Preliminary Programme

The Evelyn Oldfield Unit’s Refugee Communities History Project (RCHP) has documented and publicised diverse contributions that people recognised as “refugees” in Britain between 1951 and 2006 have made to London’s culture and economy. Personal oral histories of over 150 adults from fifteen refugee communities in London have been permanently archived at the Museum of London. Elements of these RCHP interviews have featured within a high profile public museum exhibition called “Belonging: Voices of London Refugees” (2006-2007), on websites and within multimedia resources.
Whilst collecting oral history interviews for the RCHP, the author, one of the RCHP fieldworkers, embarked on a parallel voluntary project to create Childhood Landscapes. Childhood Landscapes is an educational multimedia CD ROM which captures oral history sound clips of interviewees sharing childhood memories, stories and folk tales. It has been widely distributed free of charge to schools and public libraries throughout the UK. The idea to create such a resource evolved from conversations with interviewees and involved many volunteers of all ages. This paper will explore the extent to which nostalgia about childhoods spent in other lands has influenced the oral history narratives shared within this resource. Furthermore, the extent to which the evolving Childhood Landscapes project may have influenced interviewees’ whole life history narratives archived at the Museum of London will be discussed. (Show less)

This paper is based on my doctoral research with five generations of an extended Scottish Jewish family, and examines how nostalgia for a possibly non-existent, sweeter, past was reflected in different ways in the oral history life story interviews that I conducted with members of the third and fourth generations of the family. The first immigrants were a rabbi and his wife, Zvi David and Sophia Hoppenstein, who travelled from the Polish/Lithuanian border to Edinburgh in 1882. Several branches of the family still maintain the orthodox Judaism of these first immigrants. Other branches practise a secular Judaism; still others have married non-Jews, and their children and grandchildren have been brought up largely without links to Judaism – though some of those children have chosen to explore their Jewish heritage as adults.
In this paper I suggest that the way in which interviewees discussed their childhood memories of Jewish festivals, prayers, songs, and food has as much to do with nostalgia as with religious practice. I also argue that the cycle of the Jewish festival year, annually recalling previous family occasions with their associated smells and rituals, promotes the production of nostalgia and therefore promotes a desire in its participants to continue the traditions and thus reproduce these same feelings in their children.
As well as in the perpetuation of religious tradition, nostalgia also arises in the interviews in other aspects of links to the past. Although the original family name is now lost, several of the third, fourth and fifth generation children have been given the middle name ‘Hope’ which provides a connection to their immigrant ancestors. Several of the oral history interviews included references to treasured artefacts that had been handed down from unknown grandparents and great-grandparents, long-lost toys they had played with in grandparents’ houses, or half-forgotten portraits of unknown ancestors. And some informants recalled the smells and sounds of the parents’ and grandparents’ workplaces with a similar nostalgic longing to that in which others recalled the Cantor singing at the synagogue.
In this paper, then, I will argue that feelings of nostalgia for the past are part of the reason why Judaism continues to be transmitted to the future generations; and that the holding on to photographs, artefacts, memories and the vestige of old family names, are strongly linked to this nostalgia for past generations. (Show less)

The subject of my research is collective and individual memory of community of victims of the mass deportations of Poles who lived in the border regions of the Soviet Ukraine before the World War II. Some of them recently returned to Poland (their historic homeland), other still live in their deportation place – northern Kazakhstan. In my PhD dissertation I am using the results of my own field research in Poland and Kazakhstan in 2006-2010 (60 narratives).
The Poles of Kazakhstan represent a special case of a constraint diaspora. Its formation as a social group is largely connected with the painful history of the relationships between Poland and the Russian Empire, then, Soviet Union. Their attempts to preserve identity are dramatically interesting to point out.
Collective memory of this group is a phenomenon, based on specific historical experience and position of group in a modern Polish society. Real popularity of this group among researchers, using the oral history methods, resulted in the active process of unification their personal memories. Repeatedly expectations of scientists forced narrators «to construct» their memories about past experience concentrating to prove their origin to closed Polish society. In other words in their narrations they want to defend the right on arrival to Poland, changing citizenship, residence and a lot of privileges foreseen for them by the Polish government. So, they rethink their past and present it as a series of misfortunes and repression against them as representatives of ethnic minority in the USSR. They do not talk about happy moments in their lives and do not mention the life or work in collective farms in Soviet times.
My research shows that the Polish researchers accept this version of their past, as it fits into the public stereotype Polish diaspora in the USSR. However, the mythologized picture of deported Poles, popularized by Polish public discussions, do not survive the confrontation with real, living and breathing Russian-speaking repatriate. (Show less)

The paper draws upon oral histories with three generations of Ukrainians in Britain. The interviews were collected by three projects in the mid-1980s, late 1990s, and more recently in 2006/7. The paper is inspired by attempting to understand changing generational memories of taste and our earlier work on imagined nation and home. We focus on how succeeding generations have used ‘taste’ in relation to food and foodways as part of making and remaking Ukrainian identities in the British context.
Broadly, the oldest generation, who settled in Britain immediately after the Second World War, talk about food (and food shortage) as a way of recalling the history of the father country and individual and interrupted life stories. However, it is also clear from their oral histories, that such recollections are partial and often elaborated. Removed from their homes in their youth and childhood, their recollections of Ukraine are imbued with nostalgia that is expressed through a longing for what they remembered as the authentic tastes of home cooking, indeed of Ukraine – the nation. Attempts to recreate this taste in Britain were a significant challenge for uprooted Ukrainian women; women who in early youth were forced from their families to labour in Nazi Germany. As post-war ‘displaced persons’ they were then brought to Britain to work in the country’s textile industries.
Isolated from their remembered nation and unable to return, they established new lives and families, with many seeking to retain a sense of being Ukrainian. Cooking and food customs were key parts of this project, challenging what they believed was the erosion of ‘traditional’ foodways in the homeland and attempting to recreate an imagined national cuisine. This effort was narrated and performed within families and at communal events, around Saturday Schools, churches and social clubs. And was part of a demonstration and transmission of collective identity. The resultant cuisine was also used to contrast Ukrainians from others, including initially the white English, whose cuisine in memory is recalled with some disgust.
Examining changing attitudes to food and foodways can also be a means of charting changes in nostalgia between generations. While those who first came to Britain from Ukraine used food to evoke what they believed to be an authentic, most often a pre-Soviet western, Ukraine, their children’s memory of food would become initially associated with the domestic; memories of their mothers and their parental homes through which they expressed a shared romanticism for Ukrainianess. This was set to change when daughters reached adulthood and began to assume positions within the public organisations of their communities. With increasing numbers of ageing relatives, who tended to be hostile towards the state and state care provision, the clubs and churches began to play a greater role in caring, including providing cooked meals for older members. The younger women who organised and delivered this care also began to secure more influential roles in their community and religious organisations. The public care and charity practiced by the younger women that would later extend to organising international relief, including for the children of Chernobyl. Nostalgic views of the fatherland were further complicated with the arrival of post-Soviet migrants.
While the process of food memory is still under development amongst the grandchildren of those who came to Britain in the late 1940s, we believe that ‘Ukrainian food’ has begun to be used as a cultural token by the youngest in their relationships with other Britons. This may be a third stage in the history of nostalgia amongst Ukrainians in Britain: a longing for a connection to a place of family origin that is no less constructed in their imaginations than it was in their grandparents’, but it is qualitatively, emotionally different. It is less a longing for a land of milk and honey, and more a source of distinguishing taste and claiming space in postcolonial, multi-ethnic Britain. (Show less)