Русская улица в еврейской стране: Исследование фольклора эмигрантов 1990-х в Израиле по М. Еленевская, Л. Фиалкова (review)

529 Ab Imperio, 1/2007 1 S. Iu. Nekliudov. Posle fol’klora // Zhivaia starina. 1995. No. 1. Pp. 2-4. Olga GERSHENSON М. Еленевская, Л. Фиалкова. Русская улица в еврейской стране: Исследование фольклора эмигран- тов 1990-х в Израиле. Москва: Ин- ститут этнологии и антропологии РАН, 2005. Ч. 1. 353 с.; Ч. 2. 243 с., илл. Приложения, Библиография. ISBN: 5-201-00887-9. Mariya Yelenevskaya and Larisa Fialkova have studied the folklore of recent Russian immigrants in Israel. Their book, however, is much more than a traditional folklore study – it is rather an intersection of oral history and postfolklore studies (Sergei Nekludov’s term for a hybrid mix of modern urban folklore and mass culture).1 Yelenevskaya and Fialkova present an analysis of life story interviews with 143 immigrants, focusing on their Jewish identity, attitudes to “others,” perceptions of time and space, religious beliefs , folklore, and language. What emerges is a collective portrait of the new immigrant community of nearly one million people. This community constitutes both a sizable part of the Russian diaspora and a significant addition to the Israeli society – today every sixth Israeli is of Russian origin. Yelenevskaya and Fialkova draw from and contribute to several areas of study, including the study of immigration , the study of the Russian diaspora, and the study of contemporary Israeli culture. But perhaps their most important contribution is to the study of Soviet and postSoviet Jewry. In that sense, the appearance of this book is timely and welcome. For years, research on Russian Jews was limited to antiquated Sovietology (“Jews of Silence” discourse), or a black-andwhite study of anti-Semitism (“Oy, we suffered” discourse). More often than not such research was produced from an “outsider perspective” – by researchers trained in the West, who were predominantly non-native speakers of Russian. Unlike such “outsiders,” Yelenevskaya and Fialkova are themselves immigrants to Israel (from St. Petersburg and Kiev respectively ) who know their subject first hand. They speak in the first person, giving the readers a rare insight into the world of local meanings and expressions of the immigrants (taking what anthropologists call the “emic” approach ). In that, they join a cohort of new research on Russian Jews, produced by “cultural insiders,” based on interviews, ethnography, and cultural history. Among them, are monographs by Yuri Slezkine, Elena Nosenko, Larissa Remen- 530 Рецензии/Reviews nick, and my own.2 What is particularly valuable inYelenevskaya’s and Fialkova’s book is that the authors do not focus on elites and intelligentsia, but rather capture the everyday mundane life of rank and file Russian immigrants (or simply “the Russians,” as they are dubbed in Israel). Even though the authors did not aim for a representative sample, the profile of their interviewees does resemble that of the larger immigrant community. Most of the immigrants came from Russia and the Ukraine, mainly from large urban centers. Most of them are college educated professionals for whom immigration meant a loss of professional status. Most of them are ethnic Jews, but some of them have partial Jewish heritage or just Jewish spouses (the Israeli immigration law jus sanguinis grants citizenship to both Jews and their non-Jewish family members). Importantly, most interviews were conducted in areas with a high concentration of immigrants – Haifa, Nazaret-Elit, Ashkelon, and Beer-Sheba – which form a periphery that is rarely seen and heard. One of the book’s many strengths are the interviews themselves. Yelenevskaya and Fialkova let their interviewees speak freely from the pages of the book, carefully preserving their juicy metaphors, stuttering repetitions, idiosyncratic syntax, and linguistic shifts. Taken together, these interview narratives capture a novel form (or dialect) of Russian – a Russian with an influx of Hebrew vocabulary, Russified with suffixes and endings (e.g., olimka – “a female new immigrant” from the Hebrew ola). The language of immigrants is the subject of an entire chapter, which also includes an analysis of hysterical double entendres resulting from mixing languages, as well as accounts of misunderstandings resulting from genuine mistakes. The authors’ choice to quote generously (sometimes entire pages) from the interviews strikes me as particularly important given the non-elite status of the interviewees, who are doubly and triply marginalized : as immigrants, as provincials, sometimes as elderly, and often as women (about two-thirds of the interviewees are women). This choice is empowering. Moreover, like any good story, the interview narratives are fun...