American Hungarian family histories as chronicles of collective memory: Authors’ motivations and attitudes

Type of Abstract (select): Individual Presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
The presentation provides, first, a brief overview of the "Hungarian Roots & American Dreams" project—a book series that grew out of a Facebook group—showing how family histories of immigration from Hungary to the United States (and in some cases, remigration to Hungary) become living family chronicles and tools for preserving collective memory. The over 100 stories featured in the two volumes of the series so far (edited by Anna Fenyvesi and Réka Bakos; the first volume was published in 2024, the second in 2025) provide an almost comprehensive picture of the cataclysmic historical events of 19th- and 20th-century Hungarian and United States history.
The second half of the presentation discusses the results of a survey administered among the authors (n=61) of the two volumes, mapping out authors’ motivations for embarking on writing their stories, attitudes to the writing process, and changes in their perception of their family and their own place “in the world” and “in history” as a result of the writing process. The results of the survey demonstrate the ways in which the writing of family histories gains meaning for authors, underscoring the importance of these histories not only at the level of preserving accounts of personal and family history as building blocks of community history, but also their role as “stories of ourselves”, i.e. building blocks of our narrative identity that help us interpret and understand the world around us.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Anna Fenyvesi is a linguist and associate professor at Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Szeged. She has studied the linguistic and cultural life of Hungarian-American communities since the 1990s, when she spent several years in Pittsburgh as a graduate student. Her linguistic research focuses on bilingualism, linguistic heritage, and identity preservation, most recently supported by a Fulbright research grant in 2024. Since 2019, she has also been carrying out family history research.