A town recalls its past: narratives about Jewish craftsmen and handicrafts

摘要

There exist two major ways of dealing with the Jewish past in the former Pale of Settlement: to forget this past as something not prestigious and thus not worth remembering, or to use it in the “romantic-nostalgic” context. Contemporary materials collected among the inhabitants of provincial townships in Ukraine show that the Jewish past has become very “popular” nowadays; it is not only a part of the familial history of Jews, but also a key element of the local history. Jewish age-old professions (handicraft, trade, etc.) is an important theme in people's narratives; this article focuses on stories of this type from the point of view of how they “ethnicise” and “exoticise” the local past.