Dalia Cidzikaitė (Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania)
As Andreas Eckert and Adam Jones have noted, “Life stories, recounted or written down, rank high among the source materials relevant to the historical construction of everyday life.” In my presentation, I talk about the oral history project that I have started in 2018, during which I have been interviewing Lithuanian Americans, who fled West at the end of WWII as children or pre-teens. The project is a continuation of the “Oral History Project” carried out by the Culture Council of the Lithuanian American Community in 1996-2008. The presentation focuses on the younger generation of the DPs and their recollections about everyday life. I draw attention at its repetitive character and “banal ordinariness,” as well as everyday life as a ritual and social practice as seen in the stories of war refugees. I also raise question about the role and place of the history of everyday life in macrohistory.