Cultural Studies paper by Vasvári, Louise O.
Identity and Intergenerational Remembrance Through Foodways: Case Studies of Three Generations of Hungarians of Jewish Origins
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
In this study, through the interdisciplinary analysis of foodways with Gender Studies and Holocaust Studies, I aim to show the cultural and gendered significance of the wartime sharing of recipes for starving women prisoners in concentration camps, as well as for the continued importance of food talk and food writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust in the memory work of survivors and their descendants. Fantasy cooking, or “cooking with the mouth,” as it was called in many camps, and recipe creation was a way for many inmates to attempt to maintain their identity and connection to their ethnic and family history, while depiction of food memories also has a continuing role in the postwar memoir writing of survivor women. I will also examine the continued use of food talk as a genealogy of intergenerational remembrance and transmission in the postmemory writing of the second generation and even-third generation daughters, and very occasionally of sons. Studying multigenerational Holocaust alimentary writing becomes particularly important today because we are fast approaching a biological and cultural caesura, where direct survivors will disappear and we will need new forms of transmission to reshape Holocaust memories for the future.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Louise O. Vasvári (M.A. and Ph.D., UC, Berkeley) is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and of Linguistics at Stony Brook University. Currently she teaches in the Linguistics Department at NYU and is also Affiliated Professor at the University of Szeged. She works in medieval studies, diachronic and socio-linguistics, Holocaust studies, and Hungarian Studies, all informed by gender theory within a broader framework of comparative cultural studies. She has published with Steven Tötösy, Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (2005), Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies (2009), and Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies (2011). louise.vasvari@stonybrook.edu