At 14:00 on 17 December 2015 in Room 414, the History Department will host a conversation with Anika Walke (Washington University in St. Louis). This discussion of oral history research in the Soviet Union will take place in Russian and English.
The Nazi regime and local collaborators killed 800,000 Belorussian Jews, many of them parents or relatives of young
Jews who survived the war. Thousands of young girls and boys were thus orphaned and struggled for survival on their own. Pioneers and Partisans is the first systematic account of young Soviet Jews' lives under conditions of Nazi occupation and genocide. These orphans' experiences and memories are rooted in the 1930s, when Soviet policies promoted and sometimes actually created interethnic solidarity and social equality. This experience of interethnic solidarity provided a powerful framework for the ways in which young Jews survived and, several decades after the war, represented their experience of violence and displacement. Through oral histories with several survivors, video testimonies, and memoirs, Anika Walke reveals the crucial roles of age and gender in the ways young Jews survived and remembered the Nazi genocide. The book shows how shared experiences of trauma facilitated community building within and beyond national groups, and uncovers the relationship between memory and identity in the Soviet and post-Soviet context. The presentation offers an opportunity to discuss the methodology and theory of oral history, and the potential and pitfalls of such research in the former Soviet Union.
Anika Walke is assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Walke was educated at the University of Oldenburg (Germany) and the State University of St. Petersburg (Russia), before she completed her doctorate at the University of California-Santa Cruz.
Walke’s research and teaching interests include war memory, migration, and nationality policies in the (former) Soviet Union and Europe, and she has published several articles on oral history and memory in the former USSR and Jewish resistance in Nazi ghettos in Belorussia.
Contact: (812) 386-76-34
