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Conclusion
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280 S Prior to 1989, our views of the Jewish experience in the Soviet Union were derived primarily from the memoirs of émigrés and published writings that came out of the Soviet Union. Both sources agreed that the shtetl had been destroyed and with it “traditional” Jewish life had been eliminated. Whereas Soviet sources—plays, novels, and newspapers— celebrated the Jews who gave up their petty trade and instead found work among the factory proletariat, and enthused about the Jews who were abandoning their religious superstitions, Western writers bemoaned the loss of “traditional” Jewish livelihoods and the forsaking of timehonored traditions. But the archival record and oral histories reveal a much more complicated story. Even into the 1950s, representatives of the Council for Affairs of Religious Cults were still writing confidential reports expressing concern about the persistence of holiday celebrations and prayer quorums among small-town Jews, and current residents remember childhoods full of Jewish life and report continued faith and identity with Judaism. Sociological surveys confirm the persistence of faith and Jewish ethnic identity among Jews living in the major cities of Russia and Ukraine.1 The residents we have interviewed often lack k Conclusion Conclusion 281 a detailed bookish knowledge of Jewish history and Judaic faith, but they retain an intimacy with many informal modes of Jewish expression , including the Yiddish language, Jewish food customs, and a sense of the Jewish calendar cycle. Jewishness remains an important part of their everyday life. This book has shown how oral histories contribute to the historical record by offering remembered details of the everyday. Oral histories illuminate the rhythms and textures of daily life, and highlight the habitual . They refocus our emphasis onto what ordinary folk considered important—family, food, stability, recognition, and community. They help us understand how individuals structured their lives, how they constructed narratives to understand the world around them, and how they gave meaning to their experiences. In many cases, the oral histories provide testimony, filling in details about traumatic moments of violence or other crimes against humanity . These memories, seared into the witnesses’ consciousness, are more stable than everyday memories and retrievable even seventy years after the events they describe. In these cases, the oral histories add factual data to the historical record. In many cases, the only written evidence we have of major massacres committed by the Nazis and their accomplices in Ukraine are the records of the Soviet Extraordinary Commissions, which themselves were based on oral testimonies taken in the spring of 1945. These terrifying testimonies are usually no more than a paragraph or two in length and often tell little about the sources for the incidents they describe. The witnesses who provide the sworn testimony are often local officials who are recounting information they have learned during the course of the war, but of which they themselves were not eyewitnesses. Many of the commission reports present compilations of testimony or summaries of incidents with little explanation. One typical report “about the murder and torture by Germans of people in Dankivka” includes only a brief statement testifying to the murder of an entire innocent family: “Losinsky, Ben, born in 1909, was shot in a field in the village of Dankivka. Losinska, Tsima Plotyivna, born in 1910, and her son, Losinsky, Anatoly Benovich, born in 1930, were shot in a field near the village of Paryivko.”2 The oral histories help supplement these vital records, providing coordinating evidence and at times additional details. For the thousands of massacres about which we have only the [34.234.83.135] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:47 GMT) 282 in the shadow of the shtetl names of victims, oral testimony—even recorded decades later—can help fill in important missing information. There are certainly some individual episodes that have remained in human memory but are otherwise inaccessible. But oral history is not about mining the human mind for untainted facts. Rather, its primary goal is to understand how individuals and communities construct their pasts and understand their history. The oral histories we have collected provide context and color for the written record. They remind us that decisions made by officials have an impact on individuals, and that the impact is not always direct or as intended. Further, they show us the long-term impact of governmental policies, how the subjects of official campaigns were faring twenty, thirty, or forty years later. Whereas the names of common folk occasionally pop up in the archival record, they tend...