Notes on a Transcultural (University) Life

Abstract

In the 1990s, a new genre of biographical writing appeared in America, the academic memoir, often written by immigrants or those who, because of their class or sexual orientation, had a hard time fitting into the culture. I read these works with voracious interest, but somehow I always came to the conclusion that my own difficult childhood as a refugee and my journey to assimilation were much more complex than these. In the last two decades, I have written many scholarly articles from a feminist perspective, including about the lives of female Holocaust survivors. In 2016, I published my study "Biography, social gender and trauma" in this journal, where I discuss the interdisciplinary genre "life writing," which, as it expands genre boundaries, can go beyond the canonical limitations of traditional autobiography. Yet, until recently, I avoided writing about my own life. Then this year, after celebrating that round birthday, which is usually the last round one for those lucky enough to live to this age at all, I started to write a text that is a beginning towards autoethnography. My broader family history exemplifies almost every turn of Hungary's tragic history, but in the article published here I primarily discuss the aspects of my life in the U.S. My essay is both personal and historical, but it primarily seeks to recall what it was like to do a doctorate in America in the "radical" sixties at Berkeley, and in the seventies, to belong to the first generation of feminist scholars to see what intellectual and cultural forces shaped this generation.