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Sharing reflections on learning and teaching about Eastern Europe
Decentering the curriculum of Eastern Europe by diversifying primary sources
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Excerpt from Chone Gottesfeld’s travelogue ‘My Trip to Galicia’, dedicated to Galician town of Skala (1937)
Returning three decades after his emigration, journalist Chone Gottesfeld of the New York Yiddish newspaper Forverts (פֿאָרווערטס) found his hometown of Skala—today known as Skala-Podilska—in a state of prolonged decline. According to the 1900 census, the town had 5,638 inhabitants, of whom Jews made up nearly half (2,494). By the time of the last census in 1931, Skala’s population had fallen to 4,017, with just 1,460 Jews remaining. More broadly, towns across Galicia never recovered from the devastation of the First World War. During the interwar period, their main source of income—trade with the Russian Empire—had become impossible. As Gottesfeld’s account makes clear, the local population now had virtually no means of subsistence....
Excerpt from Chone Gottesfeld’s travelogue My Trip to Galicia (1937): “The shtetl is dying out. And this is not the only shtetl in Galicia.”
This excerpt continues journalist Chone Gottesfeld’s reflections on his hometown of Skala, which he left thirty years earlier when he emigrated to America. After visiting Galicia in 1936, he wrote a travelogue whose impressions were first published in the newspaper Forverts (Forward, official Yiddish title: פֿאָרווערטס) and later released as a separate book. It is clear that one of his implicit aims was to encourage financial support for Galician Jews, which is why he focuses primarily on describing their hardships in detail. In this passage, the author highlights the main factors behind the town’s decline, particularly demographic changes driven by economic hardship and recurring epidemics. The head of the Jewish community explains...
Amateur Media and Life in Cheryomushky
In addition to the official media (ekklesia)—the imagined narratives and myths presented through theatrical performances, films, and other sanctioned representations consumed by Soviet citizens in the agora (for instance, in cinemas as part of the public sphere, or via television as a window onto it)—there also existed a private sphere (oikos). But how can we uncover what everyday life was like for ordinary people? One valuable source for accessing this lived reality is amateur film recordings, which captured fragments of daily life in cheryomushky and khrushchovkas. The Soviet Union maintained a unique ideological system that simultaneously restricted and encouraged amateur media. The state promoted amateur filmmaking through official clubs—such as those...
TV News from a Lviv Television Studio in the 1960s
The task of popularizing the Soviet government’s approach to solving the “housing issue” in the Ukrainian SSR was entrusted not only to trade unions and their media—such as construction or architectural magazines—or to artists working in theater and cinema, but also to television. A television studio in Lviv was established in 1955, and by 1957 it was already actively producing local news. These broadcasts typically featured several short stories, each lasting from one to three minutes, focused on the region’s economic and cultural development. When not aired live—live broadcasts being made possible through the use of a mobile television station—the news segments were filmed on 16 mm film by traveling television crews. The...
The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!, a 1975 Soviet Film
In 1969, Soviet playwrights Emil Braginskiy and Eldar Riazanov wrote the play Enjoy Your Bath! Or Once Upon a Time on New Year’s Eve, which quickly became a favorite in Soviet theaters. In the early 1970s, the decision was made to adapt it for television, leading to the premiere of the two-part TV movie during the New Year’s holidays of 1975–1976. Much like the 1959 Moscow operetta about the Cheryomushki neighborhood, a popular theatrical plot was reimagined in a new medium—this time, not through cinema but television. Unlike the 1963 film musical Cheryomushki, the adaptation took the form of a television movie enriched with numerous musical interludes, which became widely popular after its...
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