Transcarpathian Jews vis-à-vis Antisemitism: a Story from the Periphery

• In Event: Soviet Jews and Antisemitism after World War II

Abstract

The paper analyzes ordinary Jewish experiences of and reactions to popular and state antisemitism in postwar Soviet Transcarpathia. A fraction of the prewar population, predominately Holocaust survivors and forced labor survivors in the Hungarian Labor Battalion returned to Transcarpathia, ceded to the Soviet Union in June 1945, and rebuilt their private and communal lives under secular Soviet rule. In my project, I will be looking at video oral history interviews that I conducted over the last two years in Israel and Ukraine, as well as materials from other oral history collections, to find manifestations of postwar Soviet antisemitism in the western periphery of the Soviet Union.

Previous scholarship has focused in depth on the post-World War II Soviet Jewish experience within the context of the “Black Years” (1948-1953) defined as official anti-Jewish policies during the late Stalinist period. The following decades under Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s regimes have received cursory attention within the context of continuities and discontinuities of Stalinist antisemitic policies, taking place during broader events of the Cold War. These studies have addressed social, cultural and religious Jewish life, while emphasizing the experience of Jewish intellectual and cultural elites. However, these works have not addressed how ordinary Jews, particularly Holocaust and forced labor survivors, experienced popular and state antisemitism after World War II. Similarly, this critical scholarship also refers to regions, newly annexed to the USSR during World War II, as hubs of popular antisemitism. Scholars, however, have not made much distinction between those geographical areas that were subjected to Sovietization during and after World War II. My project analyzes the Soviet Jewish experience in Transcarpathia vis-à-vis forms of Soviet antisemitism.

Overall, I want to draw attention to an alternative narrative regarding the expression of Jewishness in the Soviet Union after World War II; one that takes place in a traditional environment in a Soviet province, which existed in the shadow of urban Jewish cultural centers and the Soviet administration in Moscow.

Author

• Anya Quilitzsch, Indiana University