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Recollection and Relocation in Immigration: Russian-Jewish Immigrants “Normalize” Their Anti-Semitic Experiences
Author(s): Rapoport, Tamar; Lomsky-Feder, Edna; Heider, Angelika
Date: 2002
Topics: Antisemitism, Interviews, Immigration, Main Topic: Antisemitism, Memory, Jewish Identity, Russian-Speaking Jews
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.
Die "Normalisierung" antisemitistischer Erfahrungen: Junge russisch-jüdische Migranten erinnern ihre Kindheit in der Sowjetunion
Translated Title: The "normalization" of anti-Semitic experiences: Young Russian-Jewish migrants remember their childhood in the Soviet Union
Author(s): Heider, Angelika; Rapoport, Tamar
Date: 1999
Topics: Antisemitism, Main Topic: Antisemitism, Jewish Perceptions of Antisemitism, Russian-Speaking Jews, Russian Emigration, Youth, Interviews, Immigration
"We are similar in that we're different": Social Relationships of Young Russian Jewish Immigrants in Israel and Germany
Author(s): Schütze, Yvonne; Rapoport, Tamar
Editor(s): Breckner, Roswitha; Kalekin-Fishman, Devorah; Miethe, Ingrid
Date: 2000
Topics: Interviews, Russian-Speaking Jews, Immigration, Aliyah, Acculturation, Integration, Russian Emigration, Friendship, Main Topic: Other
Abstract: The data used in this study was collected for the project titled 'Russian Jewish Immigration in Jerusalem and Berlin: A Comparison.' The project
focuses on the process of social integration of young Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel and Germany and had resided in the new society for roughly five to six years at the time of the interview (1995/1996). The interview subjects were 38 young Russian Jews in Jerusalem, whose mean age was 24 years, and 46 in Berlin, with a mean age of 22.6 years. The interviews in Israel were conducted exclusively with university students, while the Berlin group consisted of 35 university students and 11 individuals preparing to enter the university or other educational institutions. The central question of this study can be summarized as follows: Do the different approaches to Russian Jewish emigrants taken by Israel and Germany - approaches which are historically, politically, and culturally distinct - have diverging effects on the process of integration, and thus on the immigrants' future perspectives in the new society? In this paper, we have dealt only with a part of this question, namely social relations between emigrants and native residents.