Hungary in search of relief from their troubles in the motherland. They said goodbye to Europe on arrival in the port of Fiume (Rijeka) and after weeks of travelling, they first encountered fairyland on Ellis Island, where they were immediately labelled ‘hunkies' and assigned to the hardest manual labour, given that they didn’t speak the language. These people firmly believed that they would one day return to the home country and use the money they earned in the U.S. to buy land and houses, but only a quarter of the emigrants returned to Hungary.

It is they who are the subject of this dance piece: the wobblers, the brave and the insecure who waited hungrily and hesitantly for the agent to take them to work as slaves in the mines of Pennsylvania... This show is about them, the outcasts, the hunkies who came to America before World War I, dizzy and staggering in a strange new world where they’d eventually learn to live but where they’d always remain outsiders. About them, the Hungarians in exile, who stood clear-eyed but with a wavering soul in the land of the New World.

The Dezső Fitos Folkdance Company commemorates them, presenting the exodus of Hungarian peasants through the fate of four emigrant young men.