Jumbled Mosaics: Exploring Intracategorical Complexity in the Memoirs of Jewish Austrian (Youth) Emigrants to the United States

Abstract

This article offers a comparative analysis of a selection of memoirs of Jewish Austrians who fled to the United States under National Socialism, drawing primarily on unpublished memoirs from the Austrian Heritage Collection held at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. The article applies an intersectional approach to demonstrate how these memoirs can contribute to a more nuanced historiographical reconstruction of the complex processes of memory and identity formation that accompanied persecution, flight, exile, and survival abroad than have often been undertaken hitherto. Intergenerational discourse is of particular interest here, as is the intersection of age and generation with other analytical categories such as religious and/or cultural identity within the family, gender, schooling, friendships and social networks, class and political orientation, as well as practical issues surrounding integration in the United States during and after the 1940s such as language and the consequent transculturality of the Jewish Austrian exile community. The article demonstrates that each life story constitutes its own idiosyncratically “jumbled mosaic” – a compelling epithet used by one of the memoirists that captures perfectly both the unique subjectivity but also intracategorical complexity of the individual life stories.