Author: Jael Silliman
Publisher: Seagull Books
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 198
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8170461987
Description
An invaluable cultural document shaped from a personal exploration, through the lives of four generations of Baghdadi Jewish women, of a social and cultural history of Baghdadi Jews in Calcutta, India.
An invaluable cultural document shaped from a personal exploration, through the lives of four generations of Baghdadi Jewish women, of a social and cultural history of Baghdadi Jews in Calcutta, India. The author discovers, through the lives of her foremothers, how, despite being widely dispersed across Asia, they ‘dwelled in traveling’, creating a moving geography of Baghdadi Jewish culture. We see how they negotiate multiple identities, including that of emergent Indian nationalism, and how they perceive and shape their Jewishness and their gender in response to changing cultural and political contexts. This book also traces the trajectory of a Jewish presence in one of the most hospitable cities of the Diaspora.
These rich family portraits convey a sense of the singular roles women played in building and sustaining a complex Diaspora in what Silliman calls ‘Jewish Asia’ over the past 150 years. Her sketches of the everyday lives of her foremothers —from the social and political relationship they forged to the food they ate and the clothes they wore—bring to life a community and a culture, even as they disclose the unexpected and subtle complexities of the colonial encounter as experienced by Jewish women.
REVIEWS :
I look back on the past from a new location', writers Jael Silliman. The new location is lowa. Silliman gives us an acute picture of revisionist identity formation in the United States. And the past—the Baghdadi Jewish community in Calcutta—offers a fascinating account of the relationship between urban and national identities, the heterogeneity of the Jewish Diaspora, cultural difference between colony and post-colony, and, above all, women’s lives.
—Gayatri Chakravorty Spival
Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Colombia University. Her publication's consisting of translations and critical works, include of 'Grammatology, Imaginary Maps, Breast Stories, In Other Worlds, The Post-Colonial Critic, Outside in the Teaching Machine' and 'A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.'
Jael Silliman's Wonderful and most necessary book makes a unique contribution to ongoing conversations on identity, diasporas, and the meaning of 'home'. As an Argentine Sephardic Jew transplanted to the United State I found it impossible to put down. A must read.
—Rita Arditti
Graduate College of the Union Institute. Her publications include 'Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo' and 'The Disappeared Children of Argentina'.
This book offers much more than a window on a vanished community. Silliman describes Baghdadi Jews as persons 'dwelling in traveling'. Their experiences across continents and cultures raise issues acutely relevant to twenty-first century concerns with the ways religious, national, ethnic and gender identities are transacted across boundaries both fixed and malleable.
—Ann Grodzins Gold
Professor of Religion and Anthropology at Syracuse University. Her publications include 'Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims, A Carnival of Parting, Listen to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India and the forthcoming In the Time of Trees and Sorrow: Nature, Power and Memory in Rajasthan.'
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface : Narratives of Diaspora
Introduction : Indian and Colonial Frames
Farha : Crossing Borders, Maintaining Boundaries
Mary : Coming Home to the Mount of Olives
Flower : Meeting India at the Midnight Hour
Jael : Indian Portrait, Jewish Frame
Conclusion : Dwelling in Travelling
Reference
Incex