Between 1977 and 1985, some 20,000 Ethiopian Jews left their homes in Ethiopia and embarked on a secret and highly traumatic exodus to Israel. Due to various political circumstances they had to leave their homes in haste, go a long way on foot through unknown country, and stay for a period of one or two years in refugee camps, until they were brought to Israel. The difficult conditions of the journey included racial tensions, attacks by bandits, night travel over mountains, incarceration, illness, and death. A fifth of the group did not survive the journey.

For a period of over seventy years after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, talking about the past, either political or personal, became dangerous. The situation changed dramatically with the new policy of glasnost at the end of the 1980s. The result was a flood of reminiscence, almost nightly on television, and more formally collected by new Russian oral history groups and also by Western researchers. Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson both began collecting life story and family history interview material in the early 1990s, and this book is the outcome of their initiative. Living Through the...

In the last decade, a focus on memory in the human sciences has encouraged new approaches to the study of the past. As the humanities and social sciences have put into question their own claims to objectivity, authority, and universality, memory has appeared to offer a way of engaging with knowledge of the past as inevitably partial, subjective, and local. At the same time, memory and memorial practices have become sites of contestation, and the politics of memory are increasingly prominent. This interdisciplinary volume demonstrates, from a range of perspectives, the complex cultural work...