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.

About the Author
Tibor Varady is professor emeritus at Emory University, and professor emeritus at the Central European University. Parallel with his scholarly work, he published prose works and essays in several languages including fourteen literary books.

Reviews
"Varady earlier published accounts of some of these case files, first in Hungarian in 2013, then in Serbian in 2015, and then in German in 2016. Anglophones are fortunate now to have access. For a social historian, interest lies in what the cases reveal about the life of a multi-ethnic community living through difficult times. A lawyer reading the book will wonder how s/he would have dealt with the situations that confronted the Varady law firm. An introduction by Professor Richard Buxbaum, former editor of the American Journal of Comparative Law, notes the book's broader importance. It could well serve as a model for writers on law and social history, even those who do not have elders who practiced law through two world wars and one social revolution." -- John Quigley * Law and History Review *
"The book reveals new sides of institutions and regimes, a pragmatic side to German officials' legal decision-making that sometimes conflicted with their racial agendas and a complexity to communist revolutionary policies as lived experience. The result is a book in which we, as readers, feel as though we are accompanying the author to his attic, unpacking boxes, and making sense of the people whose lives comprised this tumultuous and devastating moment in the region's history." https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2023.29 -- Emily Greble * Slavic Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9789633864074
Author Tibor Varady
Format Hardback
Page Count 342
Imprint Central European University Press
Publisher Central European University Press
Weight(grams) 588g