Polish Jews in Paris: The Ethnography of Memory (review)

120 SHOFAR Fall 1992 Vol. 11, No. 1 through a sermon by a rabbi against immoral behavior and the reflections of an Algerian-Jewish intellectual on tense Muslim-Jewish relations. Through these sources we learn that Middle Eastern Jews were among the founders of Haifa and modern Jaffa, and that unlike many European Jews in the nineteenth century, they did not live on private donations from abroad (haluka) but were engaged in handicrafts, commerce, and manual labor. We are also made aware of the impact of World War II on Middle Eastern Jewry: of the assistance of young Algerian Jews in the Allied war effort, that it was only by dint of logistical problems that the Tunisian Jewish community was not a victim of the Final Solution, and of the pogrom against the Jewish community in Baghdad as the British stood on the outskirts of the city. Both the narrative and the documentarycompendium are supplemented by extensive footnotes and bibliography, creating a text informative to the general reader and invaluable to scholars. The story ofthe Jews ofArab lands in modern times is a tale rarely encountered in either Jewish or general Middle Eastern histories, and readers will be grateful to Professor Stillman for providing a second volume as useful as the first. Reeva S. Simon Middle East Institute Columbia University PolishJews in Paris: The Ethnography ofMemory, byJonathan Boyarin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. This elegantly written ethnographic study attempts to recreate the texture ofthe everyday life ofthe East European Jewish community in Paris today. Focusing on the landsmanshaftn, or mutual aid societies, Boyarin describes how the lives of the now elderly members of these associations, nearly all of whom came from left-wing political backgrounds, have been shattered by the disjunctive experiences of this century: the Holocaust, their tremendous disillusionment with communism, and the profound cultural dislocation resulting from the processes of immigration and integration into French society. These disjunctive experiences, Boyarin argues, have instilled in the immigrants a deep-seated need to bestow new meaning on their "fragmented lives" (p. 29). They strive to accomplish this end not be creating new organizations, but by reshaping their traditional ones, the landsmanshaftn. Through a rich array of secular rituals,these Book Reviews 121 former political radicals endeavor to reinstate their history back into the mainstream ofJewish tradition. Funerals and memorial services for the victims of the Holocaust provide the single most important avenue through which the immigrants renew their tie to the Jewish past. This preoccupation with death is by no means surprising given the social makeup of the community: not only are its members elderly, and its ranks constantly diminishing, but the vast majority of them are Holocaust survivors as well. While attendance at funerals reaffirms the community's sense of solidarity and continuity with the past, the particular nature of French burial customs further reinforces communal identity, since burial plots are collective rather than individual, and landsmanshaft members are buried together (pp. 137-138). In addition to the normal round of funerals, the Yiddish community as a whole sponsors an annual service at the cemetery to commemorate the victims ofthe Holocaust. And finally, this cycle ofremembrance culminates with the annual pilgrimage to the towns of Pithiviers and Beaune·laRolande near Paris, where Jewish immigrants were interned during the German occupation. While death and mourning constitute the core of landsmanshaft activities, there are festive occasions as well, especially the annual balls. These balls, Boyarin suggests, remind the immigrants that they are "heirs to a long and glorious past" (p. 104). That these balls are held on Purim and Hanukkah permits these thoroughly secular immigrants "to reassert their connection to their ancestors on the one hand and the Jewish validity of their political beliefs on the other" (p. 103). Yet, just as the nature of the immigrant's mourning rituals changed in the wake of the Holocaust, so too has the focus of these annual balls shifted in light of the immigrants ' profound disillusionment with communism. While these balls once served as occasions for public manifestations of left-wing solidarity, today they focus almost exclusively on the celebration ofYiddish culture and on the affirmation of pro-Israel loyalties. Although the aim...