Recollection and Relocation in Immigration: Russian-Jewish Immigrants “Normalize” Their Anti-Semitic Experiences
Author(s)
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Publication Date
Abstract
This study conceptualizes the relationship between recollection of the past and relocation in the context of immigration. Combining symbolic interactionist and narrative paradigms, it explores how immigrants' representations of past experiences inform their identity construction and the process of entering the host society. Our interpretive analysis of personal narratives related spontaneously by eighty-nine Russian-Jewish immigrants in Israel and Germany reveals that they choose to “normalize” their anti-Semitic experiences by representing them as secondary, expected, and “normal.” They do so via four narrating tactics of normalization: obscuring, self-exclusion, vindication, and essentializing stigma. Each tactic devalues the cultural depiction (grand narrative) of anti-Semitic experiences as transformative and traumatic. By normalizing their past, the immigrants deconstruct and resist the authority and moral commands of the national narrative they encounter in both societies. Putting forward normalization as an alternative interpretation, the immigrants claim ownership of their biography and cultural identity.
Topics
Antisemitism Interviews Immigration Main Topic: Antisemitism Memory Jewish Identity Russian-Speaking Jews
Genre
Geographic Coverage
Original Language
Volume/Issue
25(2)
Page Number / Article Number
175-198
DOI
Link
Link to article (paywalled), Recollection and Relocation in Immigration: Russian-Jewish Immigrants “Normalize” Their Anti-Semitic Experiences
Bibliographic Information
Recollection and Relocation in Immigration: Russian-Jewish Immigrants “Normalize” Their Anti-Semitic Experiences. 2002: 175-198. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1525/si.2002.25.2.175
