Language:
English
Year of publication:
2018
Titel der Quelle:
Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts
Angaben zur Quelle:
17 (2018) 35-56
Keywords:
Immigrants Psychology
;
Jews, East European History 1918-1939
;
Memory Social aspects
Abstract:
This article examines the memory practices of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in America in the period between World War I and World War II, specifically the forms in which they remembered their former homelands in Eastern Europe. Through the lens of Jewish hometown associations, socalled landsmanshaftn, this study shows that American Jewish memory operated in distinct modalities, namely nostalgia, trauma, and invention. The idea of loss that shaped nostalgic and traumatic forms of memory resulted from a sense of uprootedness due to the migration experience, an increasing cultural alienation from Eastern Europe as a Jewish homeland, and the disruptive blows of World War I and the pogroms in its aftermath. As the study argues, American Jews in the interwar period created the foundations for a memory that we usually associate with Holocaust memory. This form of diasporic memory stood in a dialectic relationship with the idea of invention, which symbolized the productive encounter of imagination and reality of Eastern Europe as homeland. It is this dialectic between loss and invention that shaped American Jewish collective memory and identity in the interwar period. Eastern Europe, as a result, became both a place of Jewish life and death.
DOI:
10.13109/9783666370809.35
URL:
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