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They Left It All Behind
Trauma, Loss, and Memory Among Eastern European Jewish Immigrants and their Children
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Publisher:
2019
Summary
Trauma was a potent influence in the lives of pre-1924 Eastern European Jewish immigrants. They uprooted themselves because of grinding poverty, anti-Semitic discrimination, pogroms, and the violence of World War I. This book’s psychoanalytically-informed life stories, based on 22 in-depth interviews with the immigrants’ adult children, tell the tales of these immigrants and their children.
Many of the children believed their parents had left their lives in Eastern Europe behind them. This disavowal—aided by the immigrants’ silence and denial—allowed their children to minimize the trauma and loss their parents suffered both before and after immigrating. I analyze the impact of parental trauma and loss on the second generation.
Trauma and loss affected the transmission of memory, and, consequently, often immigrants’ recollections were not passed on to future generations. The topics of trauma and loss in the lives of Eastern European immigrants are relevant in understanding current immigrants to America.
Often immigrants’ children tried to repay the debt that they felt was incurred by their parents’ sacrifices. Resilience, accomplishment, and their transition from their immigrant parents’ world to their own full participation in the American milieu characterized the adult lives of the immigrants’ children.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2019
ISBN-Print
978-1-4422-5423-7
ISBN-Online
978-1-5381-2520-5
Publisher
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
269
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Foreword No access
Preface No access
Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access
Dramatis Personae No access
1 They Left It All Behind and the Disavowal of Loss No access Pages 1 - 38
2 Communicating about the Past and Trauma No access Pages 39 - 78
3 Missing the Old Country and Life in America No access Pages 79 - 130
