Izabella Agárdi. <i>On the Verge of History: Life Stories of Rural Women from Serbia, Romania, and Hungary, 1920–2020</i>

This 472-page monograph, written by Izabella Agárdi, a research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg (iASK) and lecturer at the University of Pannonia Kőszeg Campus in Hungary, was published by ibidem Press in Stuttgart as a part of the book series Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society. The book includes a brief foreword by historian Andrea Pető, a professor at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University in Vienna, Austria.The study represents an original analysis of thirty oral history interviews of Hungarian-speaking women conducted by Agárdi in the second half of the 2000s. The women Agárdi interviewed lived in rural areas of three countries: Hungary, Romania (Northern Transylvania), and Serbia (autonomous province of Vojvodina). Although their stories differed in many ways, the interviewees had several characteristics in common: age, language, gender, and rural background. In other words, they belonged to the same “historical generation and mnemonic community,” and their Hungarian background serves for Agárdi as a means for exploring “how ethnic and national identities serve as carriers of continuity amidst change throughout the century” (18). Born in the 1920s or 1930s, these women spent their childhood in the interwar years, adolescence during World War II, adulthood during the period of state-socialism, and old age and retirement in the post-socialist period; all of them had passed by the time of the publishing of the book. Writing about and analyzing their life stories, Agárdi embarks on an ambitious quest of connecting individual, microlevel life stories of rural women with what she calls general histories and public historical narratives of Central Europe, with a particular attention to the ways women themselves connected their personal stories with larger historical narratives about the region (17). Apart from the introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into seven chapters, uneven in length (the fourth chapter has 114 pages, whereas the seventh chapter has 16). The chapters follow chronologically the historical periods and women’s life stories, from interwar years (chapter 1), World War II (chapter 2), the state-socialist period (chapter 3), and post-socialist transitions (chapter 5). The other three chapters are more thematical than chronological, as they discuss three distinct topics: the issue of ethnicity in the voices of minority women (chapter 4), the topic of home and movement (chapter 6), and the role of laughter in women’s narratives (chapter 7). Each of the chronological chapters opens up different themes too, like the memory of the Treaty of Trianon, religious education, the images of the Russian and German soldiers during World War II, collectivization, narratives of personal advancement during socialism, socialist nostalgia, motherhood under socialism, the question of continuity and rupture after 1989, and many others. The book, therefore, is rich in the number of themes it addresses. Yet, all these aspects—the unevenness of the chapters, the combination of the chronological and thematic chapters, and the variety of the themes the author addresses—more often than not make it difficult to follow the logic and the argument of the book overall. There are several aspects of the book which stand out for their quality. The first concerns women’s memories of World War II in chapter 2, particularly insightful regarding the theme of everyday life and war from a gendered perspective. Here, the reader learns about the interviewees age of adolescence and their experiences and expectations during the war, which encompassed dance classes and balls on the one hand, and fear of the soldiers’ violence and economic hardships on the other. The chapter offers two main insights. By exploring the periodization of war from these women’s perspectives, it shows that their perception of when the war started depended on the physical presence of the marching soldiers: German and Soviet, at times Romanian or Yugoslav partisans (136). Moreover, whereas there is a strong presence of the memory of German and Soviet soldiers in their narratives, the figure of the Hungarian soldier is missing, and there is no mention of the Holocaust. The case studies presented in this chapter are engaging and illustrative, and the author does well in analyzing the narratives of the women, showing us how not to take what the women say for granted. Secondly, the analyses are a rich contribution to our knowledge about the history of women’s work in impoverished rural areas of Central Europe in the twentieth century. The chapters offer substantial insights about the women’s memories of poverty and social inequality in the interwar period (83), of World War II where mothers are remembered as those who did most of the work (163), of women’s economic maneuvers during the years of early socialism and the difficulty of their work with children, the economic embitterment during socialism (chapter 3), and of their continued work even during their retirement years after 1989 (chapter 5). Work, interestingly, appears as one of the central concepts in the life stories of these women, and at times it is the organizing principle of their narratives. This is the case with one particularly interesting example, that of Erzsébet from Vojvodina, whose memory and periodization of socialism relates to the building and demise of a sugar factory (250–52). Lastly, chapter 5 succeeds in bringing attention to a lesser-explored topic of old age and retirement in post-socialism. From the perspective of rural women, the period of post-socialist transition appears as the time of receding welfare, representing the loss of security that they felt socialism had given them. Moreover, the chapter also highlights the complexity of women’s retirement, which many women felt they had to explain, argue for, and even defend (370). Despite these positive aspects, the book does have significant limitations. Perhaps the most important one is its unclear contribution to historiography, even though one of the author’s central claims is “to place the life narratives of rural women in dialogues with scholarly and public accounts from different subfields of written history” (20). Agárdi lists these “subfields”—national Hungarian history, social and agrarian historical maps, gender history, and transition studies—and although at times she does engage in some historiographical discussions, the choices of historical works discussed and Agárdi’s exact contribution to different fields is not clearly articulated. A related point concerns historiographical references, most of which were published more than twenty years ago. For this reason, Agárdi’s analysis is not able to make timely contributions to the fields, which have evolved significantly since the 2000s when she was conducting the interviews—for instance, the field of gendered labor history, the scholarship on gender, ethnicity, and welfare studies in Central Europe, or the history of the Romani women in state socialism. Another issue is that in some cases the author refers to Hungarian historiography only (also when discussing the history of Yugoslavia). Since the book was published in English for a broader audience, what is missing is the author’s proper contextualization of the historiography she refers to. In the current format, a reader unfamiliar with Hungarian historiography is left wondering until the book’s conclusion what the author’s actual intervention is. Some of the overall insights, moreover, seem superfluous, such as the conclusion that there were contradictory views on the Horthy era (88–89) and contradictory views on state-socialism, which was seen both as a period of personal advancement and as a period of stagnation (chapter 3), or—citing the title of the conclusion—that the memories of this generation are divided (429).Some additional smaller shortcomings of the book should be mentioned. First, the author often discusses issues only through the voice of the narrators, assuming that the reader is familiar with what is meant. Examples for this include the discussion of youth camps or the massacre in Zsablya in 1944 (248), neither of which are contextualized or explained properly for the reader. This issue contributes to the overall lack of clarity in the book. Secondly, the author intertwines the analysis of the interviews with her own story of interviewing the women. This strategy, however, often feels arbitrary, interrupts the argumentative flow, and does not significantly contribute to the analysis. Finally, the text would have benefited from some additional editing, as there are several places where the author’s analysis is textually merged with a quote from one of the women’s narrations (e.g., 307–8, 383). Although the book’s contribution to (Central) European historiography remains somewhat limited, the book can be a valuable read for scholars working in the fields of gendered labor history, history of the everyday life during World War II, and the history of post-socialist transformations and memory studies in Central Europe.