Staging Traumatic Memory: Competing Narratives of State Violence in Post-Communist Hungarian Museums

The article examines the way three contemporary Hungarian museums–the House of Terror Museum, the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Memorial and Documentation Center–represent the history of the Holocaust and the history of Jewish/non-Jewish relations. Reflecting different political agendas, each of the three museums offers a different interpretation of how the Holocaust fits into the larger narrative of Hungary's 20th century history. The article argues that post-communist public memory has been constructed through debates about these histories. By analyzing the three museums' displays, narratives and the debates surrounding them, the article argues that Hungarian public discourse has yet to come to terms with the meaning and place of “Jewishness” (and the way it has informed “Hungarianness”) in modern Hungarian history. Despite the centrality of Jews and Jewish-non-Jewish relations to the museums' narratives, none are able to offer a clear definition of what “Jewishness” means and how it functioned at different times throughout the 20th century.     

The writer as the people's therapist: Der Nister's last decade, 1939–49

ABSTRACT

World War II and the Holocaust caused profound changes in the style and themes of Der Nister's writing. He reevaluated his symbolist legacy and emerged as one of the most powerful and tragic voices in Soviet Yiddish literature. His transformation from a respected but marginal literary figure into a self-styled national leader became complete with his adventurous journey to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan in the Soviet Far East, which he envisioned as a site of new Jewish revival. His illusions were crushed by his arrest in 1949.     

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow: Judaism for the masses

In 2012, a new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow – an event unthinkable during the Soviet regime. Financed at the level of $50 million, created by an international crew of academics and museum designers, and located in a landmark building, the museum immediately rose to a position of cultural prominence in the Russian museum scene. Using interactive technology and multimedia, the museum's core exhibition presents several centuries of complex local Jewish history, including the Second World War period. Naturally, the Holocaust is an important part of the story. Olga Gershenson's essay analyzes the museum's relationship to Holocaust history and memory in the post-Soviet context. She describes the museum's struggle to reconcile a Soviet understanding of the “Great Patriotic War” with a dominant Western narrative of the Holocaust, while also bringing the Holocaust in the Soviet Union to a broader audience via the museum. Through recorded testimonies, period documents, and film, the museum's display narrates the events of the Holocaust on Soviet soil. This is a significant revision of the Soviet-era discourse, which universalized and externalized the Holocaust. But this important revision is limited by the museum's choice to avoid the subject of local collaborators and bystanders. The museum shies away from the most pernicious aspect of the Holocaust history on Soviet soil, missing an opportunity to take historic responsibility and confront the difficult past.     

THE HOLOCAUST AS RECURRING REALITY: VICTIMIZATION THEMES AND JEWISH AMERICAN ETHNIC IDENTITY FORMATION

Drawing on sociological studies that document the regularity through which marginalized ethnic groups construct an ethnic identity, this article examines identity formation in the Jewish American context. A content analysis of 100 short stories written between 1946 and 1995 demonstrates how victim-oriented identities are created out of the more mundane experiences of everyday life. These stories, which were intended for consumption by Jewish American readers, describe daily life within the Jewish American community and, with surprising regularity, bring issues of victimization into the imagined experience for their readers. In addition, the analysis shows how Jewish American short story writers present the Holocaust, victimization, and anti-Semitism as contributing heavily to the processes of identity formation within the community. The discussion of the data concludes by arguing that, as the Jewish American community becomes further removed from the events of World War II, the Holocaust is becoming a more salient recurrent reality in the formation of a Jewish American identity that is increasingly tied to issues of victimization.     

The Holocaust: Commemorated but not remembered? Post-colonial and post-traumatic perspectives on the reception of the Holocaust memory discourse in Poland

The argument focuses on the reception of the globalized narrative of the Holocaust in the regional memories of East-Central Europe, in particular Poland. It is argued that this narrative has not been successfully integrated into the regional memory, partly because of the narrative's own deficiencies and partly due to the specific nature of the way in which regional memories have been produced. Instead, it has contributed to the split of collective and social memories in the region as well as to further fragmentation of each of these two kinds of memory. In result we may say that in post-communist Poland the Holocaust has been commemorated on the level of official institutions, rituals of memory, and elitist discourses, but not necessarily remembered on the level of social memory. It is claimed that to understand this phenomenon we should put the remembrance and commemoration of the Holocaust in the context of the post-communist transformation, in which the memory of the Holocaust has been constructed rather than retrieved in the process of re-composition of identities that faced existential insecurity. The non-Jewish Poles, who in the 1990s experienced the structural trauma of transformation, turned to the past not to learn the truth but to strengthen the group's sense of continuity in time. In this process many of them perceived the cosmopolitan Holocaust narrative as an instrument of the economic/cultural colonization of Eastern Europe in which the historical suffering of the non-Jewish East Europeans is not properly recognized. Thus the elitist efforts to reconnect with the European discourse and to critically examine one's own identity has clashed with the mainstream's politics of mnemonic security as part of the strategy of collective immortalization that contributed to the development of antagonistic memories and deepened social cleavage.     

Narratives of suffering among older Jewish women

This paper analyzes what 30 elderly Jewish women said about suffering. Their views must be understood in the larger context of Jewish culture in America. A fundamental question here concerns the degree to which the Holocaust, the ultimate in suffering for Jews, is used as a personal comparison for the suffering of these women. Relatively few mentioned the Holocaust in their personal narrative of suffering. Nevertheless, the Holocaust was always a silent presence in these narratives. Our data analysis found seven themes in the in the interview material about suffering. These are: (1) a general lack of direct reference to the Holocaust as the exemplar of personal suffering; (2) a focus on the need to survive; (3) the pervasiveness of disease-related pain and discomfort; (4); miserable life experiences; (5) reviewing life and encountering the end of life; (6) discrimination; and (7) suffering as a cultural construct.Most people experience suffering at some point in their lives. Some may outlive their suffering, but most never forget it. While suffering at any one time may be intense, some people may grow away from this experience, particularly when their minds are set on other things. Narratives of suffering can become important personal testimonies and, for Jews, collective testimony. Accessing narratives of suffering through interviewing or conversation brings such experiences to the surface, painful as they might be. Yet each retelling of such a story represents a victory of sorts, as the teller says, “I am still here.”In this paper we examine narratives of suffering among 30 elderly American Jewish women age 80 and above. Nearly all were born in the United States, but were the first or second generation to be born here. While the emphasis on Americanism and becoming an American was quite strong among these immigrant generations and their children, a symbolic connection to the old country was still maintained through cultural praxis.     

Making a Mormon?: Peacemaking in U.S. Press Coverage of the Mormon Baptism for the Dead

In the Mormon doctrine of posthumous baptism, people can be invited into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) community through baptism even after their death. When it was reported that the LDS had baptized Jewish Holocaust victims, this caused an uproar in the American Jewish community. The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Victims deemed the Mormon practice disrespectful and inappropriate. This study analyzes the news coverage of the negotiations between the group and the Mormon church. While such negotiations would typically be ripe for conflict-privileging coverage, news coverage of these negotiations actually emphasized peacemaking. Using the lens of narrative theory, this study found that, in reporting on negotiations between American Jews and Mormons, the press attempted to mend relations rather than emphasize conflict.     

Global walls and global movement: new destinations in Jewish migration, 1918–1939

Research often argues or implies that the First World War suddenly discontinued the age of Jewish mass migration and led to increased sedentarism. Indeed, the former main destinations like the USA drastically cut down on the arrival of East European Jews. This did not, however, result in the end of Jewish mass migration. This article will demonstrate that it rather led to manifold attempts to circumvent the newly introduced and increasingly exclusive measures, to a rising complexity of transnational movement patterns, and finally to the emergence of new destinations and Jewish communities all over the globe. This movement, however, was overshadowed and impacted by the almost global rise of xenophobia and fascism. Based on local histories, statistical and legal sources, as well as reports and communications by delegates of Jewish relief organizations, this article presents a social history of the intersection between global Jewish migration and politically motivated migration management. It leaves behind the focus on “departure” and “arrival” in Jewish migration history and elaborates on the relevance and dynamics of transmigration, the dominance of migrant networks and the complex relationship between national policies and migrants' agency.     

The Representation of the Holocaust in the Soviet Press, 1941–1945

Abstract

The article presents the first in-depth examination of the representation of the Holocaust in the Soviet press during the period of its perpetration, 1941–1945. The article illustrates that alongside growing anti-Semitism, both among the population and the regime, Soviet journalists, primarily Il'ya Ehrenburg and Vasilii Grossman, reported on the suffering and murder of European Jewry. The article examines the Soviet presentation of Nazi racial theory and compares it to the representation of Nazi racial theory in the American and British press during the war. The article looks at the reasons behind Soviet press coverage of the Holocaust, such as the use of atrocities to motivate the people to fight. It also examines the way in which the Soviet press used the Nazi persecution of the Jewish population as a means of distinguishing the fascist and socialist systems and highlighting the equality of all peoples, which it claimed existed in the Soviet Union. The article examines the Soviet representation of the behaviour of the Jews under occupation, focusing on the three main attributes — resistance, dignity and the brotherhood of the peoples. In general, the article strives to illustrate that the Soviet press reported on the Holocaust during the war and recognized the racial nature of the Nazi persecution and extermination of European Jewry.     

The intricacies of education about the Holocaust in Poland. Ten years after the Jedwabne debate,what can Polish school students learn about the Holocaust in history classes?

In many European countries, disparities have grown between history and the memory of the Holocaust. Debates on Polish–Jewish relations during the Holocaust and empirical studies in the field of education reveal that there is a gap between research and education. The emphasis in this paper is on the content of new history textbooks published after the 2008 educational reforms in Poland.     

Communism and pro‐soviet feeling among the Jews of East London, 1935–45

In the 1945 general election, a Communist was elected to Parliament from Mile End, Stepney, a constituency populated in large part by working‐class Jews of East European origin. Pro‐Soviet feeling in the preceding decade was strong, and was translated into ideological and political activity on behalf of the USSR by various East London branches of trade unions; friendly societies such as the Arbeter Ring (Workers’ Circle); Yiddishist groups, and popular front organizations such as the Jewish Fund for Soviet Russia. In late 1943 two prominent Soviet Jewish emissaries, Itzik Feffer and Shloime Mikhoels, visited England. Among their hosts were the Jewish organizations of Stepney. The effects of their tour, and the emotional intensity with which East London Jews followed the course of the Russo‐German war, were instrumental in creating the climate of opinion enabling the CP to post its 1945 victory.     

A teacher and his students: child Holocaust testimonies from early postwar Polish Bytom

ABSTRACT

The document presented here was created in 1945 in Bytom, Poland. It contains testimonies by Holocaust survivor children collected and put down in a notebook by their survivor teacher, Shlomo Tsam, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. The testimonies shed light on Jewish children's experience in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, describing oppression, flight, and survival in the words of the weakest segment of Jewish communities – children. The testimonies provide raw data on the encounters between Jews and non-Jews in the territories in which the “Final Solution” was carried out. It is thus an important source contributing to the burgeoning research on the involvement of local populations in the murder of the Jews, on one hand, and in saving Jews, on the other. The creation of this document, one of several collections of Jewish survivor children's testimonies produced in the immediate postwar years, is also indicative of post-Holocaust Jewish sensibilities and concerns regarding surviving children.     

One doesn't make out much with furs in Palestine: the migration of Jewish displaced persons, 1945–7

Based on the interviews David Boder conducted with Holocaust survivors in 1946, this article explores the realm of migration choices that were available to Jewish survivors in European Displaced Persons camps. The article argues that, aided by Jewish philanthropic and self-help organisations, many Displaced Persons had already established long-term strategies for their postwar lives by 1946.     

Twelve Jewish boys from the class of '47 of a Budapest grammar school – and their families: memories and reminiscences

Based on personal memory and interviews with former classmates the author outlines the lives of 12 men from the professional middle class, who between 1939 and 1947 attended a segregated “Jewish class” of a renowned Budapest grammar school. The article follows their youth, education, survival of the Holocaust and their careers at home or abroad till the end of the twentieth century. Additionally, as far as it became known, one or two generations of ancestors, siblings, and spouses, and one or two generations of offspring are also presented. Finally, central issues of the lives of the “boys,” such as emigration, political conformism, and, above all, assimilation to the majority society will be discussed in separate chapters. These life and family histories may be regarded as typical of a not insignificant segment of Budapest Jewish society.     

Narratives of generationality in 21st-century North American Jewish literature: Krauss,Bezmozgis, Kalman

ABSTRACT

The article explores prominent contemporary texts by David Bezmozgis, Nadia Kalman, and Nicole Krauss to juxtapose the narratives of generationality they produce. I argue that these narratives depend on intersecting notions of family, genealogy, and (procreative) heterosexuality and on various formal temporal modes that these texts employ. Generationality, in recent Holocaust literature, as represented here by Krauss, seems to give rise to and rely on different familial/genealogical narratives than recent post-Soviet immigrant fiction. Krauss in The History of Love works with more traditional notions of temporality and history which, I claim, are linked with both exceptionalist and diachronic narratives of the Holocaust, and normative notions of romantic love and reproductive sexuality. Bezmozgis, in Natasha and Other Stories, among others, deconstructs the notion of a synchronic transnational Jewish community and critically deals with the centrality of Holocaust memorialization and also with concomitant sexual normativities. Finally, Kalman in The Cosmopolitans critically approaches diachronic generationality: she plays with genealogy modifying the representational conventions of the genealogical diagram and thereby enters into a productive dialog with Krauss’s text. Kalman also broadens the social setting to include other ethnicities, people of color, and queer sexual practices. What is at stake in the comparison proposed here is exposing key features of contemporary North American locations of Jewishness. Reading these texts along the narratives of generationality suggests that post-Soviet Jewish American writers, and especially the women writers of the subgenre, project a vision of community that is quite open and make us question various hegemonic coordinates of Jewishness.     

Regional Features and the Socio-Demographic Development of the Jews of Podilia

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the Jewish national minority of Podilia – a historical-geographical region mainly in the central part of Ukraine – formed. Considerable attention is given to the demographic processes within the Jewish environment of the region and features of formation of the social characteristics of the Jewish population that manifested themselves in its resettlement, formation of localities, self-government, and professional employment. This article shows that one of the biggest Eastern European Jewish communities was formed in Podilia before the beginning of World War II. This community was represented by the largest Jewish subethnic group – Ashkenazim. The social features of the Jews of the region were determined by the fact that the Jewish population lived in small towns of the primarily agrarian region. In addition, during this period, its social structure and professional employment were determined by both national customs and traditions and the power policy.

This study shows that after the 1940s, the Jewish community in Podilia changed. The Jews suffered from the Holocaust, which forever changed the social characteristics of the Jewish population of Podilia.

Active anti-Jewish policy during the postwar totalitarian regime, latent antisemitism during the “thaw,” and the authoritarian conservative regime in the USSR from 1964 to the mid 1980s, caused significant changes in the demographic processes of the Jewish population of the region. From the 1940s to the 1980s, the Jewish population of Podilia steadily decreased. The Jewish community before the end of the 1980s noticeably lost its influence in the region, but remained the largest ethnic community there, after Russians.     

"Within the Pale." British Intellectual Society and the Image of the Russian Jew, 1890–1907

Abstract  "Within the Pale": This paper examines British responses to the East European Jew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike other analyses, which have concentrated on the impact of Jewish immigration to the UK and the so-called aliens' debate, the author interprets the narrative constructed by British commentators who visited the Tsarist Empire (sometimes to specifically examine its "Jewish Question") and who spent long periods there (either as independent observers, or as newspaper/journal correspondents). It discusses how Russian attitudes, images and allusions about Jews were transmitted to British discourse and the extent to which Anglo-Russian boundaries of Judeophobia were intertwined. In its assessment it considers British perceptions of anti-Tsarist persecution, life in the Pale, the Jewish-peasant relationship and Anglo-Jewish responses.     

Deciphering a Mystery: Digital Technology and the Revelation of Handwritten Texts by Marcel Nadjari and Other Members of the Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau

ABSTRACT

Jewish Sonderkommando's handwritten notes – found among the earth and ashes – are key documents of Holocaust history. But their degree of preservation is poor. Digital technology comes to the rescue to restore the legibility of these documents potentially lost to history. This article provides some examples of the successful application of image processing, which considerably increases the sharpness of the text. Special filters and approaches managed to increase by fourfold the number of pages from Marcel Nadjari's notes that could be read before. The deciphered fragments of Nadjari's notes not only allow us to better understand the meaning of the entire document, but also make a connection to another Nadjari text, thus yielding a new, much deeper, understanding of both the author himself, the particular fate of Greek Jews in the Holocaust, and also their role in the life and death of the Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz–Birkenau.     

The Politics of Recognition: Jewish Refugees in Relief Policies and Human Rights Debates, 1945–1950

This essay analyses the place of Jewish survivors in the refugee system established by the West in the aftermath of the Second World War. Departing from the literature of trauma and mourning, this article addresses Holocaust survivors as migrant refugees subjected to international categorisations, relief policies and human rights debates. Between 1945 and 1950, Jewish refugees were recognised as an ideal-type community of victims by western humanitarianism. Recognition entailed symbolic and material entitlements, and eventually rewarded Holocaust survivors with historical, political and territorial vindication. As opposed to other refugee groups who entered the market of international compassion in the 1940s, Jewish refugees were granted full status of political victims.     

The Politics of Recognition: Jewish Refugees in Relief Policies and Human Rights Debates, 1945-1950

This essay analyses the place of Jewish survivors in the refugee system established by the West in the aftermath of the Second World War. Departing from the literature of trauma and mourning, this article addresses Holocaust survivors as migrant refugees subjected to international categorisations, relief policies and human rights debates. Between 1945 and 1950, Jewish refugees were recognised as an ideal-type community of victims by western humanitarianism. Recognition entailed symbolic and material entitlements, and eventually rewarded Holocaust survivors with historical, political and territorial vindication. As opposed to other refugee groups who entered the market of international compassion in the 1940s, Jewish refugees were granted full status of political victims.