Rediscovering the shtetl in the late Soviet period: the Leningrad Jewish Independent Movement of the 1980s and the re-establishment of Jewish studies

Abstract

ABSTRACT Beginning in the early 1980s, Leningrad-based Jewish intellectuals began to explore the settlements of the former Pale of Settlement in search of their ethnic and religious identity. Starting in 1982, Ilya Dvorkin, a physicist by training, together with a few friends, undertook several such shtetl expeditions to the Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics. They visited the hometowns of their ancestors and explored important sites of Hasidism. Based on interviews and extensive archival material, this article investigates Jewish encounters with the abandoned material heritage of the shtetl and confrontations with the immaterial narratives of the past.