The Role of Holocaust Memory in Transcarpathian Jewish Life between 1945 and 1978

• In Event: “Beyond Individual Recall”: Holocaust Testimonies in the Age of Postmemory

Abstract

Critical scholarship on the memorialization of the Holocaust often focuses on the role of Holocaust memory and memorialization within Jewish communities in Western democratic countries that also engage in state-sponsored projects on the commemoration of the Holocaust.
However, these perspectives have not adequately addressed questions of individual and communal expressions of Holocaust memory in the Soviet Union, where the articulation of Holocaust memory and memorialization was potentially complicated with the state’s promotion of a unified Soviet narrative of the Great Patriotic War, excluding the Jewish experience of World War II.

My paper addresses the issue of Holocaust memorialization and memory in the context of post-World War II southwestern Ukraine, i.e. Transcarpathia, with special attention to the role of Holocaust memory in the lives of Transcarpathian Jewish families, as well as communities. Specifically, in my project, I will be looking at Yiddish video oral history, consisting of my own fieldwork of forty plus interviews with first and second generation Transcarpathian Jews, collected in Israel, Hungary, Ukraine and the United States, as well as interviews taken from the AHEYM collection, in order to show how Holocaust memory and inter-generational transmission influenced the rebuilding and practice of individual and collective traditional Jewish life in Transcarpathia between 1945 and 1978. I will discuss the presence of Holocaust memory and acts of memorialization in private and communal life in Transcarpathia in order to complicate dominant narratives of Holocaust memory and transmission as understood in Western countries. This project, by closely examining video testimonies, sheds new light on Soviet Ukrainian regional Jewish life and its complicated relationship to Holocaust memory.

author

• Anya Quilitzsch, Indiana University