A Generation In-Between. Raising Children across the German-Jewish Diaspora

• In Event: The New Jew: Between Germany and Zion

Abstract

Displaced and dispersed, German Jews who fled Nazi persecution were intent on reconstituting normalcy in the various destinations to which they had migrated. As with other immigrant communities, establishing families and raising children became the ultimate gateway towards attaining that goal, and towards integration into new homelands. Simultaneously, watching their children grow up in environments different from their own confronted German-Jewish parents with the limited role that their cultural legacy might play in the lives of future generations. At a time when the destruction unleashed by the Nazi regime had rendered Jewish life in Germany impossible, a generational shift across the German-speaking diaspora raised the possibility that German-Jewish culture was at the brink of extinction.

This paper explores the ways in which raising children prompted German Jews to consider the future of German-Jewishness and face the threat of its dissolution. As they observed their children adapting to unfamiliar environments, and as they raised children born as natives in countries they themselves had arrived in as refugees, German Jews were confronting the realization that their own native culture was living on borrowed time. While some greeted this as a natural, even a desired, development, others reflected upon it with a heavy heart. Coming to terms with the temporality of German-Jewishness as a lived experience was often cited as justification for firmly clinging to this identity. In the words of one author, responding to the criticism exercised in the YISHUV against those who continued to cherish the German language and German culture: “Leave us be. It’s just a matter of one last generation.”

While the successful integration of children was celebrated across the global diaspora, German-Jewish parents could not ignore its implications. Through the analysis of newspapers, correspondences, journal entries, pamphlets and other primary sources – stemming not from a single diasporic node but from various countries – this paper shows that witnessing the rise of a new generation was accompanied by an intensified probing of the German-Jewish identity, its history and its potential legacies.

Author

• Sheer Ganor, UC Berkeley, department of history