TY - JOUR TI - “We left forever and into the unknown” DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3W097K3 PY - 2014 AB - As a result of the geopolitical divisions of the Cold War, approximately 185,000 Soviet Jews traveled from the Soviet Union through Austria and Italy between 1971 and 1990 in order to immigrate to countries other than Israel. This dissertation examines U.S. immigrants’ experiences of this period of transit migration as well as their extant connections to it through semi-structured interviews, archival research, immigrant-published literature, and the consideration of the experiences of the ethnographer (as a member of the 1.5 generation) and her family. This interview-based, intimate ethnography demonstrates that for Soviet Jewish Americans, the places of transit migration are the start and finish lines of reclaiming dignity as immigrants from the Second World. In Austria and Italy, they experienced shock, shame, chaotic travel, imposed waiting, and the realization of their loss of social status. But there were opportunities for hope, too: enchantment, enjoyment, and creativity, which pointed to the subject-positions they one day expected to embody. Therefore transit migration was marked not only by loss and a reckoning with one’s past but a stretching forward toward a future that would elaborate on and redeem its hardships. Immigrants’ present-day interactions with transit migration—through narrative, reflection, and return trips—illustrate that the embodied experiences of passage continue to form part of their lived experience, as markers of self-worth. As the first study to examine Soviet Jews’ transit migration, it contributes valuable ethnographic and historical knowledge about this group. By attending to migration as both social process and experience, it reveals transit migration to be a distinct category of experience with features parallel to other migrations marked by unfixed immigrant legal statuses. This thesis also identifies a relation to the past that is not cast as either traumatic or nostalgic. Instead, it points to a range of embodied relations to the past: neither determinative, inaccessible, nor only present-focused, but emergent and dynamic, allowing for both re-experiencing and connections to earlier, anticipatory desires. This dissertation therefore portrays migration to be a complex and shifting experience that gets continually written and re-written as it is incorporated into the broader trajectory of one’s life. KW - Anthropology KW - Jews, Soviet--Migrations--History--20th century KW - Jews, Soviet--United States KW - Emigration and immigration--Social aspects LA - eng ER -