Dissertation Research: The Inheritance and Disinheritance of Memory

这个博士论文项目将研究在第二次世界大战期间在苏联军队作战的犹太退伍军人家庭中过去的沟通，他们现在居住在美国。民族志的方法将被用来追踪一代人的过去的决定性时刻是如何理解或否定的后代。该项目将有助于从移民和种族，身份理论和理论的文学应用到一个复杂的过去解释一个社区的关系，集体记忆的维系和损失的学科。集体记忆的研究是社会学研究的一个新兴领域，本文将把这一研究扩展到祖父母和孙辈之间的关系领域。此外，本论文将有助于代际传递的研究，其中很少包括两代以上，代际关系的研究，主要集中在并发现象。苏联历史和犹太历史的强度和象征意义的深度将有助于戏剧化的动态研究。

This doctoral dissertation project will examine communication about the past within families of Jewish Veterans who fought in the Soviet Army during World War II and who now live in the United States. Ethnographic methods will be employed to trace how the decisive moments one generation's past are understood or repudiated by successive generations. The project will contribute to the discipline by applying theory from literature on immigration and ethnicity, identity theory, and theory regarding the sustenance and loss of collective memory to interpretation of a community's relationship to a complex past. Studies of collective memory constitute a burgeoning field of sociological inquiry, and this dissertation will extend this research into the sphere of relationships between grandparents and grandchildren. In addition, the dissertation will contribute to research on intergenerational transmission, which has rarely incorporated more than two generations, and to research on intergenerational relationships, which has focused primarily on concurrent phenomena. The intensity and symbolic depth of both Soviet history and Jewish history will serve to dramatize the dynamics to be researched.