Fraternity-Testvériség, 2006 (84. évfolyam, 1-4. szám)
2006-01-01 / 1. szám
Page 31 Fraternity- Testvériség meg. Szökőév születésű volt, és viccelődött barátaival, hogy nemsokára 25. születésnapját fogja ünnepelni. Férje 1979-ben elhunyt. Két fia, Norman és Kenneth gyászolják. í DR. JULIANNA PUSKÁS Remembering Dr. Julianna Puskás (1929-2005) at the memorial service conducted in the Magyar Reformed Church, New Brunswick, NJ, on December 28, 2005. Dr. Julianna Puskás was a grand lady whom we remember in this memorial worship service, and we remember her as the eminent scholar and historian of Hungarian emigration history. Those of you with me, who belonged to her extended family and to her immediate family, will remember her for being a gracious hostess, a marvelous cook in her residence on Amerikai út in Budapest and in her family house, which she dearly treasured in the village of Szamosszeg. She loved her family, and she included her friends into her family. She was a distinguished scholar and historian. She was a Hungarian of the “soil” who cared for and embraced her people both in Hungary and in America. She studied her people and their history. She wrote about them in America and in Hungary. Her standards of scholarship were high and her energy at times seemed boundless. When she undertook a historical project alone at first, she then reached out to others and to you and me to accomplish the goal for the common good and for the historical record. She grew up in the village of Szamosszeg during the 1930’s when almost every family in the village had members, who had been in, were still in, or were thinking about going to America. Some villagers were U.S. citizens, born while their parents were immigrants here. Julianna’s grandmother as a young girl spent a few years in the United States and told Julianna stories of her experiences. Having seen the movie about the Titanic, her grandmother always ended her stories with the priest standing on the deck of the ship holding a little girl exactly the age of Julianna in his arms as they were swept underwater. At that point, her grandmother, a deeply religious person, began to sing in Hungarian, “Nearer my God to Thee,” and Julianna joined her in singing. America was an integral part of the village’s economic life since the turn of the century. The men, like Julianna’s father, thought of going to America in times of crisis. So in the midst of the depression in Hungary in 1938, her father set out for America with a small traveling bag and a suit of modern clothes, but with no overcoat. Her father’s uncle here in New Brunswick provided the papers for him to emigrate, and he arrived in America. As a U.S. citizen, Julianna’s father then was entitled to bring his children to America. So her older brother, Béla, left Hungary in 1947 for America. Her father was overcome with homesickness, and he returned the next year in 1948 to Szamosszeg, Hungary. The periods of separation and estrangement had somehow become a part of the family’s way of life. Soon, once again, her father came back to work in the butcher shop in New Brunswick that was owned by a native of Szamosszeg. Young Julianna yearned for the America that she too had heard about and saw in wedding photos, but her father said, “No.” He saw no future for her in America. He would help finance her higher education and university studies from across the ocean. She became an economic historian and in 1970 her Institute assigned her to take on the developing field of migration studies. She immersed herself in the field of immigration history which had taken off in the 1960’s and was exploding on a worldwide, international basis. She studied questions about the melting pot theory, new data and new theoretical models and new approaches to understanding the endurance of the ethnic legacy, the model of chain migration and the evidence of mutual help, family ties, friends and neighbors providing guidance to the voyagers. For her, history now was looked at from the bottom up and required that the immigrant’s experiences be made visible. This is what Dr. Julianna Puskás did with solid research and interviews. She also examined the leaders who helped form the ethnic identity of their communities: the leaders of the churches, societies and fraternal groups. As she began her research at American universities and institutes, she needed to do field work, and thus between 1972 and 1985, she spent more than two full years among Hungarian-American families, the immigrants, the second and third generations. She visited homes, parishes, churches, Hungarian ethnic organizations, attended weddings, baptisms, funerals, religious and national celebrations. She was the guest of the Hungarian Reformed Federation of America, the William Penn Association and the American Hungarian Foundation. She interviewed over 500 persons, many church and secular leaders. She was most fortunate, “Lucky,” she wrote, “because with the help of my brother, I could make personal contact with many leaders of the Hungarian- American organizations.” She went on to say, “Comparing the richness of their stories in the oral testimonies with the limitation of the traditional sources, I became convinced that I should use the immigrants’ own
