In this talk Ilse Josepha Lazaroms will discuss the many variations of emigration and emigration narratives that existed among Jewish communities in interwar Hungary and the Hungarian diasporas. This story is a part of a larger book project entitled 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. 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.
