“Venetian Waltz, Roman Holiday, American Tragedy:” Soviet Jewish Expectations and Encounters in Transit

• In Event: Jewish Journeys from Russia and the Soviet Union

Abstract

I am dedicating a project to the “Vienna-Rome Pipeline” through which over 180,000 Soviet Jews fleeing to the West, rather than Israel, passed in the 1970s and 1980s. Vienna and Rome served as sequential transit points where Soviet Jews stayed for months, if not years, waiting to receive refugee status and permission to enter the United States, Canada, Australia, or Germany. Memories of Vienna and Rome live on in the memoirs, oral histories, and social media of Soviet Jewish emigres. Why was this transit process so impactful? How did Soviet Jews mediate the uncertainty and shock of their journeys? Did life in transit eventually affect their attitudes towards their new host countries? Indeed, as Soviet Jews left for the West, they carried expectations for the lives awaiting them. Betrayed by false promises of communism and Soviet anti-Semitism, Soviet Jews idealized migration as the sole remaining option for a better future. But when questions of destination arose, this ideal splintered into two distinct paths. For many urban, assimilated Soviet Jews, the culture and history of the West had woven itself into their identities more tightly than their Jewish heritage. Consequently, they firmly believed that the United States, and not Israel, would and should be their new home. I argue that these beliefs were first affected not upon their arrival to the United States, but in transit. The months or even years that Soviet Jews spent in Austria and Italy awaiting permission to enter the United States transformed the West and Israel from imaginary concepts into real-world encounters. Soviet Jews mediated these encounters by contextualizing them within two abstract, intertwined spaces: collective memories of the Western culture they encountered in the Soviet Union and their collective hopes for life in America. Western books, films, and music that that they once encountered in the USSR became symbolic of their time in transit. They placed a great stake in their future home, believing that their behaviors in transit would secure the American life awaiting them. This paper explores how the transit process trapped Soviet Jews in a balancing act, as they sought to align the expectations they formed in the Soviet Union with their experiences in Vienna and Rome.

Author

• Alexandra Zborovsky, University of Pennsylvania