IDENTITY, CULTURAL MEMORY, LIFE STORIES

Abstract

The study focuses on two life stories: Igaz történet (A True Story), by Teréz Müller and Imádkozzál és dolgozzál (Pray and Work) by József Bálint. It shows how changes of power or relations between the majority and minority are reflected in the Hungarian literature in Vojvodina. Twentieth century historical transformations, traumatic life events and identity changes are outlined in the background through the daily lives of a Jewish merchant family and a farmer’s family. We can recognize the culture specific features of the experiences of self and foreign, their shifts and changes.

Applying creatively Jan Assmann’s theory on cultural memory, the study focuses on showing the process of the development and interaction between individual or personal identity and collective identity in these life stories.

The author of the study also draws some gender specific conclusions. The narratives of women are structured primarily around love, intimate events in the family, often stories about mothersin law. Men, on the other hand, write about their adventures, mostly heroic, which imbue the narrator with almost superhuman powers. But they also may include horror stories, or happy, funny events, while moral homilies are also frequent. Yet, these categories do not apply in our cases. József Bálint gave a more detailed description of his marriage proposal than the female narrator, Teréz Müller, and in his story a crucial role was given to a matriarchal social structure: his mother gave her opinion about all the girls whom he was going to propose to, and she was to give her consent, too, which he accepted with no objections, no matter how controversial her decisions were. Teréz Müller, on the other hand, bore the female burden of taking care of her family, and remained an innovative personality to the end of her life, communicating in the meantime trauma experiences of the massacre of Jews in 1942, which are exceedingly rare in the literature of Hungarians in Vojvodina. Her personality as the narrator included spite, hurt and defiance, but it is also characterized by exceptional resourcefulness; she was aware of her drawbacks, and always took them into consideration. Despite of all, her story reveals the career of a content person: she felt fulfilment, she was endlessly open and always ready for change.

The difference between the two autobiographies is not gender-related, but rather stems from the differences in the authors’ respective attitudes, which are further underlined and nuanced by cultural contrasts and an intercultural experience of the world.