The Jewish Fusgeyer Migration Movement from Early Twentieth-Century Romania as Transcultural Rhetorical Tool in US Memorial Literary Culture

MELUS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-162
Author(s):  
Dana Mihăilescu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Life Story ◽  
The United States ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Dynamic Movement ◽  
Salient Characteristic ◽  
Contemporary Us Literature ◽  
Jewish Emigration

Abstract From 1900 to 1907, a so-called fusgeyer phenomenon was the most salient characteristic of Jewish emigration from Romania, given the high number of impoverished, desperate Jews who were on the brink of starvation and started to go on foot in the attempt to leave the country. My essay considers the literary representation of this fusgeyer movement over time as a conduit upholding transcultural networks of memory work in the United States. To that end, I will examine the representation of fusgeyers in the literature produced by immigrant fusgeyers to the United States immediately after emigration (M. E. Ravage’s 1917 An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant and Jacob Finkelstein’s 1942 “Memoirs of a Fusgeyer from Romania to America”) and in the literature created in contemporary times in the United States (Stuart Tower’s 2003 historical novel The Wayfarers). In my analysis, I rely on Astrid Erll’s demonstration that literature can be a powerful conduit of cultural memory by its use of “four modes of a ‘rhetoric of collective memory’: the experiential, the mythical, the antagonistic, and the reflexive mode.” I will show which of these modes of rhetoric apply to the literary works I consider and how they highlight a dynamic movement toward a transcultural type of rhetoric shaping Jewish memory forms in contemporary US literature.

Justice, Acknowledgment, and Collective Memory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Valls
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Truth Commissions ◽  
Place Names ◽  
The Past ◽  
Regime Transitions

In regime transitions, a number of mechanisms are utilized to memorialize the past and to reject the ideas associated with human rights abused of the prior regime. This is often done through truth commissions, apologies, memorials, museums, changes in place names, national holidays, and other symbolic measures. In the United States, some efforts along these lines have been undertaken, but on the whole they have been very limited and inadequate. In addition, many symbols and memorials associated with the past, such as Confederate monuments and the Confederate Battle Flag, continue to be displayed. Hence while some progress has been made on these issues, much more needs to be done.

scholarly journals REFLECTION ON COLLECTIVE MEMORY IN THE MUSEUM

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
The United States ◽  
Museum Visitors ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
Memorial Museum ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Source Of Information

The article describes visitors’ interpretation and understanding of the narrative about the Holocaust in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Visitors comments were the material for the analysis, used methodology was discourse analysis. Different discourses were singled out in visitors’ comments. Differences between visitors’ comments given in different years were ascertained. Age differences and differences among narratives of various groups of the Museum visitors were shown. It can be concluded that the Museum fulfills various functions. Besides being a place of commemoration, it accomplishes its educational function and serves as a source of information about the Holocaust.

The Body Politic and the Politics of Two Bodies: Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in Death

Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 109-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Laderman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Northern Region ◽  
The Body ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
American Nation

Abraham Lincoln has been mythologized and deified in the American imagination, occupying a preeminent place in the collective memory of the nation. He occupies this place because he is believed to embody the ideals and values of the country and because he seemed to preside with grace, equanimity, and wisdom over one of the most destructive conflicts in America's history. In life, but even more consequently in death, his presence – as “rail splitter,” “Great Emancipator,” and “Father Abraham” – conjures up an array of events, symbols, and myths that give definition and meaning to the American nation. When he died, an unprecedented funeral celebration occurred in the Northern region of the United States that solidified his privileged place in the country's pantheon of great heroes. The series of events that took place after his assassination, as well as his emplotment in public memory since then, suggest that his death, as tragic and painful as it was, added to the cohesion, unity, and the very life of the nation when it was most seriously threatened by chaos and degeneration.

scholarly journals Jewish Emigration from Europe to the United States

1914 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 196
Author(s):  
B. C. W. ◽  
L. Hersch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jewish Emigration

Beyond Black and White

2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 697-726
Author(s):  
Silvia Pedraza
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Immigrant ◽  
American Sociology ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Immigrant Experience ◽  
Paul Taylor

Research on immigrants and the eventual outcomes of immigration processes was at the very foundation of American sociology. But with the exception of a couple of studies on the Mexicans in the United States, such as Paul Taylor' (1932, 1934) monumental work on the life story of Mexican immigrant laborers in the Chicago and Calumet region during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Manuel Gamio' (1971 [1930], 1971 [1931]) anthropological studies of Mexican immigrants in the United States, and Edith Abbott'The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935(1936), Latinos were remarkably absent from such studies. Instead, these studies focused on the European immigrant experience and the experience of black Americans as newcomers to America' cities. Scholarship on Latinos (much lessbyLatinos) simply did not put down roots as early as scholarship on Afro-Americans. Perhaps this was partly due to the smaller size of the population back then, coupled with its being largely immigrant—composed of people who thought they would one day return to where they came from.

A Greater Fullness of Life

2017 ◽  
pp. 204-218
Author(s):  
Michael Huxley ◽  
Ramsay Burt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Group Work ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Century ◽  
Dynamic Movement ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Greater Good ◽  
Explicit Discourse

Although there was no explicit discourse about dance and wellbeing during the early decades of the twentieth century, modern dance artists and educators were nevertheless considering this topic in ways that contributed to twenty-first-century discussions. Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, Diana Jordan, and Mary Wigman—key figures in dance performance and education in Germany, Britain, and the United States during this period—each argued in different ways that dance was more than just a form of healthy exercise because it responded to deeper needs and enabled a greater fullness of life. Close analysis of Wigman’s solo Pastorale (1929) reveals the way by which dance at the time expressed individual wellbeing through presenting the self as a vibrant human being. Humphrey’s group work New Dance (1935) used dynamic movement to bring individuals together into a group, showing how the individual’s sense of wellbeing contributed to the greater good of society as a whole.

Dionysos in 1915: A Pioneer Theatre Collective

1977 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-53
Author(s):  
Robert K. Sarlos
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Group Structure ◽  
Group Living ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Distinguishing Characteristic ◽  
Social Fragmentation ◽  
Salient Characteristic ◽  
Individual Survival ◽  
Collective Creation

In an essay on ‘Collective creation,’ Theodore Shank observed that emphasis on the ‘cooperation of a creative collective,’ sometimes in combination with group living, is a response to ‘the fragmentation of established society,’ and as such, an essential distinguishing characteristic of the ‘alternative’ or ‘new’ theatre. Social fragmentation and individual alienation from society are not, of course, products exclusively of the nine-teen-sixties; the idea that individual survival is possible only within a group structure has emerged in previous generations that have felt threatened by a cult of individualism—a salient characteristic of Western civilization that has been carried ad absurdum in the United States.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
pp. 167-176
Author(s):  
Erik Mathisen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
National State ◽  
The Republic

Though the fusion of loyalty and citizenship in Civil War America proved short lived, the mark that it left on the republic would endure. While former Confederates would benefit from the uncoupling of loyalty from citizenship by the later decades of the nineteenth century, the treason at the heart of the Civil War and the collective memory of that conflict would live on every time a politician waved the memory of the war before the electorate in a bid for votes. The national state would experience a hollowing out of its wartime powers in the decades that followed the Civil War, but the experience of Reconstruction would set the nation against individual states. And for more than a century after the war, former slaves and their descendants bore the hardship and galling discrimination in the nation’s military, to prove and prove again their allegiance to the United States through their service as soldiers in war.

Théophilus Conneau: The Saga of a Tale

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 97-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce L. Mouser
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Motion Picture ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Life Story ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship

Rare has been the book on Africa that has acquired a history and become the subject of study in its own right. One such is the autobiography of Théophilus Conneau, a slave dealer of French and Italian background, who lived on the west coast of Africa during the 1830s and 1840s. Various accounts of Conneau's experiences in Guinea and Liberia have been translated into four languages, and were even incorporated into a successful novel in 1933, on which was based a motion picture. The latest version of Conneau's life story (and the occasion for this paper) was published as recently as 1976.Conneau's story first came to press in 1854 through the editorial assistance and skill of Brantz Mayer, a lecturer, author, and journalist of the Baltimore area, known principally for his writings about Latin America. Having obtained experience and contacts with publishers by editing manuscripts and letters, Mayer was a valuable asset to a new author in 1853. Recently discovered letters from Conneau to Mayer and Mayer's own account of the relationship between them suggest an interesting beginning for this literary enterprise. Conneau found himself in 1853 in Baltimore where he met James Hall, whom he had known previously in Liberia. Hall had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Maryland settlement for freed Blacks at Cape Palmas and had served as that settlement's first governor from 1833 to 1836. Concluding that Conneau's story of a repentant slave trader would be of value to the cause of anti-slavery and black emigration from the United States to Africa, Hall suggested that Conneau write his memoirs and introduced him to Mayer.

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