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Three generations of a family of lawyers have run a firm founded in
1893 in the small city of Becskerek (today in Serbian Zrenjanin),
first part of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg monarchy, then Hungary,
then Yugoslavia, then for a while under German occupation, then
again part of Yugoslavia and finally Serbia. In the Banat district
of the province of Vojvodina, the multiplicity of languages and
religions and changes of place-names was a matter of course. What
is practically unprecedented, all files, folders and documents of
the law office have survived. They concern marriages, divorces,
births and testaments, as well as expulsions, emigrations,
incarcerations and releases of these largely rural and small-town
dwellers. Mundane cases reflect times through war, peace,
revolution and counter-revolution, through serfdom and freedom,
through comfort and poverty. The files also show everyday lives
shaped in spite of history. Tibor Varady transforms them into
affecting and vivid vignettes, selecting and commenting without
sentimentality but with empathy. The law office of the three
generations of the Varady family demonstrates that the legal
profession permits and in difficult times even requires its members
to defend the ordinary men and women against the powers of state
and society.
Three generations of a family of lawyers have run a firm founded in
1893 in the small city of Becskerek (today in Serbian Zrenjanin),
first part of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg monarchy, then Hungary,
then Yugoslavia, then for a while under German occupation, then
again part of Yugoslavia and finally Serbia. In the Banat district
of the province of Vojvodina, the multiplicity of languages and
religions and changes of place-names was a matter of course. What
is practically unprecedented, all files, folders and documents of
the law office have survived. They concern marriages, divorces,
births and testaments, as well as expulsions, emigrations,
incarcerations and releases of these largely rural and small-town
dwellers. Mundane cases reflect times through war, peace,
revolution and counter-revolution, through serfdom and freedom,
through comfort and poverty. The files also show everyday lives
shaped in spite of history. Tibor Varady transforms them into
affecting and vivid vignettes, selecting and commenting without
sentimentality but with empathy. The law office of the three
generations of the Varady family demonstrates that the legal
profession permits and in difficult times even requires its members
to defend the ordinary men and women against the powers of state
and society.
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