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Title: Exile, Homeland, And Milieu in the Oral Lore of Carpatho-Rrussian Jews (Critical Essay)
Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Release Date : January 01, 2009
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 96 KB

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The oral or folk narrative of various Jewish-Israeli origin or ethnic groups depicts the life of Jews in exile over hundreds of years and through recurrent passages in place, as well as central themes or motifs that persisted in this narrative. In the paper at hand I present a literary-cultural reading of memories and narratives of Israeli Jews who used to be part of Hungarian Jewry. Surprisingly, Jewish exile narratives--in general--do not emphasize longing for the Promised Land to the extent we would expect, considering the religious dictates relating to the place of the Land in the life of the people (on this, see, e.g., Amaru; Davies; Mendels). Instead, the majority of these narratives, as reflected in the materials of The Dov Noy Israeli Folktale Archives (IFA) at Haifa University (see Noy and Ben Amos; Ben Amos), as well as in sporadic ethnic anthologies, deal with Jewish life in exile as a given situation (on this, see Safran; Stratton). In these mostly Hebrew collections, we find systematic preoccupation with the following issues: relations between Jews and gentile rulers or ordinary non-Jews in host countries, the characteristics or talents of Jews and how these traits make them be either well-liked or envied and resented by locals, the religious piousness of the Jews, their socio-cultural self-segregation, and many universal themes and motifs. Typically, Jewish legends have always functioned as a pseudo-realistic expressive response to the hardships of exile and a vehicle for preserving the hope for redemption. However, Jewish exile narratives paradoxically turned into a manner of accepting exile and postponing its termination. Indeed, when moving to Eretz Israel (the Jewish homeland, Israel) became possible or thinkable with the rise of the Zionist national movement in Central and East European Jewish communities as of the latter years of the nineteenth century, the local ultra-Orthodox leadership opposed this idea and viewed aliyah (i.e., emigration to Israel, literally "ascent") as more painful or dangerous than exile (see, e.g., Goldstein 115, 119; Ravitzky). Their theological explanation was that ending exile is the decision or role of God, not man, in the same way that causing it was also God's action, and in fact punishment, "due to our sins" (Daniel). In addition to theological reasoning, this stance also stemmed from the fact that in practice, this same leadership held sway over most if not all of the Orthodox Central and East European Jewish communities of the period, so it was bound to oppose change, and especially mass desertion of its flock (see Reinhartz; Spiegel). Jewish mass immigration to the United Sates in those years was less problematic in this regard as it did not necessarily entail religious-ideological change. In addition to traditional Orthodoxy and to Zionism, a third ideology of the period was socialism, which attracted the hearts and minds of many Jewish youths. However, in the so-called battle between socialism and Zionism, the non-Zionist socialists were defeated, as in the long run the combination of national as well as class awareness embodied in the Zionist ethos proved much stronger than socialism alone (see, e.g., Jelinek, Exile 159-69). The narratives presented and analyzed here express varying degrees of discontent of the then-existing interactions between Jews and gentiles, as well as between higher and lower social classes, with the two oppositions often intensifying each other. Jewish exile narratives paradoxically turned into a way of accepting exile and postponing its termination, thereby transforming means into goal. This is analogous to the dynamics of desire, longing, or expectation--the means--vis-a-vis the actual realization of longings--the goal. Is a desire satisfied (and thereby extinguished) only when the goal is realized, or does it become a goal unto itself when it becomes a chronic state of affairs? In other words: do we enjoy our longed-for, once-a-lifetime tr