Roleplay and Identity in Lili Fehér’s 1945 Memoir –The Diary of an Escaped Jew

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Published: Dec 21, 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14232/tntef.2021.2.1-19

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Louise O. Vasvári
Stony Brook University

Abstract

This study is part of a larger, ongoing, critical research focused on gender studies, Women Writing Holocaust Lives and Beyond, which examines women’s experiences during World War II and the Holocaust. The specific goal of one section of my research is to rehabilitate half a dozen neglected or forgotten works that were written by women in Hungarian and published only in Hungary in 1945 and 1946. Due to the page limits of this journal, I can only discuss the work of one of the women, Lili Fehér, who wrote about her survival in Budapest in 1944, where she lived in constant terror, hiding with fake papers. In addition to analyzing Fehér's 1945 memoir, published immediately after the war, I also attempt to reconstruct at least fragments  of her previous personal and professional life as a well-known actress, as well as her gendered self-identity amid the struggling political conditions of interwar Hungary between the two world wars.

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How to Cite
Vasvári , Louise O. 2021. “Roleplay and Identity in Lili Fehér’s 1945 Memoir –The Diary of an Escaped Jew”. Interdisciplinary EJournal of Gender Studies 11 (2):1-19. https://doi.org/10.14232/tntef.2021.2.1-19.
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Vol. 11 No. 2 (2021)
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Articles
Author Biography

Louise O. Vasvári , Stony Brook University

LOUISE O. VASVÁRI (M.A. and Ph.D., UC, Berkeley) is Professor Emerita in Stony Brook University, where she taught Comparative Literature and Linguistics. Currently she teaches in the Linguistics Department at New York University and is also Affiliated Professor at the University of Szeged. She works in medieval studies, historical and sociolinguistics, Holocaust studies, and Hungarian Studies, all informed by gender theory within a broader framework of comparative cultural studies. In addition to many other publications, she has published with Steven Tötösy: Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (2005), Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies (2009), and Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies (2011) – all three with Purdue University Press. She is the Founding-Editor-in-Chief of the e-journal, Hungarian Cultural Studies.