Preliminary Programme

In Israel of the early 1950’s, dozens of transit camps for recently arrived Jewish immigrants sprawled from the ground. They were neither temporary encampments nor stable settlements: Some of them eventually turned into nuclei of urban, often poverty-stricken neighborhoods or peripheral towns, while others were slated for demolition. Their inhabitants, by the second half of 1951 mostly immigrants from Arab countries, had to cope with both eventualities. For them, the transit camps (ma’abarot) became a formative experience, the place where concepts of citizenship and entitlement were forged, where notions of dependence, patronage, but also models of individual and collective action were formed.
We have very few ego-documents from the period; petitions and letters to the authorities offer precious insights, but in both content and form they oscillate between individual gestures of humility and relatively rare expressions of collective demands, leaving whole landscapes of social experience uncharted. The paper offers an in-depth analysis of one interview with an old dweller of a transit camp of the 1950’s, who later spent his entire life in a poor neighborhood constructed over the ruins of the former camp. Building on the work of oral historians, I shall try to explore the possible uses of such an interview. Rather than seeking to reconstruct particular events, or even the way he experienced and remembered them, my analysis focuses on the structures organizing my interlocutor’s speech, the recurring narrative moves and the salient turns of phrase. This, I would argue, can yield some precious, though certainly imperfect, clues to the structures of experience shaping his worldview. (Show less)

Over recent years, attention of historians and social scientists has been drawn to the spatial dimension of social life and particularly to the movement of people from one place to another. We suggest that ego documents can provide an intricate understanding of such movements, enriching both the individual and the societal levels.
Our case study - Letters of an elite family in the nationally oriented Jewish community in Palestine whose members emigrated from Russia. We focus on letters sent during the 1920s between members of the family – one temporarily in Europe and one at home in Palestine. The mundane every day sections of the letters enable us to map out movements and networks.
Extracting data from mundane ego letter writing provides new insights to the dominant historiography. The taken for granted pattern of movement was a one-directional, one-time movement, from 'the diaspora' to the 'new land'. We do not claim to turn this upside down, but to complicate it. First, by pointing to a plurality of patterns of movement and demonstrating four additional ones which are evident in the letters. Second, by noting the continued ties, personal, cultural, economic and political, between the members of the Jewish settlement in Palestine and Europe. Third, by locating the Jewish settlement in Palestine as one node in the broader Jewish network, rather than an ultimate destination or goal. (Show less)

The turn to the personal in history has had profound effects on the discipline, refocusing the work of many practitioners on the historical construction of selfhood, and leading them to engage with diverse sources of personal testimony. The letter is one of the genres of personal narrative to which they have turned. While many historians have drawn on letters for their observations of social, economic and political life, the letter is characteristically not only a record of matters external to the writer. Letters are also prized for their interiority and their dialogic characteristics. In what Dena Goodman refers to as ‘the paradox of correspondence’ writers fashion not only themselves but also the addressees with whom they are in imagined conversation in their letters. Historians have argued about the extent to which letter-writing is a gendered activity and they have explored ways of understanding letters as a means of managing the gendered, classed, and raced self. They have, in addition, sought evidence of unconscious as well as conscious processes in the pages of letters, and they have emphasised the importance of the materiality of the letter to writers and recipients. This paper discusses the potential of letters for historicising the self, using, as case studies, some collections of letters from the British home front in the Second World War. These include letters from women who worked as welders in factories in Northern England to their trainer in 1942; letters from a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service to her boyfriend in the RAF from 1941-44; and the correspondence of a married couple, Chris at home and Stan, a naval rating and later officer, at sea from 1941-46. (Show less)

Personal testimony is key to the project of writing histories of the self and historians are increasingly creative in their pursuit of sources, and development of techniques, for revealing subjectivities. As with other social groups with limited opportunities to speak for themselves in ways that are preserved, it can be challenging to locate sources that reveal selfhood as experienced by young people in the past. Historical sources typically represent young people from adult perspectives, for example, autobiographies and oral histories usually reflect on youth from the vantage point of later life. As records of youthful self-expression, young people’s diaries, letters and photo collections are valuable sources for exploring youthful subjectivities. This paper considers what historians can glean from working with material traces of how girls used photography; examples include girlhood photo albums and the incorporation of photographs in log books created by girl guiders. Being the product of girlhood choices, activities and meaning-making, these material artefacts reveal girls’ self-fashioning, the exploration of identities, and how they experienced change, both physical and social. In doing so, they offer rich and intimate insights into how teenage girls experienced and managed their liminal status, positioned between childhood and young adulthood, and between girlhood and womanhood. (Show less)