Memory on Demand: The Jewish Past in Today’s Hlybokaye

In this article, we discuss the ways in which the memory of the Jewish past functions in today’s Belarusian town of Hlybokaye: the contexts of its production and consumption, the key actors, forms and mechanisms. We take the restoration of the old Jewish cemetery by visiting activists and the installation of a monument to the famous townsman Eliezer Ben-Yehuda as case examples. We argue that only random representations of the Jewish past have been appearing in local knowledge and that neither local groups nor outside actors have so far stated demand for an overarching general local narrative about Jewish Hlybokaye. On the one hand, the Jewish theme in the local knowledge of today’s town is secondary, while on the other hand, there has been occasional demand for it.

Ключевые слова

Memory, town, local history, Jewish town, memorial practices, city branding, Jewish cemetery, Hlybokae, Ben Yehuda

Источник финансирования

This article is a translation of: Лурье М.Л., Савина Н.А. Память до востребования: еврейское прошлое в современном Глубоком // Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie. 2021. No 4. P. 138–155. DOI: 10.31857/S086954150016706-6

Получено

22.09.2021

Дата публикации

28.09.2021

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53655

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ГОСТ	Лурье М. Л. , Савина Н. А. Memory on Demand: The Jewish Past in Today’s Hlybokaye // Этнографическое обозрение – 2021. – №4 C. 298-312 [Электронный ресурс]. URL: http://ras.jes.su/ethnorev/s086954150016801-1-1 (дата обращения: 25.04.2024). DOI: 10.31857/S086954150016801-1
MLA	Lurie, Mikhail, Savina, Natalia "Memory on Demand: The Jewish Past in Today’s Hlybokaye." Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 4 (2021):298-312. DOI: 10.31857/S086954150016801-1
APA	Lurie M., Savina N. (2021). Memory on Demand: The Jewish Past in Today’s Hlybokaye. Etnograficheskoe obozrenie (4), pp.298-312 DOI: 10.31857/S086954150016801-1

Размещенный ниже текст является ознакомительной версией и может не соответствовать печатной.


1	Hlybokaye is a small town in Vitebsk Region, Belarus, counting 19000 inhabitants as of 2020. Before the USSR annexed Disnensky Powiat in 1939, Hlybokaye used to belong to Poland. In the early 20^th century Jews comprised about 2/3 of the town’s overall population; these numbers grew to roughly one half of the population by the start of WWII [Belova, Kopchenova 2017]. After Hlybokaye fell under German occupation, the Jewish population was relocated into a large ghetto. A rebellion broke out, and all the Jews interned in the ghetto were murdered by the Nazis in August 1943. After the war was over, not all of the very few survivors decided to return to Hlybokaye, and some emigrated. New inhabitants were settling in the town – mostly villagers from Hlybokaye District and neighbouring areas.
2	In 2015 a field-working school was held by the Sefer Center¹ in Hlybokaye; folklorists and ethnographers participated in the school along with epigraphists and conducted interviews with the townspeople, primarily with the older generation. The researcher mostly focused on traditional perception of Jews, their everyday and ritual lives, by non-Jewish locals. In an introduction to a collected articles volume that was published as a follow-up to the field school, Olga Belova and Irina Kopchenova write: “After the war, Jewish life in Hlybokaye, as in other Jewish towns, has come to a halt. However the memory of Jewish life in Hlybokaye has survived in the many stories that the town inhabitants so generously shared with participants of the expedition for which we are very grateful [Belova, Kopchenova, 2017: 372].	1. The SEFER Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization has been holding field-working schools in studying cultural heritage of Eastern European Jews since 2004. See publications based on field schools’ materials at >>>
3	One of the authors of the current paper participated both in the field school and the volume [Savina 2017], and the extensive Sefer archives, that we were kindly allowed to use at will, were of immense help to our investigations. Nevertheless, the very idea of this paper comes from critical reflection on those materials and the approach to local memory studies that stands behind them. What we are talking about is not a case of informants tending to researchers’ focused interest by deliberately “turning the Jewishness up a notch” (see such cases in Petrov 2015). We were mostly interested in the contribution that colourful personal memorates make, or make not, to the understanding of what is currently happening in Hlybokaye to the memory of its Jewish past. Does this memory only exist at the individual memorates’ level or does it leak into the public sphere, and if it does, then how does that happen and with participation of which institutes?
4	We visited Hlybokaye in 2019, intent on taking a closer look at the modes and forms of persistence of Jewish memory in a town that had fallen to the fate of many a Jewish shtetl. We consciously steered clear of the Jewish theme when talking to our informants, who were both local experts (journalists, tour guides, kraeveds²) and other inhabitants of Hlybokaye of various ages and occupations.³ We asked our interviewees about contemporary Hlybokaye – its space, history and local cultural specifics, about economic, social and other processes. We paid visits to cultural institutions, war memorials, town parks and other notable objects; we went on town and museum guided tours – both institutional and conducted by town experts on our specific requests. The data from these talks and observations is what this paper is based on along with transcripts of the interviews from 2015 and publications on local events in Hlybokaye press and other news media.	2. Here and henceforth we will use this word, which is important for the discussion of local cultural processes. A kraeved (which translates as “local history expert/local historian”) is an amateur researcher who studies the history, culture, and nature of his/her village, town, district, or region and popularizes this knowledge. The discipline of kraevedenie, literally “learning about a territory,” is a practice that began in Russia and other Slavic countries at the beginning of the twentieth century as a movement to study one’s own locale or region. As a rule, kraeveds are seen as authoritative local experts. 3. The exceptions to it were Tatsiana Saulich and Margarita Kozhenevskaya whom we interviewed in their capacity of professional experts in Jewish history of Glubokoye.
5	The tradition of studying the everyday life of pre-WWII Eastern European shtetls as well as the memory about it from oral and written memoirs of the bearers of this memory (both Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours) is quite established in Jewish studies. Its founders are Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog who conducted their research on the basis of the memoirs they collected from immigrants from Polish and Ukranian shtetls into the US [Zborowski, Herzog 1952]. This methodology has been used, and is still being used, since then by many academics including those based in Russia.⁴ Speaking of the more recent works, one could name a monograph by Jeffrey Veidlinger on pre-WWII Jewish life and life under occupation, written on the basis of interviews with long-term residents of small Eastern European towns, courtesy of the AHEYM archive [Veidlinger 2013].⁵	4. See collected works: Dymshits 1994; Lukin, Khaimovich 1997; Lukin et. al. 2000, and individual articles: Amosova, Nikolaeva 2006; Amosova, Kaspina 2010a, 2010b. 5. The Archive of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (AHEYM): >>>> (retrieved on 23.10.2020).
6	Alexander Lvov has criticised this approach, noting that a search for a normative Jewish culture associated with a “classic” pre-WWII shtetl is quite narrow as it overlooks contemporary culture of Jews of post-Soviet shtetls, which is a worthy and self-sufficient research object in its own right [Lvov 2008].
7	Another strand of research, more oriented towards the constructivist paradigm, considers contemporary representations of memory about Jews in former Jewish shtetls and city districts as results of activity by certain actors.
8	In some cases, the context for such activity is urban symbolic economy [Zukin 1995]. Given the general environment of cultural industry in places formerly boasting large Jewish population, specifically “Jewish” urban environments and events are created. Since the 1990s several European cities began articulating their Jewish past explicitly and filling urban space with markers of Jewish cultural presence, forming a so called Jewish-themed tourism [Sandri 2013] as a particular branch in the tourism industry. Eszter Gantner and Mátyás Kovács note a visible presence of Jewish culture in the form of themed festivals, tours, exhibitions, cafes, etc., in contemporary Berlin, Krakow, Budapest and Prague – the cities where Jewish population plummeted after WWII. The authors explore the situation of non-Jewish actors constructing a Jewish cultural urban space aimed at tourists as exemplified by these cases [Gantner, Kovács 2007].

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Memory on Demand: The Jewish Past in Today’s Hlybokaye

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