Book of the month for July 2005

Page date:1 July 2005

Greta Uehling. 2004. Beyond Memory: The Crimean Tartars' Deportation and Return. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Image of book cover In the final days of World War II, Stalin ordered the deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar population, nearly 200,000 people. Beyond Memory offers the first ethnographic exploration of this event, as well as the 50 year movement for repatriation. Many of the Crimean Tatars have returned in a process that involves squatting on vacant land and self-immolation. Uehling asks how they became willing to die for their national collectivity. She provides a fine-grained analysis of how "memories," sentiments, and dreams of a homeland never seen came to be shared. Uehling suggests the second-generation has a surprisingly instrumental role to play. The way children correct and intervene in parental narratives, dissidents challenge interrogators, and speakers borrow and trade lines index this social aspect of memory.

Greta Uehling is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, University of Pennsylvania

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Reviewed by Natalia Shostak

Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction
The Lay of the Historic Land
The Faces of Public Memory
Exile: Recalling the 1944 Deportation
Family Practices: The Social Circulation of Memory and Sentiments
The Crimean Tartar National Movement: Memories of Power and the Power of Memory
How Death Came To Be Beautiful
Houses and Homelands: The Reterritorialization of Crimean Tatars
Sequel
Bibliography
Index

320 pages
Paperback: $24.95, ISBN 1-4039-6265-0