Amerikás Rádi Gábor 2.0
American Gábor Rádi 2.0

Author(s): Zoltán Fejős
Subject(s): Customs / Folklore, Ethnohistory
Published by: Fórum Kisebbségkutató Intézet
Keywords: pulp fiction; emigration; a popular type of story; folklorization; oral tradition
Summary/Abstract: At the end of the 19th century the main themes of pulp literature were local events and rumors through crime stories. With a few exceptions, research and reviews focusing on literary history and classical folklore genres did not take into account the theme of emigration to America. In the mid-1970s, the author conducted ethnographic research in the central region of the Zemplén Mountains with the aim of collecting memories of emigration. During this, he recorded a ballad story that contained a tragic attempt to harm an emigrant returning from America. The singer performed the case of Gábor Rádi based on a pulp publication that he did not preserve. The source text could not be identified at that time. The story, which was stuck in the initial phase from the point of view of folklorization, and two earlier parallels warned that this type of story existed in the oral tradition of the turn of the century. It is possible that with further research, new texts may be found thanks to the new, digital records of the tarpaulin publications. The former popularity and wider territorial spread of the topic is also indicated by the fact that the miraculous ending of the story about American Gábor Rádi’s damage was recently identified in four former printed editions from 1904–1905, three decades after the original research.

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