Book Review: Around the World on a Motorcycle 1928 to 1936 by Zoltan Sulkowsky: Part 1

Two Hungarian guys and a gal, part of Gertrude Stein’s “lost generation,” find themselves stuck in Stein’s Paris of the 1920s. Sulkowsky and his friend Gyula Bartha decide to travel the world on a sidecar equipped Harley Davidson. They are joined briefly by a young female Hungarian artist, Boriska Tila. Tila accompanies them around Europe and through the north of Africa before she is forced to return to Hungary because of illness. The boys continue on for a total of eight years, 170,000+ kilometers, and their story is fascinating.

We need to keep in mind this adventure takes place during the Great Depression. There were few jobs and little money available for our young heroes. How many of us would take off into the unknown without resources to fall back on? Given the opportunity, how would you survive?

Our guys looked up every important person in every community they visited, every Hungarian resident, Hungarian club, and Automobile Club contact to introduce themselves. Then they held lectures, for which they charged attendance. They wrote books and pamphlets which they sold along the way. They printed up the photographs they took and sold them as well. Many of those photographs are included in the book. I was surprised how many Hungarian folks were to be found in some of the most rural – read desolate - areas of the world. During their trek they ran into the likes of Benito Mussolini, Prime Minister Hamaguchi, General Chiang Kai-shek, Mayor Walker of New York, and President Herbert Hoover. In Hollywood they stopped off to rub elbows with Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Joan Blondell, and John Barrymore.

It wasn’t all as easy as that, of course. After all they were riding a Harley! Okay! Okay! I was just teasing. It was a lot easier to take apart the 1928 model Harley than a modern Electra Glide. They often had to dismantle it to carry it across rivers, through sand dunes, and over roads too littered with boulders to ride upon. The bike held up very well. When they did get to Milwaukee, Harley rebuilt the bike for them, although the Motor Company gave them no financial support. This was a major disappointment.

This is a fairly hefty book at 408 pages, plus a translator’s forward and small index. Oh, I have to mention the translator, Noemi M. Najbauer. Najbauer does a beautiful English translation from the Hungarian. Some translations I have read didn’t quite come across as easy reading. This one comes through the process with four stars. Even then, I found it took me awhile to wade through the book. Usually, I plow through a book in a few days. But, it wasn’t the translation that slowed me down. I found that I was enjoying the Around the World on a Motorcycle to the point I was slowing my reading pace so I wouldn’t finish it.

That was when I figured out the secret!

Next time we will talk about that secret and investigate the book a little more.