“Don‘t Tell Anyone“: Family Secrets, Sense of Uncertainty, and Navigating “Otherness“ Among the Jewish Minority in Slovakia

• Authors: Očková Katarína

Title variants

CS

„Nikomu to nehovor“: Rodinné tajomstvá, pocit neistoty a navigovanie „odlišnosti“ u židovskej minority na Slovensku

• Languages of publication: SK

Abstracts

EN

Many young Slovak Jews, belonging to the third post-war generation, learned about their Jewishness only later in their lives, when outer triggers – whether a classmate’s comment or a history lesson about the Holocaust – raised questions to which they received unexpected answers at home. This study focuses on family secrets and their productivity, and on social taboos on information about Jewish descent, in the context of perceived insecurity across three generations of Slovak Jews. Exploring how young people discovered their Jewishness and how it was presented to them by their closest kin – who had previously kept it secret from them – along with the warning not to tell anyone about it, this study shows the formative power of this information for a sense of self, as well as for their relations to others. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Jewish community in Bratislava, the author shows how contemporary young Jews – the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors – navigate their uncovered family secret, and how they negotiate the disruption in the continuity of their life stories and the intergenerational transmission of uncertainty and mistrust, which encourages the use of strategies of careful concealment of “otherness”, affecting their everyday life and relationships.

Keywords

EN

Secret; taboo; family; memory; Jewishness; uncertainty; (mis)trust; Jews in Slovakia

• Publisher: The National Institute of Folk Culture
• Journal: Národopisná revue (Journal of Ethnology)
• Year: 2022
• Volume: 32
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 22 - 31

Contributors

author

Očková Katarína