Memory in the Process of Migration.
The Transnational Autobiographical Culture of the Jewish Labor Bund

Frank Wolff, Cologne, Germany

„[T]he labor movement offered its members a completely new way of life, a new framework of conventions within which to live and work, a world unlike anything they had previously experienced.“


With these words, Ezra Mendelsohn summarizes his 1970 published – but still inspiring – study on the cultural aspects of Bundist life Class Struggle in the Pale. The „new world“ described therein is said having expressed itself not in ideological debates or party politics, but in everyday's life. Nevertheless urgent questions on the longevity, convincing power and depth effect of this assumed change remain unanswered. Research on the Jewish Labor Bund in the following years up to now mainly focused on organizational structures and political-philosophical issues within the Bund or in exchange with other contemporary parties. Very often a consequent narrowing to the national theories of the Bund took place. But how about the culture of the Bund in practice?
In almost every study Bundist autobiographies are considered reliable sources in portraying experienced culture – an assumption that sharply conflicts with newer theories on the validity of autobiographies as semiotic phenomenas between self-expression, -demarcation and -locating within personal and collective group structures. Starting from this point my first thesis is, that the autobiographies of the Bund do not express the culture of the Jewish Labor Bund, they constitute a culture of their own within the Bundist network. It is widely agreed, that the Bund undertook a shift from a strike-movement into a political one, a step that not only transformed it into a mass movement prior to the 1905 revolution, but also provided the basis for the broad political party activities in interwar Poland. Closely bound to this process the Bund became the mentioned cultural activist. During the first half of the 20th century two major incidents transformed the Bund once more. First there is the growing hostility in Eastern Europe through Stalinism and rising anti-Semitism and second, most important for the overall Jewish culture, the Holocaust experience. Emigration was the consequence many Bundist drew. Hence the Bund strengthened the previously already established transatlantic networks providing a cultural matrix for uprooted immigrants in regaining personal contacts as much as offering orientation in the new world. Therewith, my second thesis, the Bund evolved from a political and cultural actor into a rather memorical network: Many Bundists wrote or even rewrote their autobiographies after their migration experience, memorizing texts began to rule out classical political essays in important Bundist journals and huge memorial projects were started. Memory became identity-politics. With this autobiographies developed into a medium of expressing recent Bundist feelings in memorizing the left or even lost world. Although many researchers lent on Bundist autobiographies as important sources, not a single one has been analyzed as a political expression in itself, not even thinking about the network structures behind autobiographical writing in a context such as the Bund. It must furthermore be stated, that although the increasing research on autobiographical practices has come to intriguing results, a convincing group orientated analysis of a unifying category is still missing. With its collective experience and individual orientation, the Bund is a brilliant example for such a transnational, transgenerational and socially diversified network with its distinct group consciousness. The Bundist autobiographies therefore present a highly heterogeneous field of individual cultural, social and spatial patterns under one roof.
Furthermore migration as not only a generating but also an influential factor in recapturing the past has strangely been neglected in research on autobiographies. Emigration often initiated autobiographical writing, immigration always influenced the representation of memory. The Bundist autobiographical culture therefore provides a promising field of examination: The authors can be subsumed under one constructible category they all tended to identify themselves with. But the writers' practices differ drastically in respect to first the individual course of education, second the political (re)orientation during the 20th century, third the publishing method and fourth the influence of the migration process on the personal written memorizing.
Factoring in all these points, my dissertation project aims at:

• Recapitulating writers' networks
• Locating them in Bundist culture
• Comparing local autobiographical developments in the major immigration towns New York and Buenos Aires (protagonist, memory politics, publishing houses, etc.)
• Analyzing these spatial factors combined with the transnational disposition of the Bund and
• Analyzing patterns and themes of memory diversification in recalling tsarist Russia as an lieu des mémoires from a spatially distant but culturally attached socialist perspective.

The expectable result will not only be a telling history of the Bundist individual and collective possibilities of memory in an age of disturbance and wandering, it may also present an important case of reading cultural processes of reorientation, interactivity and identification of individuals within a distinguishable group during the process of far distance migration.