Life Stories as Means of Exploring Community Memory
Any narrative of the self involves the relationship with the other, seen as part of either a closer or a more distant group ‑ the similar or the different other. Therefore, such narratives represent a type of identity search, expressing certain opinions, beliefs and values that form the basis of individual or collective existence. The specific character of autobiographical narratives is that of implicitly or explicitly expressing a scope of representations, placed in connection with concrete events, which are retroactively remembered, judged, evaluated and interpreted. These factual circumstances are rendered in accordance with the events that functioned as their framework at the time of their occurrence, as well as with current events.
Fragments of everyday family, social, and religious life come alive, gaining consistence ; they evoke the atmosphere of certain neighbourhoods or cities, national contexts, historical periods. A series of commonplaces or stereotypes find themselves deconstructed when confronted with the complexity of directly experienced facts, consequently opening up for questions and debates, for as long as the time allotted to the narration allows it. The story of a lifetime chiefly represents the exploration of a field of possibilities : the reporting of actual facts of life, the situational details, the complexity of emotional involvement stir human perception from its stillness, making it open itself to meaning, to meanings.
The research that we have carried out during the past years refers to family memory and the solidarity that appears in this context. It has given us the special opportunity of exploring the territory of the differences that became visible after a period during which they had been intentionally ignored or repressed. Ethnic or religious differences do not exhaust this topic ; yet, ever since the beginning of our research, the post‑1989 tendency to state, rediscover and reconsider this type of difference, manifested by various groups and communities formed upon such grounds, has shone through as obvious. Memory, in its various forms, plays an active part in such searches and the present book stands as proof of this fact.
Moments of social, political and cultural change such as the fall of communism in 1989 offer good occasions for this sort of exercise, as they usually involve ?rewritings of history? and, subsequently, reconfigurations of memory and reorientations of discourse concerning the past. The most visible aspect of this tendency is the reinscribing of memory with the help of monuments or memorial plaques, the renaming of places and streets, the changes in the calendar of various celebrations. At times, old discourse bearing the sound of foreknown issues can be heard in new contexts. In other cases, on the contrary, they emerge as suddenly polished and doctored with new rhetoric, regardless of the fact that the voices that utter them are the same old voices, well known from before. Echoes of public discourse certainly affect the much more personalised field of the retelling of one?s own life story. However, a recounted life is an attempt to give coherence to a biography that time has often ravished and which, as a contemporary assessment, has a provisional nature.
In the present case, we must take into account the set of elements defining the context in which the communication at the basis of this book developed. The listeners and interviewers are separated from the narrators by a few generations and, with one exception, the former do not belong to the community they have studied. Nevertheless, the interviewers did take an initiation course on the culture and history of the Jewish communities in Banat and Central Europe, taught as part of the programmes offered by the ?Third Europe Foundation? (Timișoara Open College)* and they had already acquired a satisfactory experience in oral history interviewing, having also participated in the creation of the previous volumes put together by our group. The interviews have given us all a fortunate opportunity to approach the life of a community about which we knew little, to take part in holidays and ceremonies or in religious services and, moreover, to get to know special people. Undoubtedly, the most important thing gained from this project is the human experience of personal acquaintance and even intimacy with the people involved. On this level, the differences between people grow indistinct and the climate necessary for the understanding of the other is created ; we hope to encourage this climate by means of this book.
It must also be mentioned that our interlocutors, Jews who are living in Banat today, (but who were not necessarily born here, as will be seen shortly) belong to different generations (this has been one of the criteria used for the distribution of the stories into chapters) and vary according to their social or professional status. Each person?s degree and means of involvement into the life of the community, their perspective concerning this involvement, the type of participation and the representation‑role ? which our interlocutors may or may not claim ? introduces differentiation. We have tried to respect the individuality of the interviewees, while simultaneously setting ourselves the goal of throwing into relief a group‑portrait, in the background of which differences are easily perceptible. The life of a community cannot be limited, however, to the representative nature of one individual or the other, however great his prestige or however influential his personality might be. Oral history aims to recompose a genuine universe of life from a wide multitude of angles and to recover a plural memory, expressed with the help of several voices. It opposes any hurried reduction or final labelling, leaving space for the manifestation of the fluctuating field of often conflicting opinions, subjective perceptions, rediscovered emotions, provisional balances, and also for a moral of life and a set of questions related to the meanings of existence, historical time and private identity.
Recounting one?s life may mean different things to different persons : this fact is well emphasised in the interviews. Although the common starting point was the same request formulated to all the interviewees, each of them understood it differently* . For some, their personal life identifies, from a certain point on, with that of the community, for others, it mainly represents a chronology ; some see mostly its good parts, others, more challenged by fate or history, focus on one traumatic event.
Today, the Jewish community in Banat comprises, unfortunately, no more than 400?500 persons, who live mainly in Timișoara, Lugoj and Reșiţa. Thus, it is an almost exclusively urban population (with a few exceptions, those who have lived in rural areas come mostly from Northern Transylvania). Family history often refers us to the space of Central Europe, as well as to that of Transylvania or, more rarely, to the ones of Muntenia, Moldova or Bucovina. This makes the history of the place we have been studying overlap with national and European history. The historical record of the two World Wars, that of the expansion of right and left totalitarian regimes during the 20thcentury, the history of anti‑Semitism, Zionism or the creation of the state of Israel impinge upon personal or community history.
Regional and even local differences (the chapter devoted to Lugoj constitutes an attempt to give expression to local memory) are important and stand out with remarkable precision, but they do not hinder the evocation of events that surpass such boundaries. Although no deportations to Auschwitz took place in the Banat region, we chose to include in this volume testimonies concerning such events, because nowadays there are people living in Banat who originally came from the part of Transylvania which was, at the time, under Horty. There are also to be encountered here stories of deportations Eastwards that happened during the Second World War (a separate chapter includes those to Transnistria). There are evocations of the Iași and Bucharest pogroms, which come up because they involved members of the interviewees? families (if not the interviewees themselves), all victims of these horrible events. The chapter dedicated to the tragedies that have branded the lives of the Jews in the past century contains other impressive aspects as well : concentration camps, interdictions and discriminations of all sorts, numerus clausus, the forced exodus from villages or small settlements to the big towns, public humiliations, confiscations and expropriations, and requisitions of goods and lodgings.
The traumas suffered by a community end up as being part of the community?s identity, leaving traces upon the consciousness of those involved, as well as upon that of those who acted as their supporters. In the stories, the emphasis seems to lie upon the analytical dimension, upon the attempt to find explanations, as long as and while this is still possible. For some of the narrated facts, the bare story is sufficient, requiring no further comments : it helps us form an idea as to the ideologically manipulated horror and absurdity, as well as to the long‑term, inner torment exerted on the people involved. Unfortunately, the past century proved, on multiple occasions, how low one can sink when driven by herd instinct and criminal impulses.
The majority of the people we have talked to consider that the years 1940‑1941 represented a breach, marked a radical change in their condition as Jews : it was then that they realized their different nature, mostly as one which endangered their existence. This happened despite the important part some of them had played or were still playing in the economic and cultural development of the place they were inhabiting, despite the good relationships they had previously shared with the majority population and with the other ethnic communities of Banat. There are also fortunate exceptions, when people?s humanity stayed intact and solidarity continued to function beyond ethnic, religious or social barriers. Such situations are not forgotten and are often scrupulously emphasized in the stories.
The after‑war period brought redemption only for some. Others suffered the effects of the expropriations and nationalisations of the communists or experienced imprisonment ; they would also find out what religious persecution meant. Very many emigrated when it was possible for them to do so. The aim of the politics undertaken by the communists who acceded to power was ? in the case of the Jews, like in that of other communities as well ? to divide, to stir conflicts, to recover in order to justify themselves. The manipulation of ethnicity in this sense is a factor already well known to those who have researched what happened in the years that followed the war.
As in the stories of the other persons we have interviewed ? of Romanian, German, Hungarian or Serbian origin ? the last 30 years before the fall of communism appear less prominent. The explanations for a still postponed reckoning are, in many cases, an exemplary career, a sense of fulfilled duty, the growing out of the illusions and nostalgia of youth, the instinct of survival, fear, the prudence brought about by years of persecution and repression, one?s worries concerning the next day, the help offered in difficult situations by the community and by exiled relatives. This phenomenon is rather general. The continuity between the transition years and the ones previous to the fall of communism can also constitute a cause. There has been little talk of the individual guilt and responsibility to be assumed for the past 50 years, of complicities, duplicities, interested accepting and silences ; a critical approach is by no means encouraged at the level of public life. This represents a chapter only scarcely recovered by our memory and history, by means of oblivious commemorations and decorative speeches.
Another possible explanation for this kind of ?oblivion? is the need for harmonisation and coherence felt by anyone who retells his/her life and the retrospective illusions which trump all evil, especially when this evil is mentioned little or not at all. Only when evil is constantly demolished, analysed and blamed does public conscience register it as such. With the exception of some cases of obstinate extremism or intentional and guilty blindness, few people today doubt the fact that the Holocaust was an immense evil, which needs to be rejected and condemned accordingly. This does not apply to the crimes committed by the communists. I am convinced that this momentary oblivion knows no ethnic colour and characterises no particular community. It is a matter of political will, of generations, institutions, groups or persons interested in oblivion and equally spread on the Romanian territory and not only there. However, and encouragingly, there are some signs in this book that we have already started recovering from it.
However, the trauma is merely one of the elements that could define the identity of a community. Each community has a different hierarchy of the possible criteria of identification. If for the Germans of Banat, for example, folklore‑related traditions (songs, dances, holidays), the regional or local folk costume, the connection to the Heimat (birthplace) range among the most important criteria for ethnic self‑definition, the present interviews indicate that these criteria differ in the case of the Jews of Banat.
What makes the Jews feel their appurtenance to a community is, first and foremost, religion. The belief in God, the religious tradition, the extent to which it is respected, its transmission, the participation in the life of the community are all important factors, both in individual and in group definition. The Orthodox Jews, the Neologians or the adepts of a status‑quo used to go to different synagogues ; their repartition according to the various city‑areas (quarters, streets) and their social status differed.
Today, the more liberal Neologian tradition is dominant, but family or local memory registers the existence of several religious groups, as well as their differentiation according to the place of origin or to the language that they most used in the family.
Beyond the Jewishness of the studied group, one can envision a social history that would deserve more detailed exploring.
Either Ashkenazi or Sephardi, either rich or poor, speaking mostly Hungarian or German at home but learning also Romanian in school, the Jews of Banat cultivated a certain cosmopolitanism, beneficial and suited to the ethnically diversified ambience of the area which they inhabited. That did not prevent them from considering themselves good citizens of the state in which they lived, nor from serving it devotedly, as some of the interviewees feel the need to emphasise. The problem of the language spoken in the family ‑ which was Hungarian, especially for the older generations ‑ sometimes raises identity issues. In this respect, I find the discussion between Antonia Komlosi and writer Ánávi Adam extremely interesting.
Group solidarity (not necessarily ethnic or religious), the consciousness of belonging is another important factor of Jewish identity, cultivated not only in times of crisis. One can notice the frequency with which people invoke the names of famous persons from their own community (intellectuals, men of science, artists, industry owners), along with those of non‑Jewish acquaintances, friends, colleagues who grew to mean something for the others and to whom cirmcumstances brought our interlocutors closer. Sociologists call this process ? ?elite‑identification?. A certain meaning of individual value and of value in general, along with a certain type of beneficial sociality, based on meritocracy, are conveyed by this attitude.
Special attention is paid by memory to intercultural phenomena, deriving directly from the neighbourhoods, from mixed marriages, from the meanders of family history or various meetings in educational or professional environments. There is a consensus in the positive appreciation of such phenomena by our interviewees, regardless of their ethnic appurtenance. Critical appreciation directed towards the others is supported by the description of the justifying circumstances. The discussions upon what forms the basis of anti‑Semitism and what the interviewees think regarding this issue are also challenging.
At a certain point we also thought of introducing in the book excerpts from interviews with people of other ethnic backgrounds, who make references to their relationships with the Jews. We gave up this idea lest we should overload the volume ; moreover, these extracts regard individual cases, without being the result of precise questions on this topic and thus having limited relevance to our present issues.
All the aforementioned general considerations must be viewed as having a certain degree of relativity and they must be exclusively referred to what is contained in the interviews themselves. The story of a lifetime is not a survey on a certain topic ; it needs listening to rather than questioning. The circumstances in which it is told, the image that the interviewee wants to create of him/herself, his/her relation to his/her own past influence the selection and the comments, emphasising certain biographical aspects more than others. As in the case of the other books of this type, our part was rather one of listeners than of interviewers.
The documentary value of the testimonies is, however, unquestionable. Despite some degree of inexactitude, easily correctable by the historians with the help of alternative documentation and written sources, the stories give access to a universe of life otherwise hard to know. They offer a kind of information usually ignored by the historians, out of reasons that spring from the status this discipline enjoys in our country. The almost exclusive focus on political history ? often understood as a political engagement in itself rather than an analysis ‑ the ignorance or superficial treatment of the history of the minorities as compared to national history, the lack of interest in social, economic or cultural, local or regional history are only some of the possible explanations.
There is also the prejudice that the opinions, beliefs and expectations of the people are of no real interest for researchers, even if, as we can notice daily, they influence behaviours, reactions and attitudes, being part of the reality we live in. The anthropological perspective used for the elaboration and editing of this document takes into account memory as a means of conferring meaning to past and present realities and it consequently pays respect to human subjectivity, in its interactive dimension. The corpus of stories and testimonies we bring forward clarifies the way in which collective memory comes into shape and generates its own meanings by continuous negotiation. Truth is approximated here and fragmented into all its possible facets ; it appears as different people understand it at a certain moment. Written sources also contribute to the making of truth. A part of community history is always known through this kind of sources, which circulate and are credited as such by those who tell the stories, many times without the critical scruples that (should) characterise the approach of the historians. Inter‑discursive bricolage is somehow defining for the status of a discourse that refers to both the past and the present, like the one put forward by autobiographical narration. It includes both indirect evidence ? received in either oral or written form from the late members of the family or from other close acquaintances ? and the official speeches of the representatives of the community. The selection we have made has always been individual and highly significant mostly on this level.
The aforementioned data is not intended as a reader?s guide. It mostly addresses the specialists who are interested in this field and is meant to prevent hasty generalisations or, even worse, the kind that ignore the whole and mainly focus on details. Thus, this book can also be read as a book of memories. It evokes the life of a once much bigger community, whose importance for the history of these places hopefully comes across. In order to have a more complete image of what this community represented in the past, we also interviewed two persons who no longer live in Romania, but whose family history continues to interact with that of these places, as shall be seen in the interviews. In this manner, we wanted to suggest a possible follow‑up to this volume.
A different way in which this work could be continued concern the processing of the data contained in it, above and beyond the general observations made here. While the book was being prepared for publishing, we created a subject index whose results can be used productively to analyze its contents, enabling the researcher to connect the data inside our interviews with data contained in other publications. For instance, the chapter opened in the index by the subject ?persecutions, discriminations?, represented by a very large number of occurrences, and which can be expanded into a series of subordinate subjects (compulsory work, expropriations of goods and property, laws, interdictions, compulsory domicile ? evacuations, deportations, the yellow star, work camps, ghettoes) or brought together with related subjects (antisemitism, extermination, changing ethnicity (into Romanian or Hungarian), expropriations by the state, housing would allow for a complementary study by referring to data contained in books such as Persecution and Resistance in the History of the Jews in Romania 1940-1944 by Lya Benjamin (Ed. Hasefer, 2001), based mostly on the study of documents in archives. Moreover, key subjects such as Jewishness (sending to passages in which a definition of the Jewish identity is attempted according to various criteria), correlated with others such as Judaism, sacred books, names, language, ecumenical practices, interculturalism, interferences, Israel, religious, tradition, antisemitism, ?good peolpe?, Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, Russians ? can constitute a starting point for a discussion of stereotypical thought as analyzed in Andrei Oișteanu?s valuable reference book The Image of the Jew in the Romanian Culture (Ed. Humanitas, 2001).
As described above, the index suggests, among other things, the possibility of exploring new thematic relationships, but it also points out the wealth of occurrences illustrating the keywords. Many references are made to subjects such as:
? the family, leading to the history and memory of families, solidarity and family relationships, roles, names, the importance of family relationships, relationships between generations, the current situation of families, etc.
? the professions, where the occurrences illustrate a large diversity, stability or, on the contrary, mobility, as dictated by the historic times or other reasons, according to educational or life principles, traditions, fashions or survival strategies
? school, which allows us to identify educational paths, but also to note which schools were selected ? by category and academic criteria ?, which subjects, school mates, teachers (the words in italics are, in turn, keywords themselves), educational principles
? life principles
? friends(very often referred to, and showing disponibility and openness towards other ethnical groups, as well as how relationships were put to good use)
? schoolmates and/or colleagues (invoked mostly because of their prestige, irrespective of their ethnicity)
? holidays (the same as religious traditions, since other types of holidays are rarely mentioned; this is the main terrain for defining identity, be it by recurring to traditions, be it by practicing intercultural customs specific to the region or resulting from mixed marriages)
? culinary traditions.
Each of the subjects above can be analyzed in more detail and in various contexts which, in their turn, can suggest new connections and significations, especially if we associate the subject index with a name and place index. We hope to be able to publish these indices in the online version of this book (www.memoria.ro)
The present book could not have appeared without the generosity of those who told their story or wrote a few pages for our volume. Their understanding and their desire for this book to be published constituted an important stimulant for its realisation. We thank them warmly and we express our full gratitude. The long conversations we had before and after the interviews often gave us surprising access to knowledge.
We also owe special thanks to the Jewish Community in Timisoara and Lugoj for their support, and particularly to His Eminence First‑Rabbi
dr. Ernest Neumann, who kindly talked to us on several occasions and encouraged us to finish the volume, offering us information and photographs from the archives. The same gratitude goes to councillor professor Oscar Schwartz, who put together a brief record of Jewish history in Timișoara and a calendar of Jewish holidays accompanied by the necessary explanations concerning the significance of those holidays and that of the prayers used in Jewish tradition.
At our request, historian Victor Neumann ‑ author of several important studies and books with reference to the Jews in Banat, which are mentioned in the volume ? wrote an Afterword to our volume. It already represents a first interpretation and a possible analysis of the results of our research, also emphasising some aspects of the writer?s own perception of things, including the validity of such an enterprise from the point of view of a historian. We thank Mr. Neumann for the dialogue he has initiated and for his amiable help.
In the process of gathering information for this volume we used the book Jewishness in Lugoj written by Mr. Tobias Schwager (he himself one of our interviewees), and we are particularly grateful to Mr. Iosif Singer and to the late Gheorghe Reisz for the official documentation they generously provided.
As it usually happens in such cases, we owe our gratitude to those who have given us their friendly support. I would mention here Adriana Babeţi, Andrei Pippidi, Marius Lazurca, Constantin Jinga, Simina Ivan, Magdalena Mărculescu, Székernes János, Virgil Feier, Andrei Spira, Ileana Pintilie, Adina Costin, Cristina Chevereșan, Robert Reisz, Thomas Remus Mokhnacs, Edith and Andrei Dornhelm (departed in the meantime, to our great regret), Magdalena Csendes Holender.
Simona Branc and Antonia Komlosi have substantially contributed to the editing of this volume. With regard to the interviewers, I would like to draw special attention to the contributions belonging to Adrian Onică, Roxana Pătrașcu, Adriana Roșioru and Adela Lungu.
As we have mentioned from the very beginning, the present book represents one stage in a long-term project, which required much effort, preparation and, last but not least, financial support ; this latter was provided during the research by the ?Third Europe Foundation? and, through its agency, by the Resource Center for Ethno-Cultural Diversity ? Cluj and the European Cultural Foundation ? Amsterdam (for the project entitled ?To Live Together Sharing Memory?)*.
The more than friendly support given by Mrs. Lidia Gheorghiu Bradley was essential to enable this book to be published ; she partially financed the publication of the volume, with the help of the Aspera Foundation and of the Romanian Institute for Recent History. The Polirom Publishing House, represented by its general‑manager, Silviu Lupescu, and by the book editor, Daciana Branea, also made a decisive contribution to this project.