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How long and how strong is Diasporic memory? How many generations can it encompass? How deeply can generations that never lived in the old country relate to its landscape, language, colors and tastes? In the case of Israelis of Hungarian origin, these questions inevitably have to do with the history of Hungarian Jews in the late nineteenth- and early-to-mid twentieth-century, with a focus placed more acutely upon World War II and the Holocaust. Written by a female Israeli researcher of folk and documentary culture who belongs to the second-generation of Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivors, the present article strives to deal with the foregoing and other relevant questions through a comparative literary-cultural analysis of the only two presently existing Hebrew-language Hungarian cookbooks. These two cookbooks were published in Israel in 1987 and 2009, respectively, by two male cultural celebrities, the first by a Hungarian-born journalist, author and politician and the second by an Israeli-born gastronomer and grandson of Hungarian-Israelis.

Proverbs are concise formulations of folk wisdom and as such, when seen in masses, they may well express the spirit of their time and place. In Hungarian proverbial lore Jews figure prominently in nineteenth-century proverb collections but fade out of such collections as of the mid-twentieth century. In the nineteenth-century proverb collections Jews are invariably portrayed as faithless, dishonest, greedy, physically weak and unattractive. Largely, this portrayal as well as the dynamics of the earlier presence of Jews versus their later disappearance from Hungarian proverb collections match the shared history of Hungarians and Hungarian Jews since the 1867 Emancipation of the country's Jews and possibly even earlier, through their growing integration in significant arenas of their host society, up to their persecution and annihilation in the Holocaust, and later their decade long forced merging into the general Hungarian society under communism. This article traces the occurrence and disappearance of Jews in Hungarian proverb collections throughout the last two centuries and analyzes the language, content and messages of the proverbs about Jews in these collections.

This article continues my 2014 article in this journal, in which I presented a beginning of work on contemporary Israeli prose writers of Hungarian origin. My analysis of those works showed that they are governed by recurring concerns, or literary themes, such as: the memory or post-memory of the Holocaust; Hungarian-to-Hebrew language and translation peculiarities; preoccupation with the family's past, including that of remote relatives; and fascination with home objects, dishes, and recipes representing the family's Hungarian past. Following my work on those prose works, in this article I focus on the works and worlds of 1.5 and second-generation Hungarian-Israeli poets and explore, first, the presence of the concerns or themes governing this group's prose works, and, second, issues of identity through the poets' depictions of experiences such as persecution, displacement, emigration, and re-settlement in Israel. My present discussion of the 1.5 and second-generation Hungarian-Israeli poets is divided into four themes: the Holocaust as an epitome of catastrophe, the Holocaust as memory and post-memory, co-fusion of languages and cultures, and the eternal mental displacement of the poets' parents.

Reviewed by Ilana Rosen

Reviewed by Ilana Rosen

Niran, Judit. 2014. Jelek a vízen ('Signs on the Water'). Budapest: Libri. 260 pp. Illus.

Sister in Sorrow offers a glimpse into the world of Hungarian Holocaust survivors through the stories of fifteen survivors, as told by thirteen women and two spouses presently living in Hungary and Israel. Analyzing the accounts as oral narratives, author Ilana Rosen uses contemporary folklore studies methodologies to explore the histories and the consciousness of the narrators as well as the difficulty for present-day audiences to fully grasp them. Rosen's research demonstrates not only the extreme personal horrors these women experienced but also the ways they cope with their memories.In four sections, Rosen interprets the life histories according to two major contemporary leading literary approaches: psychoanalysis and phenomenology. This reading encompasses both the life spans of the survivors and specific episodes or personal narratives relating to the women's identity and history. The psychoanalytic reading examines focal phases in the lives of the women, first in pre-war Europe, then in World War II and the Holocaust, and last as Holocaust survivors living in the shadow of loss and atrocity. The phenomenological examination traces the terms of perception and of the communication between the women and their different present-day non-survivor audiences. An appendix contains the complete life histories of the women, including their unique and affecting remembrances.Although Holocaust memory and narrative have figured at the center of academic, political, and moral debates in recent years, most works look at such stories from a social science perspective and attempt to extend the meaning of individual tales to larger communities. Although Rosen keeps the image of the general group—be it Jews, female Holocaust survivors, Israelis, or Hungarians—in mind throughout this volume, the focus of Sister in Sorrow is the ways the individual women experienced, told, and processed their harrowing experiences. Students of Holocaust studies and women's studies will be grateful for the specific and personal approach of Sister in Sorrow.

This article introduces the genre of documentary poetry written by Israeli poets who came of age during the first two decades of the state (1950s-1960s) and who recount their experiences of that period. These poets were either immigrant children or native Israelis born to immigrants who had arrived in the new country from the four corners of the earth. The generic context of Israeli documentary poetry is the inclusive genre of documentary literature, referring to non-fictional writing whose authors or heroes wish to recount their experiences of major events that engulfed, affected and changed the lives of many. In the present article I present and analyze six poems written, respectively, by poets Malka Natanson, Lea Aini, Bracha Rosenfeld, Amira Hass, Peretz-Dror Banai and Vicki Shiran. These poems are organized into three pairs dealing with these themes: memories of the Holocaust as preserved and reshaped by two daughters of survivors; the life of displacement in Israeli maabarot or transit camps; and the contrast between diaspora life and life within multicultural Israel.

In her article \"The War Memoirs of Rachel Maccabi\" Ilana Rosen analyzes the memoirs of Rachel Maccabi (1915-2003) about her sacrifices to fulfill the Zionist creed. Raised in a well-off Zionist family, Maccabi moved to Israel/Palestine in the mid-1930s, served in the Haganah pre-State military organization, and later became an army officer. Her first husband fell in the 1948 War of Independence and her son in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Between 1964 and 1992 Maccabi published five memoirs. Rosen focuses on Maccabi's last three memoirs, in which she responds to the deaths of her husband and son in Israel's wars with varying degrees of restraint versus disclosure while also criticizing the decline of ideologist, collectivist Zionist values in Israel of the late twentieth century.

In her article \"Exile, Homeland, and Milieu in the Oral Lore of Carpatho-Russian Jews\" Ilana Rosen analyzes oral narratives of Central and East European Jewish communities. The Jewish people have spent most of their lifetime outside their promised land. Accordingly, their ethos, as reflected by holy teachings, expresses a yearning for a return to the holy land by divine agency once the nation is purified of its sins. In modern times, with the rise of nationalism, this creed changed into activist political Zionism, although traditional and conservative religious circles resisted this change. In the oral narratives of Central and East European Jewish communities, these dilemmas inevitably involve or touch upon those of living among other nations and communities. Therefore, in the oral lore of Jews of Carpatho-Russia in inter-war eastern Czechoslovakia (presently the western part of Ukraine), narratives about the life of Jews in exile present intricate and at times surprising notions about coping with the new political borders following World War I, the symbiotic yet stressful life with both Ruthenians and Hungarians, the abrupt ending of Jewish life in this area in World War II and the Holocaust, and its memory amongst contemporary Israelis coming from the region.