Voices of Yugoslav Jewry (review)

178 SHOFAR Spring 2000 Vol. 18, No.3 The contributors are quite interesting. The essays are diverse, but they lack a unity of theme and of focus, which is easily provided if one already knows the contents of Harry Cargas' life. Perhaps because they were collected as a tribute to a living scholar, they are not supplemented by his biography and bibliography and by an evaluation of the significance of his scholarship. They also lack a local contributor who could have discussed his years at Webster and his contributions to St. Louis. Still, the work is significant. The editors have chosen Harry's friends wisely, and the essayists honor Harry with their wisdom. A good man lived among us. We knew ofhis goodness and he is gone. He shall be missed. In this volume, his life is offered as a blessing. Michael Berenbaum Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation Los Angeles Voices of Yugoslav Jewry, by Paul Benjamin Gordiejew. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 497 pp. $27.95. This book, which grew out of the author's doctoral dissertation, is the first and only anthropological reading of Jewish community life based on ethnographic fieldwork in that area. An earlier historical perspective on Jewish communities in Yugoslavia is provided by Harriet Pass-Freidenreich in The Jews of Yugoslavia: A Quest for Community (1984). The author conducted his primary fieldwork research between 1985 and 1986 and during two consecutive and much shorter periods in 1989 (before the disintegration of Yugoslavia) and in 1994 in the post-communist phase. Gordiejew's primary concern in this text is with organized and other forms ofJewish communal life. The former Yugoslav republics are covered as well, but the analysis focuses more specifically on the Jewish communities ofSerbia (present-day Yugoslavia). This work is an important contribution to the field ofJewish Studies, an area which has heretofore received little attention from anthropologists and social scientists. Gordiejew ties six ofthe seven chapters together by describing various patterns of acculturation and submergence. Patterns ofsubmergence are generally ascribed to acts ofsocial engagement in Yugoslavism. Setting the stage for this notion, the author states in the first chapter that "[t]here is history that helps make the present, and there is the history that helps make the past" (p. 21). The history ofJewry living in the geopolitical area which after World War I was to become Yugoslavia (1917-1991) is traced in Chapter Two-making the important point that various Jewish settlements were at once part ofthe narratives of other peoples. Memory ofthe past, expressed in the present, is mediated on a symbolic level and expressed by a vast complexity of sociocultural Book Reviews 179 experiences and, as the author likes to stress, individual variation. Pre- and post-World War II patterns of ethnicity are also compared in the second chapter, showing disjuncture and dislocation ofthe community as well as continuation. Collectivity and individuality, fragmentation and integration, albeit seemingly contradictory, become familiar themes throughout the text as well as the notion of submergence which Gordiejew ties to "... larger historical processes" (p. 51) and brushes off in Chapter Three with a footnote "[as] ... is now, of course, a part of the past" (p. 441). The experience ofsecular Jewishness oriented to the community itself is treated in Chapter Four. Submergence is not only ascribed to acts of cultural immersion or social engagement in Yugoslavism of various Jewish communities but reiterated in "The Collective Voice of Submergence" (Chapter Five), where a vast range of self-identity is described as widespread, communal and (yet) distinctive. The reader is forewarned about these contradictions in the introduction. The Jewish communities of Yugoslavia are frequently referred to as fragmented units characterized by multiplicity and disjuncture. The sixth chapter discusses the resurgence of Jewish ethnic identity in light of the more recent political changes in the area. This chapter departs significantly from the first five, which are based on extensive fieldwork. Concepts which have carried their weight throughout the previous chapters are treated as deviating "... from this general pattern of political and symbolic conformity to Titoism" (p. 358). Jewish Yugoslav identity, ethnicity, and the role of the state are discussed in the last chapter (Chapter...