After World War II, most Bulgarian Jews emigrated legally to Israel. Those who stayed had to take part in the building of socialism and integrate in a monolithic "socialist nation." Thereby they had to "forget" their ethnic identity ("aided by the state in various ways) and to become "Homo politicus" rather than "Homo ethnicus." Since 1990, a revival of Jewish identity has begun in Bulgaria. Here I explore how the women of three generations from the same family reinvent their Jewish identity in their life stories. Drawing on this particular case, I suggest an approach to the question of the interplay of individual and collective memory. I focus on family and generation as different types of collectivities influencing individual memories and self-actualizations.
This article is based on the life stories of about 100 women and men born in the 1920s and 1930s in Bulgaria. The stories were elicited in oral history interviews enquiring into their lives under the communist regime. The starting hypothesis was that, in the absence of a shared public narrative about the socialist past, as is the case in present-day Bulgaria, people would struggle to make sense of their lives during the time of socialism and have difficulty producing meaningful autobiographical accounts. The article explores the narrative strategies the interviewees adopted to let them present their lives as meaningfully seamless and coherent, despite the change in frame of reference. Four such strategies are discussed: sameness (unbroken loyalty to the former regime); biographical revisionism (distancing the self from the regime but retaining loyalty to the ideology); reversed temporality (privileging the past); and steering away (focusing on private life while ignoring its context).
The article applies a constructivist approach to the idea of dissidence and the ‘figure’ of the dissident. Its first thesis is that it is not only action (i.e. expressions of dissent), which is constitutive of dissidence, but also the price paid for non-conformity: being censored, marginalised, repressed, exiled, even murdered. Therefore suffering (passion in the Christian sense) is no less important than active dissent. The second and main thesis is about the crucial role of the recognition, i.e. ‘gaze’ – from outside, through transnational contacts and presence in Western media, and from inside, in the local dissident publicity (insofar as it existed). These ideas are employed to make sense of the Bulgarian debate on dissidence in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
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