13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

FIALKOVA, Larisa and YELENEVSKAYA, Maria N.

How to Find the West in the Middle East: perceptions of East and West amongst 'Russian' Jews in Israel

This study is based on 100 personal narratives of Russian-speaking immigrants to Israel. The purpose of the paper is to analyse the antithesis of the concepts of East and West as expressed by the interviewees. Israel and Russia, each in their own way, are at the crossroads of the two civilizations, and the implications of this is a frequent topic of public discourse.

Our informants’ pre-emigration image of Israel was only marginally based on knowledge of geography, history and culture, and rather more on stereotypes formed under the influence of Russian and Soviet culture, absorbed by the assimilated Soviet Jews. Perception of the East in Russia is ambivalent. On the one hand it has the attraction of exoticism while on the other hand it is associated with fanaticism, treachery and despotism. The attitude to the West is also marked by contradictions: it is praised for individualism, prosperity and material culture but disliked for the lack of spiritual culture particularly valued in Russia.

When emigrating to Israel, our informants hoped to find themselves in an idealized ‘mini-America’, in an oasis of Western culture. The gap between expectations and reality intensified negative attitude to the East and made the latter synonymous with chaos, cheating, and alien modes of behaviour. Such stereotyping is not typical of immigrants from Central Asia and Azerbaijan. Familiarity with the culture of their Moslem neighbours in the USSR makes them less negative in the perception of the East and sheds light on the immigrants’ attitude to oriental Jews and Arabs.