East European assimilation and (re)integration: the interwar legacies of transatlantic migration and "Russian" Orthodox conversion (1918-1939).

In the 1920s and 30s, mass conversion movements to "Russian" Orthodoxy emerged among Greek Catholics in Czechoslovakia and Poland, comprising a new chapter in a continuing saga of conversion which began in the late nineteenth century, in what was then Austria-Hungary. Pre-1914 conversion movements arose in large part due to transatlantic migration -- especially return migration -- between Austria--Hungary and the Americas. Americanists have generally treated the 1920s and 30s as the era when transnational migration's impact waned owing to US immigration restrictions, while East Europeanists have minimized or ignored the impact of transnational migration upon East European regions. Interwar Catholic-to-Orthodox conversions, however, are not merely attributable to historical legacy: transatlantic migration continued to influence the dynamics of conversion as an active, contemporary force. As had been true prior to World War I, returning migrants and their families comprised the most significant constituency of the movements after the war; migrants remaining in the Americas supported the East European movements with economic and social remittances, and activists on either side of the Orthodox/Catholic divide treated the conversions as transnational phenomena. This essay analyzes the impact of transnational migration upon shifting ethnoreligious identifications, in the context of shifting social, national, and geopolitical circumstances, 1918-1939. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]