In this talk Ilse Josepha Lazaroms will discuss her current book project Emigration from Paradise: Home, Fate and Nation in Post-World War I Jewish Hungary (forthcoming with Stanford University Press). The manuscript deals with the nature of national attachment and social exclusion in 1920s East Central Europe, and Hungary in particular, as well as the ways in which the personal, social and national traumas of these years reverberate until today.
It paves the way to a more integral and comparative view on modern Hungarian Jewish history and the East Central European region, by including a transatlantic migratory perspective. The story, which is set at the point when European civilization plunged into the depths of darkness, focuses on the life-stories of individual Hungarian Jews, thereby bringing the domain of the private into the world of politics, migrations and nation states.
