Sweet Burdens

Sveta Roberman

Description

Sweet Burdens presents a detailed ethnographic study of the lives of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Germany over the past twenty years. Focusing on the first generation of adult immigrants, Sveta Roberman examines how they question and negotiate their moral economy and civic culture vis-à-vis the host German state and society, on the one hand, and the Holocaust past, on the other. She approaches the immigrant-host encounter as one of many cycles of social exchanges taking place in multiple and diverse arenas. The book sheds light on a number of issues, including the moral economy of Jewish-German relations, immigrants' performances of civics and citizenship, modes of inclusion and exclusion, consumption and consumerism, work and the phenomena of unemployment and underemployment, the concept of community, and the dynamics and difficulties of reinventing Jewish identity and tradition.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I. Spaces of Consumption

1. Building Projects of Well-Being

2. Khaliava

3. Reflections over a Full Supermarket Cart

Part II. Work and Employment

4. Working Nonworkers

5. The Sotsial’shcik

6. Work as a Line of Demarcation

Part III. Reinventing Tradition

7. Playing at Being Jews

8. Haunting Images

9. The Instrumentalization Trope

Conclusion
Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• Sociology
• Migration

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438455877
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sweet Burdens
Sweet Burdens

W ELFARE AND C OMMUNALITY AMONG R USSIAN J EWS IN G ERMANY
SVETA ROBERMAN
Cover Art: Alien I - Fremd I , by Marion Kahnemann
Published by STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie D. Searl Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roberman, Sveta, author.
Sweet burdens : welfare and communality among Russian Jews in Germany / Sveta Roberman.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5585-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5587-7 (ebook)
1. Jews, Russian—Germany—Social conditions. 2. Jews—Germany—Social conditions—20th century. 3. Jews—Germany—Social conditions—21st century. 4. Immigrants—Germany—Social conditions. 5. Germany—Emigration and immigration. 6. Germany—Ethnic relations. I. Title. DS134.27.R63 2015 305.892'4043—dc23 2014020290
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Spaces of Consumption
1 Building Projects of Well-Being
2 Khaliava
3 Reflections over a Full Supermarket Cart
Part II. Work and Employment
4 Working Nonworkers
5 The Sotsial’shchik
6 Work as a Line of Demarcation
Part III. Reinventing Tradition
7 Playing at Being Jews
8 Haunting Images
9 The Instrumentalization Trope
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
Preface
When he was a child, Zinovi heard his grandmother recite an old Yiddish proverb: “A taker is not a giver; a giver is not a taker” [in Russian, bratel’ ne davatel’, davatel’ ne bratel’ ]. The meaning of the proverb, Zinovi explains, is that there should always be a balance between giving and receiving: people should receive and give back and there is no way to live only by taking. Now in his late sixties and a Russian Jewish immigrant living in a town in eastern Germany, Zinovi does not remember much about his grandmother. But somehow, those particular words have stayed with him. He has carried them with him and tried to live according to this simple piece of folk wisdom.
I met Zinovi one sunny spring morning in a park, one of his favorite places to go. We strolled around and then sat on “his bench” by the riverbank. Zinovi and his wife came to Germany in the early 2000s from a big Russian city, where for decades Zinovi worked as an engineer. In the post-perestroika period of crisis, Zinovi, although already retired, had to work in the private sector to provide for himself and his wife, since their pensions were not enough to survive on. In the late 1990s, they decided to emigrate; they were aging, and life in Russia was becoming more difficult for them. Their son was already in Germany, having emigrated five years earlier. The son and his family live in a big city in the western part of Germany. His wife has a job, but the son himself is still unemployed, moving from one requalification course to another, like many other middle-aged immigrants.
Recalling his pre-migration preparations and thoughts, Zinovi can’t say he had no moral qualms about immigrating to Germany. He was a child during World War II. His family was evacuated and lived through the war away from the front, and did not personally experience persecution. Still, the question remained: how could he, a Jew, choose to live in Germany? But feeling that he was no longer able to survive in Russia, he, like many others, came to Germany in search of a secure livelihood and good climate. As he puts it, he “blocked” himself, going into denial, as many others did. He pushed aside his misgivings, saying to himself that his move was just another cycle in the Jewish exodus. “Jews are always on the move, they wander from place to place, from country to country. The exodus is an inevitable part of Jewish history. Now it is time to come here. As with all the previous moves, this is only a temporary stay, one of the moves in the cycle of movements,” Zinovi told himself.
He knows that many people, those of the older generation and those born after the war, could not overcome their reservations about moving to Germany, and so moved to Israel or stayed where they were. As for Zinovi, he was able to break the barrier by telling himself that he was returning to the place from which his German surname originates, to the place where his ancestors left their trace, where the roots of his grandmother’s language, Yiddish, lay.
From their first steps in the country—the moment of arrival at the railway station of the eastern German town where their immigrant hotel was situated—until this day, they have nothing to complain about regarding the attitude with which they have been met by the Germans. But when he thinks about the relations between them, the immigrants and their host country, a disturbing thought crawls into his mind: “We receive a lot here, but what do we give back?”
Looking at the immigrants around him, he regards their migration as “a very unsuccessful one”: the resurrection of Jewish life in Germany—the goal for which Germany undertook this whole immigration project—can hardly be said to have happened. More than two hundred thousand people came to the country; fewer than half of them are registered with the Jewish community. Many are not even Jews, according to Jewish religious law ( Halacha ), and therefore, according to the rules of the local Jewish communities, cannot be members. His son is one of these. There are many others who are recognized as Jews by Jewish religious law but who prefer nonetheless to distance themselves from the Jewish communities.
To Zinovi, the whole picture of their immigration looks rather sad: making the rounds of the shops, chasing after sales and discounts, visiting doctors—that is how he sees the life of most of his acquaintances of his own age and much younger. A difficult thought of being mostly a “taker” disturbs him “Germany supplied us with everything, but we are nakhlebniki [spongers] here. I am very concerned about this. The others just do not care.”
Not wanting to be just a taker, Zinovi started volunteering with the local Jewish community—helping to organize events and visiting elderly and sick congregation members. All that began one day when, bored and with nowhere else to go, he came to the town’s Jewish community center. He came because his non-Jewish wife often reproached him about speaking so much about his grandmother while knowing so little about Jewish tradition. He came also because he wanted to ask people in the synagogue about the origins of the proverb his grandmother had told him.
On that first visit, Zinovi did not find the answer to his question. What did happen, however, was that when a community worker approached him and asked whether he would agree to join the minyan (the quorum of at least ten men necessary for Jewish prayer according to the Orthodox tradition), Zinovi, who was never a religious person, agreed to participate. Why? Of about three hundred male members of the congregation, it was difficult to find the ten necessary for the service to take place. Seeing this situation, Zinovi agreed to help. He also felt “that it is not nice to come, to ask for some help and then just go away and disappear.” Besides, he hoped that with time, he would discover in religious texts the source of his grandmother’s wise words.
As would later become apparent to me, Zinovi was not alone in his anxiety and contemplation about the precarious “taker” position in which he found himself. The motif of “taking and giving” would emerge in other immigrants’ stories as well. Touching upon questions of entitlement and reciprocity, social engagement and participation, the “takers and givers” trope colors the immigrants’ questioning of their moral economy and civic culture—on both the individual and collective levels and in relation to both the present and the past.
Acknowledgments
I am enormously indebted to my professors Edna Lomsky-Feder and Eyal Ben-Ari of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for their invaluable guidance, support and belief in this project.
This project began as my doctoral dissertation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and it could never have come to fruition without generous funding and support from several sources. Preliminary research for the book was enabled by the Social Sciences Faculty Rector’s Scholarship of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Minerva Foundation, DAAD Scholarship, the Jewish Memorial Foundation, and a fieldwork grant from the Shaine Center of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During the writing I was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Postdoctoral Grant, by Shapira Postdoctoral Fellowship at Tel Aviv University, and by the Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University, Israel.
Several centers and institutions provided their support at a later stage of the project, as the dissertation began to take shape as a book. First of these are the Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Jewish Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. I am particularly grateful to Diane Wolf, head of the Jewish Studies Program at UC Davis, for her warmth and support. The Research Institute for Innovation in Education, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem provided a quite harbor in the final s