Who were the Soviet Jews? What defined them, apart from the state antisemitism directed against them (which was in many ways unifying)? How did they remain Jews without following their religion, without preserving their language, without retaining their original traditions while often promptly accepting new ones? And how did this self-conscious Jewishness match their devotion to Russian culture and even “Russian spirituality”—to the point of being baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church (even though those baptized were discriminated against not only for being Jews but also for being “anti-Marxist believers,” this became a trend in the 1970s)? How could it happen that Soviet Jews baptized in the 1960s and 1970s were not conflicted about their new faith and their “Jewishness”? Anna Narinskaya will address these questions by looking into her family history and their experience of being both “extremely Jewish” and “very Russian Orthodox.”
Anna Narinskaya is a journalist, playwright, curator, and documentary filmmaker from Moscow, Russia. Among her most notable projects are the exhibitions 200 Beats a Minute: A Typewriter and the Consciousness of the 20th Century (Moscow and London), The Last Address. Commemorating Stalin’s Repressions in Today’s Russia (Moscow and Berlin), as well as the documentaries Find the Jew: Jewish Identity in the USSR and Rock, Paper, Scissors: Ardis Publishing House Against Soviet Censorship. In 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she emigrated to Berlin where she writes for the Tagesspiegel and FAZ. Неr play The Last Word, based on final statements of female political prisoners in Russia, premiered at the Gorki Theater in Berlin and was later shown in the Marylebone Theatre in London.
Ludger Hagedorn, IWM Permanent Fellow, will moderate the discussion.
