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Food for Thought

Transnational Contested Identities and Food Practices of Russian-Speaking Jewish Migrants in Israel and Germany

AutorJulia Bernstein
VerlagCampus Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2010
Seitenanzahl451 Seiten
ISBN9783593410173
FormatPDF
KopierschutzWasserzeichen/DRM
GerätePC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
Preis33,99 EUR
Russischsprachige Juden, die nach Deutschland oder Israel ausgewandert sind, leben in vielschichtigen sozialen Realitäten. Dazu gehört auch die Esskultur, die eine besondere Rolle für die Konstruktion von Identität spielen kann, wie Julia Bernstein zeigt. Ihre ethnografische Studie des Alltagslebens, von Lebensmitteln und Lebensmittelverpackungen bringt kulturelle, soziale und ökonomische Bedeutungen des früheren Lebens in der Sowjetunion und des gegenwärtigen Lebens in Israel und Deutschland zum Vorschein. Transnationale Bezüge, so stellt sich heraus, haben tragenden Anteil daran, die widersprüchlichen Lebenswirklichkeiten zu bewältigen.

Julia Bernstein, Kulturanthropologin und Künstlerin, ist derzeit wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin und Dozentin an der Fachhochschule Frankfurt.

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Horizontale Tabs

Leseprobe
"2 Transnationalism and capitalism: Migrants from the former Soviet Union and their experiences in Germany and Israel (S. 140-141)

This chapter explores the participants’ perceptions and cultural constructions of capitalism or the capitalistic West after their emigration to Germany and to Israel. Not only is their migration accompanied by significant transformations in all spheres of the migrants’ everyday life, it offered them a unique opportunity to reflect on knowledge as well as behavioral schemes and values normally taken for granted and to act on the basis of these reflections. The special circumstances of the population investigated are that this is a case of emigration across the previously tightly closed borders of the Iron Curtain from what Markowitz (1991, 638) referred to as a “total system” to capitalist societies characterized by abundance and consumption- oriented cultures.

As former citizens of a closed society, the SU, participants lacked experience in the actual realities of living everyday amidst Western abundance, in a consumer culture, and with mass consumption. According to Miller this “is now the dominant context through which people in modern societies relate to the material world” (Appadurai 1996; Miller 1987, 4). Thus, emigration to a Western society led this group to encounter an absolutely new phenomenon and required that they develop strategies to cope with it on a permanent basis. Moreover, throughout their life in the SU, they were exposed to the powerful Soviet political machine’s propagandizing about life in the West.

Thus, migrants were socialized to view the Western society through negative deconstructions in which the West was the symbol, par excellence, of evil social regimes and the wrong way of life. The “decaying capitalist West,” as it was called in the Soviet media, was permanently juxtaposed to such frequent appellations as the “positive,” “right,” “humane,” “just,” “equal,” “spiritual Soviet socialist system.”

For example, a poster purchased by a participant in a Russian bookstore in Israel is a reprint of a 1948 poster that displays two pictures (picture 2:1). On the left side is a black-white picture of a violinist, in a capitalist country, destined to play on the streets while being completely ignored by passers-by who are portrayed as men in coats and bowlers (recalling an old image of capitalists). The violinist looks very depressed. Depicted above this scene are many lights and advertisements, such as White Horse Whisky. The caption at the bottom of the capitalist side of the poster states “The fate of talent…”

The fate of the violinist in socialist countries is presented on the poster’s right hand side in red letters. There the violinist is depicted appearing on stage in a big concert hall together with a huge organ, an orchestra, composed of hundreds of male and female musicians. The national emblem of the SU is depicted on this socialist side of the poster in approximately the same place as the advertisement for whisky is displayed on the capitalist side. The title for socialist depiction is positive—“The route of the talented!”
Blick ins Buch
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Table of Contents8
Acknowledgments12
1 Migration collages: Studying Russian-speaking Jews in Israel and Germany16
1.1 Migration and socio-cultural affiliations16
1.2 The research approach18
1.3 Research questions21
1.4 Research methods23
1.5 Comparative view of the two populations34
1.6 General characteristics of the investigated groups35
1.7 Transporting Jewish identity from the SU40
1.8 Overview of the book42
2 Transnationalism and capitalism: Migrants from the former Soviet Union and their experiences in Germany and Israel46
2.1 The Soviet kind of capitalism: Soviet spirituality vs. Western materialism51
2.2 Post-Soviet capitalism on food commodities57
2.3 “Arrival on a new planet”“68
2.4 Reviving Soviet knowledge about the social reality of life in the capitalist system81
2.5 “The Russia we had always dreamed of”—some conclusions90
3 “Chocolates without history are meaningless: ”Pre- and post-migration consumption96
3.1 Soviet “hunting and gathering”99
3.2 The classic Soviet recipe book: On the Tasty and Healthy Food Book108
3.3 Social skills of post-migration consumption115
3.4 Alternative ways of procurement and free consumption124
3.5 Contested procurement142
4 Russian food stores in Israel and Germany: Images of imaginary home, homeland, and identity consolidation143
4.1 Visibility of Russian food stores in Israel and Germany147
4.2 Image of the hostess in the Russian food stores151
4.3 Longing for the REAL home via food154
4.4 Commercial promotion of nostalgia165
4.5 Images of the Soviet paradise173
4.6 Image of Soviet proletarian food or the imaginary proletarian home179
4.7 Images of the Soviet empire and the Soviet political iconography of food post-emigration185
4.8 Nationalized Russia in food products and gastronomic Slavophilism of ex-citizens abroad201
4.9 Meaning of Russian food stores in Israel and Germany212
5 Russian food stores in Israel and Germany: Different national symbolic participations and virtual transnational enclave220
5.1 Special national key symbols crossing borders and manifestations of identity: The symbolic meaning of pork and caviar in different national contexts223
5.2 Pork227
5.3 Caviar249
5.4 Mixed national identities in Russian food stores in Israel and Germany257
5.5 Reconsidering the immigrant enterprise: From traditional, closed ethnic business toward a virtual transnational enclave269
6 Transjewish affiliation: The construction of ethnicity by Russian-speaking Jews in Israel and Germany274
6.1 The “ethnicity” and ethnization processes of Russian-speaking Jews276
6.2 Component One: Innate ethnicity and visible Otherness and its fate abroad279
6.3 Component Two: Significant Others in the SU and abroad294
6.4 Component Three: Suspect loyalty: Soviet Jewish Otherness through affiliation with Israel314
6.5 Component Four: Affiliation with Soviet Russian cultural elite316
6.6 Conclusion320
6.7 Triple Trans-Jewish affiliation322
7 Winners once a year? Making sense of WWII and the Holocaust as part of a transnational biographic experience329
7.1 Celebration of Den’ Pobedy Victory Day330
7.2 Conflicting meanings of May 8th and 9th333
7.3 Soviet victors’ narrative and the theme of the Holocaust in the SU336
7.4 Transnational praxis of the everyday knowledge after migration to Germany348
7.5 Proud of the Soviet victory, offended by the Soviet state or marginalized winners355
7.6 Challenging the victory narrative and burdensome identities358
7.7 The Outsider perspective363
7.8 Principally Others: Media discourse about the topic365
7.9 Shifting of the collective “we:” Media presentation of Germans and settled Jews as the symbolical “we” compared to “Russians”367
7.10 “Without us Israel would not have come into existence. We won the war and put an end to the Holocaust…”369
7.11 Comparative conclusions of different modifications of the original narratives in Israel and Germany370
8 “Will you prepare gefillte fish for Christmas?” Paradoxes of living in simultaneously contested social worlds243374
8.1 Reconsidering identities, reproducing stereotypes, coping with hierarchies375
8.2 Alienation, home, and homeland: “Why not Israel?” Self-positioning of Russian-speaking Jews in Germany and Israel390
8.3 Conclusion409
8.4 Contributions of this research411
8.5 Further development414
Bibliography416
Index437

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