Migration and Dislocation: Echoes of Loss within Jewish Women’s Narratives

Abstract

From around 1880 to the Second World War (which transformed Jewish history and Jewish identity with an awful finality), millions of Jews left their homes in Europe and emigrated to various parts of the world in two distinct waves of migrations, the larger migration from Eastern Europe in the decades around the turn of the century, and then a second, smaller migration of refugees from Nazism in the 1930s. In most histories of Jewish immigration, women disappear from view, subsumed into the male immigrant experience (Gartner, 1960; Hirschfeld, 1984), yet their experiences of migration were undoubtedly shaped by their gender as well as their ethnic origins and their class, together with the current political, social, economic and cultural conditions in the countries to which they emigrated and the characteristics of the Jewish communities already there (Hyman, 1983: 157; Jewish Women in London Group, 1989: 8). The gendered specificity of the experience of Jewish migration is now being examined, albeit largely in relation to the significance of gender in the process of acculturation of immigrants.