History/Political Science paper by Nagy, Ildikó
American-Hungarian Immigrants in the Aftermath of 1956 - Portraits and Life Stories
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
Those forced to resettle, war orphans, so-called „enemies of the people”, students turned freedom fighters… and many others, lives, often heartbreaking at the outset, in 1956 resulted in a veritable flood of people leaving Hungary. The 1956 uprising and freedom fight is a pivotal point not only in the history of Hungary but in the history of American-Hungarian immigration as well. In 2016 on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the 1956 uprising the Hungarian House of New York conducted an oral history research followed by an exhibit depicting the stories of the participating freedom fighters and immigrants, displaying their portraits and personal artifacts from 1956. Our goal was to contribute in this way to deepening the awareness of the stories of Hungarians living as immigrants. The facts from the past only read about in history books, certain historical events, among them the events of 1956, were brought to life through the sixteen life stories presented. By means of the interviews we got a detail-rich depiction of the middle of the twentieth century, whereby we became familiar with the lives of the subjects and their families, their habits, their daily lives, their value systems, and mentality. One of the most interesting outcomes of the interviews came about not as a result of conscious planning. The interviewees were selected at random, but they ended up showing us entirely distinct segments of society. Like a hand fan with the individual parts representing distinct sections of society, where the end of the fan, that is where the individual parts overlap, was their emigration in 1956. Before they set off each individual belonged to a separate, distinct social group, after they left the country, they all became refugees of 1956. We gained insight, inter alia, into the life of a well-to-do peasant family resettled to the Hortobágy region, the family of a factory-owner resettled to the countryside, a Jewish family which had survived the Holocaust, a middle-class family from the Upland region (Felvidék), the family of a factory worker from Csepel, several families of the intelligentsia from Budapest and an aristocratic family from Transylvania.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Nagy, Ildiko was born in and grew up in Győr, Hungary. She completed her graduate
studies in Budapest at Eötvös Loránd University, Department of Sociology, after which she received a PhD grant from the Department of Social Sciences and started to work as a researcher at the Institute for Political Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her special field of interest was the economic and social transformation of the
Hungarian countryside. Simultaneously with her academic work she was involved in the
operation of various nonprofit organizations in Hungary, as the music program organizer
of the Mediawave Festival and as the operations manager of the Ordasok Foundation.In addition, she was the editor and host of a monthly radio show on the Bartók Station of
Hungarian National Radio and a member of the board of directors of the European Jazz
Network. She moved to the United States in 2009. In 2014 she accepted a position as
the director of the Hungarian House of New York, a non-profit corporation and
community venue. Currently she is enrolled in the master’s program in Nonprofit
Management at Columbia University.