When the Local Is Transnational: Time-Space, Conflict and Community (Re)construction Within Polish-Jewish Émigrés' Diaspora

Abstract

This paper looks at the interrelationship of “local” and “global” in experiences of people who left Poland following antisemitic purges and politics of racial hatred carried under the guise of government-sponsored “anti-Zionist” campaign of March 1968. Following student protests, legitimacy crisis of the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party, factional struggles in the Party, and facing the worsening of a situation of the Jewish minority (at least since the 1967 “six day war”), up to 20 thousand Jews or Poles of Jewish descent left Poland stigmatized in an atmosphere of “symbolic pogrom” (Stola 2000: 149)1. Forced to discard their Polish citizenship, break community and family ties and displace their daily routines and life plans, these émigrés or refugees faced not only typical migrant realities of struggling for their social, economic, political and cultural status in new countries (and many of them would later change their place again), but also questions of how to survive as a community, how to maintain social bonds and a sense of dignity in a changed situation. Based on author’s empirical research2, the article is both a complex yet limited monographic endeavor and an attempt to show what types of stakes are significant when one is compelled to think in terms of identity. The author analyzes how identity and community reconstruction endeavors are structured by logics of historical events, political-cultural definitions of loyalty and belonging, as well as contemporary diasporic conditions. While situated in spatial/structural and temporal contexts, these practices are seen as spontaneous learning processes responding to tensions between individual and community and between communities. By using critical concepts of cultural sociology, the author tries to evaluate both possibilities and inevitable oppressive effects of the particular time-space and notions of community.