Illés, Klára. 2020. Megtartó erő. Egy parasztcsalád vége ('Sustaining Force: The End of a Peasant Family'). Budapest: Magvető. 379 pp.

Abstract

The volume compiled and partly written by Klára Illés is a memory-monument erected for two ordinary people, the author's parents, and their life’s work. Positioned as a hybrid, experimental collection of survivor memories and intergenerational memory-narratives (about which see Mónika Fodor's 2020 Ethnic Subjectivity in Intergenerational Memory Narratives: Politics of the Untold; New York and London: Routledge), Megtartó erő is an attempt at reconstructing a once-was world of rural peasantry and a historically burdened mixed-ethnic family ethos. Illés’s material, itself a treasure of micro-heritage, records elements of a “village world” and a universe of rural knowledge that have long disappeared and are largely unknown by today’s urban generations. By completing the tenacious and sometimes painful task of piecing together her parents’ lives, Illés has created a book that is a reflection on historical change, trauma, and guilt, as on the role of memory in creating historical continuity and enabling a continuity of one's family and identity. The title of Illés’s book is somewhat challenging to translate properly; it might be phrased as “sustaining force,” a phrase that has multiple connotations as a drive that keeps one afloat, or as a power that preserves both one’s physical existence and one's moral compass. Megtartó erő is a well-researched and meticulously edited volume of parallel biographies and intergenerational memory work, which took decades to produce, and which points well beyond the sentimental motivation of a grownup child to remember and memorialize her parents. This collection is not an academic pursuit either, as Illés refrains from analysis or from using any distanciating scholarly terminology. While it is easy to read, the genre is hybrid, one in which through fragments of different kinds of sources, the author embarks on uncovering her parents' life story, or life stories. And by reconstructing the parents' experiences, strengths and weaknesses, work