“For the Piece of Foreign-Made Sausage, Second-Hand Clothes and Chewing Gum”: the Material World in the Polemics on Jewish Emigration

Abstract

Using as a starting point common anti-Zionist allegations of selfinterest and consumerism made against Jewish emigrants and Refuseniks, the article examines the material world and its interpretations in Soviet and Jewish narratives of emigration, focusing on three situations: immigration of things, emigration of things and a thing as an alternative to emigration. Registering traditional bias against material matters typical of Soviet intelligentsia, the author still discovers several categories of things regularly mentioned in various stories of one’s own or someone else’s emigration. The article analyzes how these things are problematized and socialized evolving into “social objects” endued in contradicting narratives with various, sometimes polar, meanings.