Going to the People

Description

Taking S. An-sky's expeditions to the Pale of Jewish Settlement as its point of departure, the volume explores the dynamic and many-sided nature of ethnographic knowledge and the long and complex history of the production and consumption of Jewish folk traditions. These essays by historians, anthropologists, musicologists, and folklorists showcase some of the finest research in the field. They reveal how the collection, analysis, and preservation of ethnography intersect with questions about the construction and delineation of community, the preservation of Jewishness, the meaning of belief, the significance of retrieving cultural heritage, the politics of accessing and memorializing "lost" cultures, and the problem of narration, among other topics.

Acknowledgments
Introduction \ Jeffrey Veidlinger
Part I. History of the Ethnographic Impulse
1. Thrice Born, or Between Two Worlds: Reflexivity and Performance in An-sky's Jewish Ethnographic Expedition and Beyond \ Nathaniel Deutsch
2. Between Scientific and Political: Jewish Scholars and Russian-Jewish Physical Anthropology in the Fin-de-Siècle Russian Empire\ Marina Mogilner
3. To Study Our Past, Make Sense of Our Present and Develop Our National Consciousness:" Lev Shternberg's Comprehensive Program for Jewish Ethnography in the USSR \ Sergei Kan
4. "What Should We Collect?": Ethnography, Local Studies, and the Formation of a Belorussian Jewish Identity \ Elissa Bemporad
5. Yiddish Folklore and Soviet Ideology during the 1930s \ Mikhail Krutikov
6. After An-sky: I.M. Pul'ner and the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad \ Deborah Yalen
7. "Holy Sacred Collection Work": The Relationship between YIVO and its Zamlers \ Sarah Ellen Zarrow
8. The Last "Zamlers": Avrom Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski in Vilna, 1944-1945 \ David E. Fishman
Part II. Findings from the Field
9. Ethnography and Folklore among Polish Jews in Israel—Immigration and Integration \ Haya Bar-Itzhak
10. The Use of Hebrew and Yiddish in the Rituals of Contemporary Jewry of Bukovina and Bessarabia \ Alexandra Polyan
11. Food and Faith in the Soviet Shtetl \ Jeffrey Veidlinger
12. Undzer Rebenyu: Religion, Memory, and Identity in Postwar Moldova \ Sebastian Z. Schulman
Part III. Reflections on the Ethnographic Impulse
13. Ex-Soviet Jews: Collective Autoethnography \ Larisa Fialkova and Maria Yelenevskaya
14. Family Pictures at an Exhibition: History, Autobiography, and the Museum Exhibit on Jewish Łódź "In Mrs. Goldberg's Kitchen" \ Halina Goldberg
15. Seamed Stockings and Ponytails: Conducting Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Contemporary Hasidic Community \ Asya Vaisman Schulman
Part IV. By Way of Conclusion
16. From Function to Frame: The Evolving Conceptualization of Jewish Folklore Studies \ Simon J. Bronner
List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Jewish Studies
• Social Science

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 février 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253019165
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

GOING TO THE PEOPLE
Going to the People
Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse

Edited by Jeffrey Veidlinger
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Veidlinger, Jeffrey, [date], editor.
Title: Going to the people : Jews and the ethnographic impulse / edited by
Jeffrey Veidlinger.
Description: Bloomington ; Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, [2016] |
Selected papers presented at a conference held at Indiana University in
February 2013. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015023878 | ISBN 9780253019080 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780253019141 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253019165 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH : Jews-Europe, Eastern-Social life and customs-Congresses. |
Jews-Social life and customs-Congresses. | Jewish folklorists-Europe,
Eastern-Congresses. | Folk literature, Yiddish-Congresses. | Jewish folk
literature-Congresses. | Ethnology-Europe, Eastern-Congresses. |
Europe, Eastern-Ethnic relations-Congresses.
Classification: LCC DS 135.E83 G654 2016 | DDC 305.892/4047-dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015023878
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
Go out and see what the people do. - BT ERUVIN 14 B
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction Jeffrey Veidlinger
PART I. HISTORY OF THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMPULSE
1. Thrice Born; or, Between Two Worlds: Reflexivity and Performance in An-sky s Jewish Ethnographic Expedition and Beyond Nathaniel Deutsch
2. Between Scientific and Political: Jewish Scholars and Russian-Jewish Physical Anthropology in the Fin-de-Si cle Russian Empire Marina Mogilner
3. To Study Our Past, Make Sense of Our Present and Develop Our National Consciousness : Lev Shternberg s Comprehensive Program for Jewish Ethnography in the USSR Sergei Kan
4. What Should We Collect? : Ethnography, Local Studies, and the Formation of a Belorussian Jewish Identity Elissa Bemporad
5. Yiddish Folklore and Soviet Ideology during the 1930s Mikhail Krutikov
6. After An-sky: I. M. Pul ner and the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad Deborah Yalen
7. Sacred Collection Work : The Relationship between YIVO and Its Zamlers Sarah Ellen Zarrow
8. The Last Zamlers: Avrom Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski in Vilna, 1944-1945 David E. Fishman
PART II. FINDINGS FROM THE FIELD
9. Ethnography and Folklore among Polish Jews in Israel: Immigration and Integration Haya Bar-Itzhak
10. The Use of Hebrew and Yiddish in the Rituals of Contemporary Jewry of Bukovina and Bessarabia Alexandra Polyan
11. Food and Faith in the Soviet Shtetl Jeffrey Veidlinger
12. Undzer Rebenyu: Religion, Memory, and Identity in Postwar Moldova Sebastian Z. Schulman
PART III. REFLECTIONS ON THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMPULSE
13. Ex-Soviet Jews: Collective Autoethnography Larisa Fialkova and Maria Yelenevskaya
14. Family Pictures at an Exhibition: History, Autobiography, and the Museum Exhibit on Jewish d In Mrs. Goldberg s Kitchen Halina Goldberg
15. Seamed Stockings and Ponytails: Conducting Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Contemporary Hasidic Community Asya Vaisman Schulman
PART IV. BY WAY OF CONCLUSION
16. From Function to Frame: The Evolving Conceptualization of Jewish Folklore Studies Simon J. Bronner
List of Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK EMERGED out of a conference held at Indiana University in February 2013. First and foremost I would like to thank the conference co-organizers, Dov-Ber Kerler, Haya Bar-Itzhak, and Anya Quilitzsch, who worked with me in putting together the event. I would also like to thank Melissa Deckard for coordinating and administering the event, as well as the other staff at the Borns Jewish Studies Program for their assistance: Janice Hurtuk, Tracy Richardson, and the Borns program s own folklorist and assistant director, Carolyn Lipson-Walker. In addition to those whose papers appear in this volume, there were several others who participated in the conference as paper presenters, commentators, or chairs: Michael Alpert, Alan Bern, Valery Dymshits, Itzik Gottesman, Sarah Imhoff, Jason Jackson, Dov-Ber Kerler, Marija Krupoves, Moisei Lemster, Shaul Magid, Anya Quilitzsch, David Ransel, Ilana Rosen, Boris Sandler, Dmitri Slepovitch, and Yuri Vedenyapin. Their input and ideas are also reflected in these papers. I would particularly like to thank Dmitri Slepovitch and Michael Alpert for also providing evening entertainment and enlightenment at the conference with the Traveling the Yiddishland show. Both Dov-Ber and I express our heartfelt thanks to Dr. Alice Ginott Cohn z l, who was a longtime supporter of Yiddish studies at Indiana University; without her generosity the conference would not have been possible.
Former director of Indiana University Press Janet Rabinowitch attended the conference and solicited the book manuscript. I thank her for helping envision how the ideas we discussed at the conference could be formulated into a book. At Indiana University Press, I also thank Robert Sloan and Jenna Whittaker for seeing the project through. Thanks, as well, to Eric Levy for his patient and precise copyediting, my undergraduate research assistants Jacqueline Khutorsky and Terra Schroeder for their assistance, and Paula Durbin-Westby for compiling the index. I am grateful to Eugene Avrutin and the other peer reviewer who remained anonymous for providing helpful and insightful critiques of the manuscript. I completed the final edits while on fellowship at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, and am grateful for the opportunity to have had time to work on this manuscript while simultaneously embarking upon a new project of my own.
Finally, I extend my deepest thanks to the contributors of the volume for taking the time to develop their conference papers into coherent chapters, for their patience as the publication process wore on, and for providing me with the opportunity to learn more about Jewish folklore, ethnography, anthropology, and oral history. It has been a pleasure to work with each of them.
GOING TO THE PEOPLE
Introduction
JEFFREY VEIDLINGER
In the spring of 1873 a manifesto written by an ad hoc group of populists based in St. Petersburg began circulating among Russian university students: Go to the people and tell it the whole truth to the very last word. Tell it that man must live according to the law of nature. According to this law all men are equal; all men are born naked, all men are born equally small and weak. 1 The following summer, the summer of 1874, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students abandoned their universities and went into the countryside to the people. These urban students and alienated nobility had come to believe that the future lay in the revolutionary power of the Russian peasantry, the simple folk, the narod or the muzhik .
This compulsion to go to the people was infectious: it not only played an important role in the growth of the Russian revolutionary movement, but it also encouraged intellectuals, amateur scholars, and aspiring artists to draw inspiration from their roots, to return to their people. The Jews of the Russian Empire took part in this movement of return with enthusiasm. The most celebrated spokesperson for the movement to the people among Jewish activists was probably Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport, known more commonly by his pseudonym, S. An-sky. 2 An-sky s manifesto, Jewish Folk Creativity, published in the short-lived journal Perezhitoe (The past) in 1908, began with an epigraph from the Talmudic tractate Eruvin 14b, Go out and see what the people do, that paralleled the populists rallying cry and linked the modern cause to the Jewish past. 3 Our task today, he wrote in that seminal manifesto, is to organize without delay the systematic collection of the works of folk art, of the monuments of the Jewish past, and to describe Jewish lifestyles over the generations. This task is not partisan, but national and cultural, and the best forces of our people must be mobilized and unified for it. The time has come to create Jewish ethnography! 4 Between 1912 and 1914, An-sky would try to put his ideas into action by leading a series of ethnographic expeditions to the Pale of Jewish Settlement.
In the winter of 2013, marking one hundred years since this now famed expedition, a group of artists and scholars-linguists, ethnomusicologists, historians, practicing musicians, folklorists, literary scholars, sociologists, and anthropologists-met at Indiana University in Bloomington to discuss the past, present, and future of the Jewish ethnographic impulse. This book is derived from those discussions. The contributions included in this volume are divided into three broad sections, the first of which comprises historical analyses of particular East