Jewish Youth in Flight: Mobility and Agency

• In Event: Jewish Youth During and After the Holocaust

Abstract

The history of migration has enjoyed a relatively fertile scholarly attention, that has only mushroomed as of late. Most recently, scholars have questioned the narrative of a one-way trajectory from Russian oppression to American acculturation by showing how, be it by choice or circumstance, new Jewish communities fanned out across the globe. They have also muddled a historiography that has drawn an all too stark line between the sending and the host society. These scholars have revealed how bonds of belonging to the old world were not irrevocably severed upon setting foot in the new world. And yet the fact that a staggering percentage of European Jewish migrants had not yet reached adulthood has been noted in passing and yet never accorded sustained exploration.

This presentation will argue that integrating the perspectives and experiences of minors underscores the role of youth as active agents in the act of migration. Several popular perceptions have obscured the agency of youth in the migration process: youth are generally regarded as passive and dependent, and the nuclear family unit as a hierarchical structure in which children languish at the bottom. These assumptions don’t hold to historical scrutiny—as this presentation that will focus on letters penned by interwar and wartime migrant Jewish youth—will maintain. Migrant youth could urge reluctant parents to flee a perilous situation. For example, memoirs reveal that German Jewish youth were often most attuned to the disturbing rise of social antisemitism, and championed migration despite the initial reluctance of their parents. Or they could see migration as an exciting adventure, rather than a burden. Younger male refugees from Nazi Germany, for instance, envisioned a New World peopled by cowboys, Indians, and gangsters. They found themselves rather disappointed by the far more prosaic reality. In some cases, children and teenagers made the heart-wrenching decision to leave family members behind as they attempted to chart their own futures. Thus, an image of determined and active children forcefully emerges that unsettles assumptions about the passivity of child migrants and their position at the bottom of the family hierarchy.

Author

• Daniella Doron, Monash University