Between Experience and Memory: East European Jewish Childhood in Ego-Documents

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

How do different types of ego-documents frame, portray, and interpret childhood and childhood experiences? What narrative structures shape these accounts, and why? How productive is the dichotomy between memory and experience in analyzing these sources?
This panel explores these questions through the lens of ego-documents written by east European Jews. By examining both adult retrospectives such as autobiographies and memoirs, and contemporary writings by children and adolescents such as letters and diaries, participants will investigate the intricate relationship between narrative, memory, emotions, and lived experience in the representation of childhood.
Exploring Jewish childhood in Eastern Europe across diverse settings—including family life, Hasidic courts, and the traumatic landscapes of the Holocaust—the discussion will offer a multifaceted perspective on childhood in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Ultimately, this discussion seeks to illuminate how childhood was framed, mediated, experienced, and remembered in various forms of personal writing within east European Jewish society.

Sub Unit

• Jewish Studies

Chair

• Elissa Bemporad, CUNY Queens College / CUNY Graduate Center

Papers

• 'Once Upon a Time, When I Was Small': Narratives of Childhood in East European Jewish Autobiographies - Ekaterina Oleshkevich, Hebrew U of Jerusalem (Israel)

• Memory of Hasidic Courts and Childhood in Ego-Documents of Court’s Insiders - Gadi Sagiv, Open U (Israel)

• Jewish Children’s Emotional Communities amid a Genocide - Natalia Aleksiun, U of Florida

Discussant

• Alex Valdman, Ben Gurion U (Israel)