Mythical moments in national and other family histories

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 179-193

  Feuchtwang, Stephan ^a  

^a LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Historical harpsichords; Pleyel; Wanda Landowska

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750188122     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbi014     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. Peter Homans, Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century's End, 2000.
2. Homans here cites Kai Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters, New York, 1994.
3. Dan Sperber, 'Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations', Man n.s. 20, 1985, pp. 73-89.
4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London (1989), revised edn 1991, p. 201.
5. Alexei Yurchak, 'Soviet Hegemony of Form: Everything was Forever, until it was No More', Comparative Studies in Society and History 45: 3, 2003, pp. 1-33.
6. The interviews were in Russian and took place in spring 2002. But Tsypylma knew the family from previous work, in 1998, for her doctorate at Humboldt University, and she allowed me to make use of her earlier interviews as well. Berlin was one of three sites, the other two being in China and Taiwan, in each of which I worked together with a different, local research colleague. The project asks how interpersonal transmission of shared and catastrophic loss relates to more public histories and commemorations. The events were of course not at all alike, so the point is to contrast the different political cultures and institutional contexts in which the events could occur and be recalled. The Economic and Social Research Council of the UK (R000239521), to which I am most grateful, funds the research. The transcripts and translations of the interviews will eventually be placed in the ESRC archive, Qualidata.
7. Yosiv, 21 January 1998, p. 1. The interview took place in his apartment.
8. Yurchak, 'Soviet Hegemony of Form', p. 5. His startling but probably commonplace example is the secretary of a branch of the Communist Youth organization Komsomol who is an enthusiast of rock music. He can denounce bourgeois ideology and morality, in accordance with senior speech-writers. He remains an enthusiast for educating youth about the vices of capitalist cultures, the deceitful soporifics of their cultural industries, but reserves from this condemnation what he considers to be great popular art, even when produced by a musician addicted to a drug. He writes a newspaper article promoting the German heavy metal band The Scorpions (pp. 21-24). There is a continuity from this enthusiasm through perestroika and into Germany itself, in the writing of Vladimir Kaminer, a Jewish Russian migrant to Germany. His very popular book of short stories, Russendisko, was written in German, recalling his similar enthusiasm in the time before. He and it are included in the Berlin Jewish museum as an example of contemporary German Jewish life, another incongruity for he is not a religious Jew. Many thanks to Tsypytma for this information.
9. Interview in her apartment, 2 May 2002.
10. Interview in his apartment, 3 May 2002.
11. She did not say what she had discovered. But in the same year institutions seem to have stopped collecting Party membership fees, so it would have taken a much more deliberate commitment to continue membership.
12. Natalia, 2 May 2002, p. 7.
13. Natalia, 2 May 2002, p. 7.
14. Yosiv, 26 March 2002, p. 9.
15. Yosiv, 26 March 2002, p. 4.
16. Yosiv, 26 March 2002, p. 4.
17. Yosiv, 26 March 2002, p. 3.
18. Yosiv, 26 March 2002, p. 5.
19. The Jewish Cultural Union had lobbied the then East German (DDR) government in 1990 successfully to allow Soviet Jews to come to East Germany, and this policy of annual and quite large 'quota refugees' was adopted by the unified Federal legislature. It is being restricted in 2005 by an agreement among the sixteen Laender of Germany.
20. Mikael, 1 April 2002, p. 3.
21. See Tamar Rapaport, Edna Lomsky-Feder and Angelika Heider, 'Recollection and Relocation in Immigration; Russian-Jewish Immigrants 'Normalize' their Anti-semitic Experiences', Symbolic Interaction 25: 2.
22. The authors say it is standard among Soviet Jewish migrants that they respond to the anti-semitism they experienced in the Soviet Union in two ways, either by identification with Russia, minimizing the anti-semitism they experienced and perhaps even manifesting self-hatred and a denial of being Jewish, or alternatively by positive affirmation of being Jewish. It is quite possible that assimilation to socialist vocational or professional commitment did imply a choice and therefore a minimizing of what was not chosen. The authors make a good point when they say that the Russian migrants present anti-semitic attacks and discrimination in Russia as normal and unimportant, because they could cope and thrive despite them. But they might also hold at a distance both identities as they appear in learned narratives of Russia, Israel, or Germany, while retaining affection for both their family Jewishness and for the Russia they liked and in which they thrived. Certainly, Yosiv's family does not fit into either standard category: They are neither deniers nor affirmers.
23. Yosiv, 26 March 2002, p. 6.
24. Yosiv, 26 March 2002, p. 7.
25. Andrei, 2 May 2003, p. 1.
26. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, New York, 1989, P. 101.
27. Idith Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel, Berkeley, 1998.
28. Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power, pp. 270 and 327.
29. Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power, pp. 269-70.
30. See Deborah Golden, 'Belonging Through Time: Nurturing National Identity among Newcomers to Israel from the former Soviet Union', Time and Society 11: 1, pp. 5-24 for a description of the Hebrew lessons that induct Jews to Israel. The lessons still set aside and diminish the experience that brought them to Israel. She shows how 'climbing up' (aliyah), as coming to live in Israel is called, differs from the education in citizenship patriotism that induced immigrants to the USA. It is a climbing into the Land of the past and the future of Jews, of present tribulation to future triumph, of being one in a flow of waves of newcomers washing up on its shores. But she also argues that among Soviet Jews ingrained suspicion of being asked to consider present tribulation as a passing phase distances them from this vision.
31. Yosiv, 26 March 2002, p. 8.
32. It was not clear when he thought compensation should have begun. In fact German reparations to Israel and to German Jews were instituted by Konrad Adenauer, under US pressure, in his second term as Chancellor (1953-56).
33. Mikael, 1 April 2002, p. 1.
34. Mikael, 1 April 2002, p. 3.
35. Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power, p. 221.