ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Mónika Fodor probes selected personal narrative excerpts that link storytellers’ life events with the intergenerational memories about their ancestors’ assimilation experiences. Two concepts are highlighted to give a theoretical backdrop: current work on assimilation as the social, linguistic, and cultural integration of immigrants into the host society and the invisible yet widespread ethnic identification of late-generation European Americans with their ancestry. The analysis of the intergenerational memory narratives reveals how late-generation European Americans negotiate their ancestors’ assimilation as agency construction. The stories deal with assimilation and ethnic identity on two levels. The first is manifested in the storyworld as event sequences remembered from the life of narrators’ immigrant ancestors. The intergenerational memory reconstruction of ancestors’ arrival, adaptation to changes, choices, fears, and sometimes traumatic experiences are retold as highly controlled narrative events that made sense at that time but are open to renegotiation for the descendants. The second level is the storytelling world of the narrators’ contemporary American social context in which ethnicity may or may not have individually attributed values. The chapter highlights the narrative tools that respondents use to explain the losses and gains related to ethnic ancestry choices.
