Hometowns Revisited: American Jews, Regional Belonging, and Authoritarianism in Interwar Poland, 1926-1939

• In Event: In and Out: Twentieth-Century Jewish Mobility in Eastern Europe

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s, many New York Jews from the former Habsburg province of Galicia traveled to Poland as tourists. Having left their hometowns as subjects of a multiethnic empire in the late 19th century, they now traveled to a nation-state that did not recognize them as its citizens. Even though returning as a tourist symbolized only a temporarily visit, the travelers were caught between an emotional attachment and experiences of alienation. They started to rethink what it means to be from a no-longer-existing region like Galicia and realized that they in fact became American Jews. Yet, using the label of the Galitsyaner, they activated their relief networks to alleviate both the impacts of the Great Depression and rising authoritarianism in interwar Poland. It shows how regional identities from the imperial past not only persisted throughout the migration experience but became stronger when confronted with new nation-states. Thus, this paper impels us to think about continuities of empires beyond East Central Europe and shows how Jewish self-understanding was constantly reshaped in conversation with both a sense of regional belonging and the political reality of the places of origin.

Author

• Oskar Czendze, UNC at Chapel Hill