Daughters’ Stories: Family Memory and
Generational Amnesia1
Daniela Koleva
Abstract: After World War II, most Bulgarian Jews emigrated legally to Israel.
Those who stayed had to take part in the building of socialism and integrate in
a monolithic “socialist nation.” Thereby they had to “forget” their ethnic identity
(“aided” by the state in various ways) and to become Homo politicus rather than
Homo ethnicus. Since 1990, a revival of Jewish identity has begun in Bulgaria.
Here I explore how the women of three generations from the same family
reinvent their Jewish identity in their life stories. Drawing on this particular case,
I suggest an approach to the question of the interplay of individual and collective
memory. I focus on family and generation as different types of collectivities
inﬂuencing individual memories and self-actualizations.
Keywords: communism, family, generation, Jewish, memory
Looking for a way to establish meaningful links between collective memory and
personal memory, I shall look here at the notion of generation and will try to
explore its potential, drawing on the case of three generations in a Bulgarian
Jewish family. The very notion of collective memory seems to be somewhat
ambiguous while very rich and open ended. It seems to be more practiced than
theorized, as is the notion of memory itself. Thus, it seems to be already worn
out of surplus use without developing its explanatory potential. To make sense
of the particular case that I am going to examine, I need to work with two
notions of memory: the very concrete one of personal autobiographical memory
and the broader (and more problematic) one of collective memory as a frame

Daniela Koleva (Ph.D., University of Soﬁa, M.A., University of St. Petersburg) is an associate
professor at the Department for History and Theory of Culture, University of Soﬁa. Her research
interests are in the ﬁeld of oral history and anthropology of socialism, biographical research,
memory, gender, and politics of history. She has published a monograph on socialist “normal
biography” and a number of articles in international scholarly journals and collective volumes, as
well as collections of life stories.

doi: 10.1093/ohr/ohp040. Advance Access publication 3 July 2009
The Oral History Review 2009, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 188–206
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oral History Association.
All rights reserved. For permissions, Please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Family Memory and Generational Amnesia | 189

that conditions the former. Also, I have to work with two notions of generation:
the very concrete one of generations in the family and the broader (and more
problematic) one of generations as cultural identities constructed around a
collective response to a certain political situation.
The generations in the family can be thought of in terms of positions that unite
individuals and at the same time distance them from each other. Societal
generations, on the other hand, can be regarded as positions linking speciﬁc
values, orientations, and attitudes of age groups to the respective historical
periods. The ﬁrst conceptualization of societal generations belongs to Karl
Mannheim who, in his now-classical study, argued that generations were not
age groups or cohorts, but rather a “particular kind of identity of location.”2 The
identity of social location (Lagerung), that is, the objective structural situation,
was a prerequisite for the collective cohesion of a generation. But the “actuality
of a generation” was achieved by the “participation in the common destiny of
this historical and social unit,”3 that is, the collective organization of the
experiences. Thus, a generation is characterized not only by temporal simultaneity
but also by shared orientations. The third level of cohesion is the so-called
“generational unit,” a group of people belonging to a generation and developing
common ways of coping with their generational “destiny.” A particular generation
usually consists of a number of units depending on the different ways of reaction
to the same social circumstances. The core ideas of this theory that are particularly
important for the discussion of the case that follows are, ﬁrst, the importance of
the historical situation and, second, the importance of the stage of life at which
individuals are exposed to that situation. Mannheim stresses that youth, the
formative years of one's life, is the period of formation of the “natural view of
the world” that may or may not lead to the actuality of a generation. Thus, the
concept of generation enables a “synchronisation of two different calendars:
the ﬁrst pertaining to the life's cycle of the individual, the second to his/her
historical experience.”4 In other words, the concept of generation makes the
historical localization of individual biographies possible.
Revising and further developing Mannheim's ideas, contemporary authors have
highlighted the importance of traumatic events as the main constitutive factor
of generations—an idea that is particularly relevant to the case in point. In this
perspective, the “actuality of a generation” can be sought in a “collective
response to a traumatic event or catastrophe that unites a particular cohort of
individuals into a self-conscious age stratum. The traumatic event uniquely cuts
off a generation from its past and separates it from the future.”5 Thus, the
constitution of generations is triggered by the social signiﬁcance of their time. It
is, however, dependent on the acquisition of a generational consciousness and
memory. Therefore, generations involve the organization and institutionalization

190 | KOLEVA

of collective memory or, using Pierre Bourdieu's concepts, “share a common
habitus, hexis and culture, a function of which is to provide them with a collective
memory that serves to integrate the cohort over a ﬁnite period of time.”6
Linking, thus, the concept of generation with the notion of collective memory
understood as the implicit patterns that mold personal reminiscence, I shall try
to explore the inﬂuences of different mnemonic communities (family and
generation) on individual self-conceptualizations presented in the course of life
story interviews with three Bulgarian Jewish women from the same family.

Historical background
As an ofﬁcial ally of Nazi Germany during World War II, Bulgaria adopted antiSemitic legislation that should have led to the extermination of its Jewish
population. A special Commissariat on Jewish Affairs was established. It managed
to carry its tasks in the newly annexed parts of today's Macedonia and Northern
Greece where 11,343 Jews were sent to the death camps in February–March,
1943. In the “old territories,” however, a mass campaign in defense of the Jews
started, initiated by inﬂuential persons among the intellectuals, the politicians,
and the higher ranks of the Orthodox clergy.7 As a result, Bulgarian Jews from
the old territories (about 50,000) avoided deportation to the Nazi death camps.
That is why, as a Bulgarian Jewish author has put it recently, their “involvement
in the Holocaust is panoramic rather than paralysing” and therefore “the theme
of Holocaust, which is something like a password to the realms of pain for Jewish
survivors from Western Europe, has, for Bulgarian Jews, proven to be part of a
collective experience observed from the distance of an illusory security.”8
While some Bulgarians did hold anti-Semitic views, anti-Semitism was not part
of everyday public culture in Bulgaria9 as in other East European countries. The
Jews, however, suffered from repressions resulting from the anti-Semitic Law for
Defense of the Nation (1941): 90% of the Jews living in Soﬁa were interned and
their belongings sold out; most able-bodied men were gathered in forced labor
camps.10 The repressions were probably one of the factors triggering support for
the communist movement among the Jewish population, together with strong
Zionist attitudes. Many Jews took part in the communist resistance and a few of
them got important positions in the newly established institutions after the 1944
coup d'etat. Two tendencies developed in parallel among the Bulgarian Jewry in
the ﬁrst years after World War II: of integration into the post-war Bulgarian
society and of emigration and establishment of a sovereign Jewish state.
In an atmosphere of growing animosity between the communist-dominated
Bulgarian government and the newly established state of Israel demonstrating
its orientation toward the United States, the greater part of the Bulgarian Jews

Family Memory and Generational Amnesia | 191

emigrated to Israel in 1948–49 with no right to return. Those who stayed had to
take part in the building of socialism. Thereby, they underwent a process of deJudaization much like the Jews in Western Europe, where the dominant postwar attitudes were of national unity and reconciliation.11 In communist Bulgaria,
this process was more intensive and far-reaching, including not only secularization
but tacit ethnic homogenization as well. In addition to their religion, Bulgarian
Jews had to “forget” their ethnic identity and integrate in a monolithic “socialist
nation” (“aided” by the state in various ways, such as nationalization of the
property of the Jewish communities, merging the Jewish organizations with the
Fatherland Front,12 etc.).
The postcommunist transformations changed this situation dramatically and set
the stage for a Jewish cultural revival. In Bulgaria, this process seems to have
been less controversial than in other postcommunist countries where the Jewish
communities were destroyed in the Holocaust. Since 1990, urban Jewish
property has been restored in Bulgaria. Certain forms of community life have
been restored, and new ones established, including youth organizations.
International Jewish organizations sponsored a Jewish school in Soﬁa as well as
courses in Hebrew for children and adults. With the liberalization of publishing
in the 1990s, a number of publications for and from the community appeared. A
conscious interest in community memory can be observed among the younger
generation. After decades of ethnic homogenization, Bulgarian Jews, much like
those in the other postcommunist countries, have been involved in a process of
re-ethniﬁcation.13

The project
In 2002–03, a group of social scientists and historians carried a feminist oral
history project in Bulgaria placing particular emphasis on giving voice to minority
women. More than half of all interviewees were of Turkish, Pomak,14 Jewish,
Armenian, and Roma origin.15 The interviews comprised a ﬁrst part in which the
narrator's life story was elicited with a particular focus on gender roles and power
in her family of origin and her own family, on gender issues at the workplace,
etc. In a more structured second part, questions were asked about the
interviewee's opinions of gender relations in contemporary Bulgaria and her
attitudes to women in politics, to women's representations in media and
advertising, etc. Where possible, women from different generations of the same
family were to be interviewed. The idea behind this was to capture the handing
down of gender roles between generations and their presumed change.
In the context of this project, in the last days of 2002, I interviewed a medical
doctor, her elderly mother, and her daughter. Here I will leave aside the gender

192 | KOLEVA

issues representing the thematic core of the project and will focus on family
memory and generational memory as possible intermediate layers between
personal recollections and what might be considered the collective memory of
the wider Jewish community in Bulgaria.

The interviewees
The eldest of the three women I interviewed, Adela (aged 85 years at the time
of the interview), was born into a Jewish family in the northwestern Bulgarian
town of Vidin, notable with its ethnic diversity and its large Jewish community
in the early-twentieth century. At high school, she became a member of the
Hashomer Hatzair movement16 (see ﬁg. 1).

Fig. 1. Adela as Hashomer Hatzair member (second row, center), c. 1935.
Photo courtesy of the family archive.

Family Memory and Generational Amnesia | 193

She earned a university degree in economics but exercised her profession for
only a short period before her marriage.17 At the age of 30, she married a
Bulgarian18 and gave birth to two children. She had a few chances to emigrate
to Palestine during and after World War II—as the Jewish youth movement,
Hashomer Hatzair, demanded from its members—but circumstances always
precluded emigration: she did not take the chance in 1940 for she was in the
middle of her studies at the university. Neither did she go right after the war,
when another chance for illegal emigration appeared: she had to take care of her
elderly mother who was sick. In 1948, when there was an opportunity to emigrate
legally, and most Bulgarian Jews took that chance,19 she had just married a
Bulgarian and again decided to stay. Her daughter Nadezhda (aged 47 years)
married a Bulgarian as well. She married early in life and had an early divorce.
Thereafter, she pursued her career as a medical doctor and raised her daughter
Katya almost alone but with Adela's crucial help in the ﬁrst years after the breakup of her marriage. Like many others, she emigrated to Israel20 with her daughter
in the early 1990s and spent four years there—a fact that she hardly ever
mentioned in her talk. Katya, my third interviewee, aged 26 years, not married,
had a Master's degree and worked at a Jewish institution in Soﬁa.

The interviews
I ﬁrst visited Nadezhda in her apartment one December morning just after she
had decorated her Christmas tree.21 Comfortably sitting in an armchair under a
Wassily Kandinsky poster, she talked at length about her parents’ family, her
childhood, and her profession. She was self-contained, ironic, and eloquent
about what she was willing to tell and easily withholding the rest. (One of the
reasons was that I did not press her on the issues she avoided.) For about an
hour, we talked about Nadezhda's life, her family, and her work; mostly about
the latter. Not a word was uttered about her Jewish origin.22 Her four-year's stay
in Israel merited only half a sentence of her narrative. Later, Katya remarked that
I had failed “to tease her on the Jewish theme” and that her mother did not like
to talk about the years spent in Israel. Toward the end of the interview, Nadezhda's
elder brother came to visit her and the interview ended abruptly and somewhat
prematurely. Though I was fascinated by her personality, I gave up the idea of a
second interview for I did not know how to deal with what I felt was a negative
reaction to the feminist agenda of the interviewing project.
The interview with Adela was easier: because of her physical condition, she did
not go out and did not enjoy many visitors in her small ﬂat. Therefore, she
seemed enthusiastic about having somebody to talk to and had prepared for the
event: she had put on her white knitted sleeveless jacket (kept for special

194 | KOLEVA

occasions), she had taken off the cover of her mother's 120-year old sewing
machine, and she had thought her talk over (see ﬁg. 2). The latter must have
been relatively easy for she had already written her memoirs before under the
title Memories of a Vidiner. Though in that title she identiﬁed herself by her
native town, a good deal of her talk with me was focused on “Jewishness.” The
greater part of her story was about her childhood and her parents’ family. She
also talked in detail about Hashomer Hatzair, which was essential in her formation
“as a person.” A good deal of Adela's talk revolved around her dreams to emigrate
to Israel and her “destiny” to stay in Bulgaria, gradually replacing the theme of
Jewishness. Thereafter, she focused on her family and children omitting her
grassroots political activism as a member of the Communist party.
The interview with Katya was different from the other two not only because she
was present at the interviews with her mother and grandmother. As I turned on
the tape recorder, she remarked that it was the ﬁrst time she was “on the other
side of the mike,” that is, being interviewed rather than interviewer. Her education
and her earlier work in radio included some experience in both oral history and

Fig. 2. Adela with her mother’s sewing machine, c. 2004. Photo courtesy of
the family archive.

Family Memory and Generational Amnesia | 195

journalist interviewing. This set the conversation—for me at least—on an equal
footing. Furthermore, she was in a position to comment on her mother's and
grandmother's stories in her own talk. She spent her childhood with her
grandmother till the age of 10–11 years and since then has lived with her mother.
Her 4-year stay in Israel in the early 1990s and the difﬁculties she and her mother
had to face there formed a considerable part of her narrative. Her M.A. thesis
was on the Jewish revival in Bulgaria after 1990 and she had recently begun
working at a Jewish institution in Soﬁa. Not surprisingly then, her talk was the
most reﬂexive one of the three, as regards both Jewish identity and women's
situation. Partly, this was due to her professional activities and certainly also to
her better knowledge of the objectives and the approach of the project. Her talk
was a mixture of impressionistically sketched childhood memories, attempts at
self-analysis, and comments on her mother's and grandmother's stories.

Generations in the family: transmission and solidarity
The importance of the family as a guardian of Jewish traditions and identity has
been stressed by both researchers and members of the Jewish community.23 The
family is the primary social framework of identity formation and the primary
community of memory. Seen in this perspective, the three stories offer an
opportunity to broach the question of intergenerational transmission. My
approach to them is inspired by Daniel Bertaux's method of “social genealogies”24
and by the project he and a group of Russian sociologists carried in the mid1990s in Russia on the ways families managed (or failed) to preserve and hand
over to younger generations their “cultural capital” after the 1917 revolution.25
However, while Bertaux and the Russian colleagues were interested primarily in
the social contexts and their impact on the individual life paths, I will focus on
the symbolic and ideological resources for identity construction and on the
intergenerational continuities and discontinuities of self-identity in times of
abrupt social changes such as the socialist and postsocialist transitions.
Assuming that the sequence of generations is about continuity and conﬂict, I
am turning to the three women's utterances which throw some light on the
intergenerational relations in the family. Adela spoke affectionately and
respectfully of her parents alternating the account of their habits at home on
the eve of Sabbath with her own reﬂections about their inﬂuences on herself:
her mother taught her all practical skills and her father, who was “very eloquent”
and “well-respected in the town,” bequeathed his spiritual attitudes:
He brought us up spiritually with his example. My mother, on the other
hand, educated us with her example in the home. Laziness did not exist as
a concept for her. Till her very last day she could not understand what it

196 | KOLEVA

means … […] And my father … used every occasion to educate us with
stories and proverbs. […] Spiritually, I take after my father. My mother
taught me to work, to work a lot. But in terms of worldview, as a person, I
take after my father. He would tell us these stories and we'd put on the
table whatever food we had. […] He really loved telling us tales. That's
how he taught us integrity and compassion, and also keeping to Jewishness,
and taking care of the reputation of the Jews.26
Jewishness in Adela's understanding is more than religion: it seems to embrace
traditions, community, and a kind of moral stamina that she associates with
Jewish identity. According to Adela, her father was “not religious at all” even
though he performed the daily rituals, observed the Sabbath, and went to the
synagogue on religious feasts. Having given up identiﬁcation with Judaism quite
early in life under the inﬂuence of Hashomer Hatzair, and having later joined the
Bulgarian Communist party, Adela may well underestimate her father's religiosity
in thinking of him as an intellectual ally and willing to see only his wisdom, moral
integrity, and loyalty to the Jewish tradition.
Interestingly enough, a similar intellectual proximity between father and
daughter seems to have existed in Adela's own family. Her daughter Nadezhda
admitted to having been “spiritually” closer to her father:
My mother is very strong minded, and I suppose she inﬂuenced my
personality a lot in everyday matters. She was very active in our education,
even too active. She was a controlling, strong person, who had not had the
chance to express herself through a professional career. […] Maybe in
contrast to her hyperactivity, dad was quiet, calm, and closed in. Spiritually,
I felt much better with him. Maybe he inﬂuenced that part of me. So, to
sum it up, for everything related to being organized, being orderly, for all
these everyday life issues, the inﬂuence of my mother has been decisive,
while with my father I remained spiritually closer.27
Nadezhda admitted to having hated the “absolute order” that reigned in her
parents’ home though she had unwillingly carried a lot of it over to her own home.
Contrasting her parents’ home to that of her friend at school, she found the former
“quite depressing”—she did not like the furniture, the clothes her parents used to
wear, the manner in which they used to behave. Her mother did not seem to be
aware of that or maybe did not attach much importance to it. In Adela's narrative,
all tensions and conﬂicts seemed to ﬁnd a peaceful resolution, and there was an
essential continuity in the “destinies” of successive generations of women.
In her turn, Katya, who had spent a few years of her childhood with her
grandmother, remembered her as a grassroots activist:

Family Memory and Generational Amnesia | 197

I remember that a lot of women got together in the local branch of the
Fatherland Front and I went with her. She also kept the books for our
apartment building, she did all kinds of things. She was very active. From
time to time, she took me to some awards ceremonies that she had
organized, in some halls, with some medals. She was always organizing
things, she even tried to order us around the home. […] she always exuded
this strong spirit of the communist activist, with her grey skirt, the blouse,
her tidiness, etc. And I imagine she must have looked exactly like the
activists of [the] Hashomer Hatzair movement … I think of her as an aged
copy of what she used to be in her youth.28
Katya's narrative of her mother was more complex and reﬂexive:
When I was younger, I don't know why, but somehow in my mind, my
mother was more or less marginal. Things actually changed for the ﬁrst
time, that is, we started getting closer, when we moved to our own ﬂat.
That was the ﬁrst serious trial for me.29
An even more serious trial was their stay in Israel where each of them led her
own struggle apart from the other and was unable to rely on each other's help:
Nadezhda was constantly at work while Katya struggled to learn the language,
to integrate, and to form herself “as a person.” Both of them did the impossible,
as she stated in her talk, at the cost of drifting away from one another:
Because at that time my mother and I were already becoming quite
alienated. She was struggling very hard at the time. And she did well, she
managed to achieve things people dream about. At the very ﬁrst attempt
she passed the medical exams and started working in the largest hospital
of Tel Aviv. […] so she was constantly at work and she was almost like a
zombie. We didn't have anything to say to each other. She didn't have her
own circle of friends there, she was very isolated, while I had my circle, we
drifted really far apart, really far.30 […] Now that I am older, I realize that
the years go by and it's much harder for me to accept this, and I am much
more sensitive to her situation, you know, that she is alone. And especially
on holidays I've often thought that if I have to, I'd stay at home because
of that. […] I have to do it, because I feel that unfortunately, since we are
both women, we need to support each other, simply because it is only the
two of us.31
At these moments of the interview, Katya was more appreciative of her mother's
achievements and showed more understanding for her situation than the two

198 | KOLEVA

elder women seemed to show in respect to their mothers. Certainly, she may not
have reasoned like this in a different conversation, when questions of women's
situation were not so central. Even without this statement of gender solidarity
and emotional bonds between generations, however, it is clear that there are
important continuities within the family: self-reliance, holding education in high
esteem, seeking intellectual challenges, regarding work as self-fulﬁlment.
Nadezhda spoke most readily about her profession and her work. Adela was
proud about her university education. Katya admired her mother's professional
success in Israel; she herself had begun working on a Ph.D. thesis. The three
women shared a disposition to cope with their lives alone, not relying on their
partners. They also had shared interests in literature and a common way of
spending their free time: reading. Neither of them talked about the conﬂicts in
the family: they only mentioned the “nightmare” of “three families, four
generations” living in one apartment before Adela decided to sell it and buy
smaller separate ones. They (particularly the two elder women) stated that it
was disastrous for their mutual relations but neither of them expanded on that
topic. All three preferred to demonstrate that mutual help, care, and respect
existed in the family. None of them mentioned any predecessor beyond the
ones they had directly interacted with. Thus, for all of them, family was more of
an alliance rather than ﬁliation. Nevertheless, the relations between generations
seem to be no less important than the intragenerational ones. A number of basic
orientations and dispositions have been transmitted between generations. To a
certain extent, the daughters have acquired experience and attitudes from their
mothers and have integrated them in their own life expectations. Using
Bourdieu's concept, we could conclude that the three generations have kept
and successfully transmitted the “cultural capital” of the family. Thus, the family
appears as a community with its inherent tensions, but one that has been held
together by a distinct “familial culture” more or less shared by the three
generations.
The intergenerational moral economy of the family looks, however, quite
different as far as Jewish identity is concerned. If, in relation to their life
strategies, the three women seem to belong to a shared world, their perceptions
of their ethnicity make them inhabit divided worlds—and this is where societal
generations come into the picture.

Historical generations: the loss and reinvention of
Jewishness
In the ﬁrst half of Adela's talk, the one concerned with her parents’ family, the
theme of the Jewish identity—or Jewishness, as she called it—was central. In

Family Memory and Generational Amnesia | 199

addition to the sweet memories of the family evenings with her father telling
stories, she had quite bitter ones of the hostile attitude toward the Jews in
Vidin, of how the children were afraid to go out on the street at Easter: “There
were some people who would never forget that we had killed Christ,” she
explained. In high school, she experienced her Jewish identity both positively—
belonging to the Hashomer Hatzair movement, and negatively—suffering the
mockery and the threats of some classmates and teachers who would not let her
“stand out with anything.” At the same time, she stressed that the pro-communist
students and teachers, whom she called “progressive” using the term from the
communist propaganda vocabulary, used to support her. Thus, she provided an
acceptable “emplotment” for the events that followed (her dream to emigrate
and her decision to stay), so that her “destiny” did not appear pitiful. After that
moment, there is no more mention of Jewishness in her talk. Herself a communist,
married to a communist, she had been staunch in giving up any form of religious
identiﬁcation. Marrying a Bulgarian and staying in Bulgaria while her kin
emigrated, she was not able (or motivated) to sustain her Jewish identity through
tradition either and to transmit it to her children.
Jewishness, and the time spent in Israel, made a conspicuous silence in
Nadezhda's story. Katya suggested that this was because that period was very
difﬁcult and her mother was reluctant to return to it in her memory. While this
may very well be true, it must be noted that Nadezhda's case was also one of
the so-called “split mind” typical of the communist everyday: the inappropriateness
of any mention of one's feelings, personal attitudes, and life strategies—which
belonged to the private world—in a presentation of one's “public” personality.32
The situation of the interview was for Nadezhda, a public situation where her
private attitudes ought not to be on display. Thus, it remained unclear whether
her decision to move to Israel was triggered by economic reasons only (the
severe economic crisis in the early 1990s in Bulgaria) or was an attempt at
rediscovering her Jewish “roots” (given the low religiosity of Bulgarian Jews, the
state of Israel seems to have a key symbolic importance for their constructions
of ethnicity and belonging) or, alternatively, emerged as a chance to seek selffulﬁlment in another social and cultural environment (given the isolation of the
communist countries, such chances were unavailable before the 1990s).
Whatever her motivation might have been, her return to Bulgaria suggests that
the attempt had been a failure. However, instead of guessing at the particular
reasons for it, Nadezhda's silence lends itself to a broader interpretation33 as an
echo of the silence imposed by the communist authorities on the multicultural
realities of Bulgarian society.
Thus, the family member who was most interested and most competent on the
subject of Jewishness turned out to be Katya, the youngest. Nothing of her

200 | KOLEVA

understanding of Jewishness was handed down by her mother or grandmother.
She remembered no mention even of the word “Jew” in her childhood though
relatives from abroad used to visit her grandmother's apartment and to talk in a
language (Ladino) that was familiar neither to herself nor to her mother and
uncle. She remembered Adela's attempts to teach her that language without
explaining what it was and her own resistance to those attempts. It was only
when she and her mother settled in Tel Aviv that she started to learn about
Jewish history, tradition, and religion. During that period, she made great efforts
to learn Hebrew and managed so well that she was the only immigrant who was
allowed to sit for the matriculation exam in Jewish literature and history (instead
of math and biology).
When she came back to Bulgaria in 1995 and enrolled at the university, she
discovered that a revival of Jewishness had begun: an interest in Jewish
traditions, rituals, history, and language had been stirred among the Jewish
community in Soﬁa. Political loyalties and citizenship seemed to have lost their
salience while cultural belonging had become central for the individual's selfdeﬁnition. Furthermore, the very fact of belonging to the Jewish community
offered access to networks for jobs, education, and support from abroad, etc.
While her mother was annoyed by all those who “played at being Jews,” Katya
found new opportunities for herself. She was needed as a translator and teacher
of Hebrew. In spite of her young age, she had become an “expert.” She was
conﬁdent enough in her knowledge to explain to me her grandmother's limited
perspective and to caution me against taking all she had said at face value:
My grandmother, from a modern perspective, always presents things
differently. […] She had no way to learn about these things. And I think
she doesn't understand them well.34
Nevertheless, in her talk, Katya expressed her regret about having only studied
Jewish traditions instead of really adopting them from her family. It is not clear
whether and to what extent this deﬁcit is felt in terms of personal identity or of
professional competence. Maybe she feels that she lacks enough “insider”
knowledge that might prove essential for her work. But in her words, there also
seems to surface a certain discontent and a quest for “roots” that cannot be
motivated by professional ambition only:
In a lot of respects, I have a lot to learn. Tons. But the easiest way to learn
about tradition is to follow it. For me this means following it in a real life
environment. And I don't feel the need to do this, I don't feel this as mine,
I never have. While I was in Israel, I followed the Israeli way of life. Yet it
didn't really work because we had a very cold, unpleasant, bleak home.

Family Memory and Generational Amnesia | 201

Practically, I had no family there. So, even over there, these things never
really came back, they were never established. And I practically know that
I am not going to pass them on to my children either. I don't have the
motivation. Traditions are a great thing and it's good to know them,
because you feel you belong, and that's important for you.
Living in an environment of alternative possibilities, Katya has a more complex
attitude toward the “cultural capital” of the family: she seems to be aware and
to regret the loss of a part of it that could have enriched her life and her
personality. Her professional commitments, the fact that she has learned
Jewishness from books seems only to increase her sensitivity to this topic.
Katya's case, thus, seems to correspond to the so-called three-generation
hypothesis formulated in a totally different context by Marcus Hansen in 1938
and noting the return of the third-generation American immigrants to values
that had been ignored by their parents.35

Conclusion
The three stories are interesting from the point of view of how collective memory
inﬂuences personal identity. They demonstrate the complex intertwining and
interpenetration of different layers of memory: the “ofﬁcial” memory managed
by the communist state whose aim was to homogenize and de-ethnicize; the
newly “awakened” memory of the Jewish community seeking to accommodate
the Holocaust, communism, and Israel; a family memory ensuring adaptation and
coping; and individual memory pertaining to the construction of different
personal models of Bulgarian Jewish identity. A possible way to make sense of
these differences seems to be their relating to the idea of generation as developed
by Mannheim's followers: from bio-anthropological generations in the family to
societal generations as “communities of remembering” constructed through a
certain institutionalization of memory. Indeed, conceived in such a way, generation
seems to play an intermediary role linking meaningfully the ﬁrst two layers of
memory, which are forms of public memory, and the latter two, the private/
individual memory. While family memory appears quite homogeneous and free of
conﬂict in all three stories, each of them relates and refers to Jewish memory and
(partly at least) to the ofﬁcial communist memory in a different way. The
differences are clearly not random but due to the fact that each of the three
women belongs to a different societal generation. Each generation has deﬁned
itself in relation to the previous one and in relation to its formative (traumatic)
event. Each new generation has a different relation to the past (e.g., the two
socialist generations, Adela's and Nadezhda's). This means that each generation
maintains its own narrative (collective memory) of its origins and its formative

202 | KOLEVA

events, that is, each generation sustains a distinct self-consciousness or “a
generational culture or tradition.”36 Adela belongs to the generation whose
constituting traumatic event was World War II. In their formative years, the
members of this generation suffered the repressions following the anti-Semitic
Law for Defense of the Nation and the threat of being deported to the death
camps. Adela's involvement in the Hashomer Hatzair movement and later in the
communist party can be regarded as belonging to a speciﬁc “generational unit.”
These circumstances made acceptable her choice to stay in Bulgaria while her
kin emigrated. Having herself suffered from exclusion for being a Jew in her
youth, Adela abandoned Jewish practices and stopped being a homo ethnicus.
She became a homo politicus asserting “progressive” communist values rather
than ethnic ones.37 While her case may be extreme, some degree of “ethnic
amnesia” was an inherent part of the collective memory of her generation. Thus,
she virtually deprived her children of the chance to construct an identity as
members of a minority group. True, she did not have her husband's support in
that, and the larger social environment was not favorable either: the Bulgarian
socialist nation was constructed as a monolith from a social, ethnic, and
ideological perspective, and there was no place for Jewishness in the communist
national narrative. If they were to be accepted, Jews from Adela's generation
who stayed in communist Bulgaria had to be loyal to the system and its ideology.
They were subject to a subtle, indirect coercion to purge their memory of their
religious and ethnic singularity and to suppress elements of their culture for the
sake of integration.
Nadezhda did not have any choice of ethnic identity till the age of 40 years,
and after that, she did not seem to need one. While Adela strove all her life to
be accepted in the Bulgarian society, Nadezhda's belonging to it was never an
issue. (One important reason for that might have been the fact that her name
was Bulgarian rather than Jewish.) Her Jewish origin was not an issue either.
This does not seem to have been essential for her. It was not something to try
to forget about but also not something that guided any choices in her life
except one—the emigration to Israel. Nadezhda's generation experienced
neither ethnic humiliation nor ethnic pride; they did not take their ethnicity to
be problematic. Neither was it salient in the way they conceptualized
themselves. In the quest for Jewish identity during the 1990s, Nadezhda's
generation that grew up during socialism came to be referred to as “the lost
generation” for they had not kept their Jewish memory. When, after 1990,
revalorization and, indeed, reinvention of Jewish identity has become possible,
it has been met with certain resistance because of its all too obvious
inventedness (Nadezhda). Nevertheless, there remains the feeling of loss of
symbolic resources that could have enriched the narrators’ lives and personalities
(Katya).

Family Memory and Generational Amnesia | 203

Finally, Katya's generation was the one that constituted itself during the
postcommunist transition. Its formative/traumatic event is the “velvet revolution”
of 1989 and its aftermath. The representatives of this generation had more
freedom to rethink and reinvent their cultural heritage, to select positive traits
to develop, and to regard their belonging as a matter of their own choice. On
the other hand, their social situation probably called for a more stable form of
self-identiﬁcation in a dynamic postsocialist environment where the united and
unifying communist memory was severely questioned. Therefore, this generation
found it possible (and desirable) to develop a greater reliance on Jewish memory
in the quest for personal models of identity.

NOTES
1 Earlier versions or parts of this text were presented at “Diversity in an International
Context,” Berkeley, November 1–3, 2006; “Memory and Forgetfulness” 17th
International Round Table, Blagoevgrad, February 15–17, 2008; “Community,
individuality and creativity: A life stories perspective. In honour of Paul Thompson.”
University of Essex, Colchester, May 16–17, 2008. I am grateful to Paul Thompson,
Larry Ray, and Yulina Dadova for their insightful comments on earlier versions.
2 Karl Mannheim, The Problem of Generations (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1952), 292.
3 Ibid., 303. Italics in the original.
4 Alessandro Cavalli, “Generations and Value Orientations,” Social Compass 51, no. 2
(2004), 157.
5 June Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner, Generations, Culture and Society (Buckingham:
Open University Press 2002), 12.
6 Ron Eyerman and Bryan S. Turner, “Outline of a Theory of Generations,” European
Journal of Social Theory 1, no. 1 (1998), 93.
7 See, for example, Michael Bar-Zohar, Beyond Hitler's Grasp. The Heroic Rescue of
Bulgaria's Jews (Avon, MA: Adams Media Corporation, 1998); The Survival. A
Compilation of Documents 1940–1944, compiled by David Kohen (Soﬁa: “Shalom”
Publishing Centre, 1995).
8 Emmy Barouh, “Ancestral Memory and Historical Destiny: The Sense of Belonging”
in Jews in the Bulgarian Lands: Ancestral Memory and Historical Destiny, ed. E.
Barouh (Soﬁa: International Centre for Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations,
2001), 12.
9 In a letter to his superiors, the German Ambassador in Soﬁa from 1941 to 1944,
Adolf Heinz Beckerle, explained this attitude with the traditional multiethnicity of
Bulgarian society: “Having lived all their lives with Armenians, Greeks and gypsies,
the Bulgarians see no harm in the Jew to justify special measures against him.” Quoted
from Ethan J. Hollander, “The Final Solution in Bulgaria and Romania: A Comparative
Perspective,” East European Politics and Societies 22, no. 2 (2008): 203–48.
10 Boyka Vassileva, Evreite v Bulgaria 1944–1952 [Jews in Bulgaria 1944–1952] (Soﬁa:
St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, 1992), 8. See also Kohen, The Survival.

204 | KOLEVA

11 Emmy Barouh, “The convenient clichés of remembrance,” in History and Memory.
Bulgaria: Facing the Holocaust, ed. Emmy Barouh (Soﬁa: Open Society Foundation,
2003), 43.
12 Otechestven Front [Fatherland Front] was established as a broad anti-fascist
coalition lead by the Bulgarian Workers’ Party (communists) in 1942. Later, it
developed into a mass organization, in service of the ruling Communist Party.
13 I think that this term captures best the ongoing processes in the Jewish community
from the perspective of the participants. A survey carried in 1998 among Bulgarian
Jews covering a representative sample of 1,215 individuals living in 608 households
showed that the respondents did not consider Jewish ethnicity as synonymous with
Judaism as religion. While all identiﬁed themselves as Jews, only 2% stated that
they were “deeply religious” and 83% replied that they were “wholly irreligious” or
“tend to be irreligious.” (Barouh, Jews in the Bulgarian Lands, 13–14).
14 Bulgarian-speaking Muslims.
15 The project, entitled Voices of Their Own: Oral History of Women from Five Minorities
in Bulgaria, was initiated by the Bulgarian Association of University Women and
funded by the Open Society Fund, Soﬁa. It took place in 2002–03.
16 Hashomer Hatzair [Hebrew—“The Young Guard”]—socialist Zionist youth
movement, founded in Eastern Europe in 1916. Many Jewish youth, affected by the
process of modernization that had begun among East European Jewry, sought a
means of maintaining their Jewish identity and culture outside the Orthodox Jewish
life. The movement was also a response to the growing anti-Semitism. In its early
stages, it was heavily inﬂuenced by the Scout Movement and by the socialist
movement. Hashomer Hatzair stressed the need for the Jewish people to normalize
their lives by changing their economic structure (as merchants) and to become
workers and farmers who would settle in the Land of Israel and work the land as
chalutzim (pioneers). They dreamt of creating in their new homeland a society based
on social justice and equality. The ﬁrst members of the movement went to settle in
Palestine in 1919, immediately after World War I. They established the so-called
kibbutzim, collective settlements. On the eve of World War II, Hashomer Hatzair
numbered 70,000 members worldwide. The movement was active in leading
resistance in the ghettoes and the concentration camps. As the war ended, members
of Hashomer Hatzair were among the ﬁrst to organize and to take part in the illegal
migration to Palestine.
17 According to the 1934 census, most Jewish women were housewives. Only 6.25% of
them worked outside their homes. See Vassileva, Evreite v Bulgaria 1944–1952, 6.
Till 1948–49, this share did not signiﬁcantly change: housewives represent 33% of
all persons who emigrated to Israel. Given that whole families emigrated and that
the share of children was 29.15% (Vassileva, Evreite v Bulgaria 1944–1952, 123), it
seems likely that most married women were housewives. However, Adela did not
explicitly mention that she followed this pattern after her marriage.
18 Intermarriage was quite common for Bulgarian Jews: according to a representative
of the Jewish Agency for Israel in Soﬁa, 80% to 90% of Bulgarian Jews come from
mixed marriages, while in the U.S., for instance, their share is 52% (Barouh, Jews in
the Bulgarian Lands, 13).

Family Memory and Generational Amnesia | 205

19 Between October 1948 and May 1949, 32,106 Bulgarian Jews emigrated to Israel
and less than 10,000 stayed in Bulgaria. Since then, due to emigration and low birth
rate, their number slowly continued to diminish, reaching 6,431 persons in 1956
(Vassileva, Evreite v Bulgaria 1944–1952).
20 The 1998 survey mentioned above demonstrated that many Jews harbored the
thought of emigration: only 17% of the respondents were categorically against it
while 19% of the households had already made the decision, and emigration was
only a matter of time. The primary reason was the difﬁcult economic situation in
Bulgaria, and the favored destination was Israel. Zhivko Georgiev, “Sociodemographic and socio-economic proﬁle of the Jewish community in Bulgaria,” in
Barouh, Jews in the Bulgarian Lands, 9–10.
21 According to the 1998 survey, 65% of Bulgarian Jews celebrate Christmas and 63%
Easter. Krasimir Kanev, “Ethnic Identity, Interethnic Attitudes and Religiosity Among
Bulgarian Jews,” in Barouh, Jews in the Bulgarian Lands, 43. The author attributes
this to the minority status of the Jews who, “on the one hand, ha[ve] suffered
discrimination and cultural pressures from macro-society in the course of history,
and, on the other, [are] actively seeking ways to integrate.” He also points to the
high level of integration of Jews in Bulgarian society as an additional important
factor (Barouh, Jews in the Bulgarian Lands, 45).
22 Her half-joking complaint that she was always on duty at Christmas could be taken
as a hint to her origin. It can have an alternative explanation, however: hinting at her
“incomplete” family after the divorce.
23 Tsvetana Georgieva, “Mechanisms of Ethniﬁcation: The Family and the Festival
System,” in Barouh, Jews in the Bulgarian Lands, 58–76.
24 Daniel Bertaux, Les recits de vie. Perspective ethnosociologique (Paris: Nathan,
1997); Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson, ed., Pathways to Social Class: A
Qualitative Approach to Social Mobility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
25 Victoria Semenova, Ekaterina Foteeva, and Daniel Bertaux, ed., Sudby liudei: Rossia, XX
vek [Destinies of people: Russia, 20th century] (Moscow: Institute of Sociology, 1996).
26 Krassimira Daskalova, ed., Voices of Their Own: Oral History Interviews of Women
(Soﬁa: Polis Publishers, 2004), 17–19. I do not agree with the translator's choice of
the word “Judaism” and prefer Jewishness because Adela is not referring to the
religion in this passage but to Jewish identity in a broader and more ﬂuid sense.
27 Ibid., 31.
28 Ibid., 43–4.
29 Ibid., 45.
30 Ibid., 49.
31 Ibid., 54.
32 Lutz Niethammer, “Der Prügelknabe,” in Die Volkseigene Erfahrung: eine Archäologie
des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR, ed. Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von
Plato, and Dorothee Wierling (Berlin: Rowolt, 1991).
33 “Taking silence into account means watching out for the links between forms of
power and forms of silence.” Cf. Passerini, Luisa, “Memories between silence and
oblivion,” in Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, ed. Katherine Hodgkin and
Susannah Radstone (London: Routledge, 2003), 238–54.

206 | KOLEVA

34 Daskalova, Voices of Their Own, 50.
35 “What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember.” Cf. Bernard
Lazerowitz and Louis Rowitz, “The Three-Generation Hypothesis,” American Journal
of Sociology 69, no. 5 (1964): 529–38.
36 Eyerman and Turner, “Outline of a Theory of Generations,” 93.
37 For comparison, see Viktor Voronkov and Elena Chikadze, “Different Generations of
Leningrad Jews in the Context of Public/Private Division: Paradoxes of Ethnicity,” in
Biographical Research in Eastern Europe. Altered Lives and Broken Biographies, ed.
Robin Humphrey, Robert Miller, and Elena Zdravomylsova (Aldershot: Ashgate
Publishing Limited, 2003), 249.

