Introduction

The family narratives presented here have been selected from the material of a Hungarian pilot research carried out in 1997-98 and from what my American students collected about their own families for the Social change and families in Hungary course I taught at Rutgers University in the spring semester of 2001.

I expected to find some similarities between lives organized, experienced and narrated along reasonably parallel lines in different historical and social realities; nevertheless the similarities were sometimes striking. This led me to the idea of presenting Hungarian and American family stories parallelly.

[...]

Stories may resemble one another because all but one students involved have a Central/Eastern European background and most of them come from a farmer's or a craftsman's family. It means that they carry the memories of similar historical events, social positions, traditions, and cultural patterns. Occasionally, they still preserve some of these traits as a residual (or non-residual) part of their lifestyle. Perhaps, it can be said, that in spite of various political, social and economic situations, analogous historical family backgrounds may result in similar future careers and narratives. Thus, I propose that similarities found are due to the specific role symbolic families and social groups play in the construction and transmission of narratives, and to the composition and social reproduction of horizontal societies that go far beyond political and geographical borders.