Imaginary Vitebsk: the view from the inside

Abstract

While the term “imagined geography” most often relates to outsiders, views of an unfamiliar environment, also of interest are the views of insiders whose personalities were formed within and by the social space of their original milieu. Sometimes impressions of the latter were written down during the period they discuss and, thus, present an immediacy that appears to be unmediated. When, however, the insider memoirs were written later, the researcher encounters the additional problem of evaluating the work’s authenticity, due to subsequent views of the memoirist which he adopted from his later environment. In regard to places with an ethnically heterogeneous population like Vitebsk, in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century ideas about social space were often expressed in terms of ethnic symbolism and reflected values about what was considered prestigious in cultural and social terms and also on the basic distinction between “us” and “them.” The major cultural and social transformations of the first half of the twentieth century seriously altered the “imagined geography” that had been formed under the conditions of traditional society. The present article examines changes in ideas about social space via a case study of the Belarusian city of Vitebsk, which for many people has become a symbol of the traditional Jewish world. However, the article indicates that, despite all the changes, on the eve of the Second World War the city’s Jews continued to view their social and ethnic space in a traditional manner.