Knowledge, Sentiment, and Sociability: the Unintended Community of Soviet Jewish Emigres (New York).

Abstract

From the early 1970s through the 1980s, over 70,000 Jewish immigrants from urban centers in the Soviet Union resettled in Greater New York City. Viewing themselves as worldly professionals, they arrived with a strong expectation of rapid assimilation into American society. But rather than finding overnight acceptance and a feeling of ease with their new surroundings, Soviet Jewish immigrants discovered instead that they are quite different from Americans and American Jews. In respone to this unanticipated feeling of estrangement, while they have neither established an array of formal organizations nor clustered in any one occupational niche or residential area, Soviet emigres have sought out each other and created a community. This study explores the social and symbolic constitution of the "Russian" (really Soviet-Jewish-immigrant) community the newcomers have formed. Rejecting evolutionary theories of ethnic group development and the related idea that immigrant communities are inevitable, albeit temporary, responses to the necessity of making a living while confronting the unfamiliarity of a different society than one's own, this study treats community formation, or ethnogenesis, as a dynamic sociocultural process. Soviet emigres' community is presented as an arena where prior knowledge does battle with current practice through individual experimentation. This community is contoured and confirmed sporadically through social performances and frequently and consistently by talk. In these ways, otherwise unseen values and beliefs are brought into conscious focus providing a moral base for social action and individual adjustment to social change. Based on twenty months of intense participant-observation among Soviet emigres in New York (January 1984-September 1985) and several subsequent visits, the study investigates the symbolic contents of the immigrants' emerging Russian-Jewish-in-America identity and the moral imperatives and social constraints attached to it. Beyond describing the particulars of Soviet emigres' post-migration experiences, this examination of a case of acculturation without urbanization contributes to the building of a general theory of culture change and an underst and ing of the meaning of community in the post-modern world.