Ex-Soviets in Israel: From Personal Narratives to a Group Portrait

1. Fieldwork and Methods

Material฀for฀Analysis Material for the book was drawn from face-to-face interviews with immigrants to Israel from the FSU conducted from 1999 to 2002. The total sample was made up of 123 interviews with 143 subjects who immigrated to Israel between 1989 and 1999. For various reasons 6 prospective interviewees refused to participate in the project. All the informants belong to the same immigration wave, but at the time of the interview their tenure in Israel ranged from ten years to less than two months (7 subjects). Importantly, 5 of our informants re-emigrated to Canada and the United States, 2 others returned to Russia, and 1 went back to Ukraine. The interviews (more than 80 hours of recordings) are transcribed in full. In several cases family members and friends preferred group interviews to individual ones, and this accounts for the discrepancy in the numbers. The context of the interviews varied: some were held in the homes of the interviewers or interviewees, others in offices, and still others in public places such as parks and beaches. In most cases we made preliminary arrangements, fixing the time and place of the interview, but there were also several cases of spontaneous storytelling, which were recorded on the spot. The average interview was 45 minutes; 6 of the interviews were short and were just one or two stories about memorable events of the teller’s life. The rest were life-story interviews, some as long as 90–120 minutes. Four subjects (Gaiane A., 77; Elvira D., 34; Dana L., 23; and Noubar Aslanyan, 58) wished to add information after the first interview session and volunteered for a second interview . Five interviews were conducted in Hebrew (4 of these were recorded by Hebrew-speaking students, and the fifth was with a Fieldwork฀and฀Methods 15 1 fourteen-year-old who was not fluent in Russian). The rest of the interviews were in Russian, the mother tongue of both the interviewees and the authors.1 One of the interviews conducted by a student, Christine Barzahian, contained interesting information but was difficult to transcribe because the subject’s Hebrew was not perfect and he frequently mixed it with Russian and Armenian , which we were unable to understand. Fortunately, he willingly agreed to another session, this time in Russian, his second language. The second attempt was a group interview—both his wife and his son joined the conversation. Thus we have three cassettes (one in Hebrew and two in Russian, for a total of 4.5 hours of recording), and some of the stories appear twice. The difference in the interviewee’s eloquence in Russian and in Hebrew does not conceal the stability of the narrator’s repertoire. This is the only interview in the sample in which the interviewees are identified by their real names. The Aslanyans are performing musicians and are comfortable with recognition. We asked Noubar whether we could use his real name. This is what followed: Noubar฀Aslanyan: I am not afraid. Interviewer: Do you want us to give you these pages for review to check whether something annoys you or whether you disagree with what we will have written? Noubar฀Aslanyan: Well, I think you will write only what you have here [points to the cassette player recording the conversation ]. Interviewer: We won’t write anything else, just for you not to . . . Noubar฀ Aslanyan: I have a membership card of the Soviet Composers’ Union. And there is an entry for a pseudonym on it. This line is empty on my card; it’s blank. If Shostakovich doesn’t have a pseudonym, why do I need one?2 Note that Noubar said, “I am not afraid” with defiance, and in this he is different from many ex-Soviets. For most of our subjects anonymity was a matter of concern nourished by the Soviet experience of trying to express “correct ideas” rather than sincere views (see examples of self-censorship on pages 32–33). We are CHAPTER฀1 16 happy to give the real name of a person who dedicates much time and effort to the promotion of interethnic cultural relations in Israel. It was Noubar Aslanyan who organized a charity concert in memory of teenage FSU immigrants killed in a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv in June 2000 (see chapter 3). All the other interviewees are quoted under assumed names; however, the demographic data are...