Emotions, the Family Unit, and the Experience of Family Separation Among Nazi-Era Jews

This presentation examines emotions, fluid notions of the family unit, and the experience of family separation among Nazi-era Jews. Beginning in 1934, and lasting for nearly all of the duration of the Nazi regime, approximately 1000 European Jewish youth migrated to the United States with the assistance of child migration schemes, while their kin remained trapped in Europe. Emotions emerge forcefully in the rich array of family correspondences left behind by these separated families, as refugee youth attempted to convey their new lives to their parents and adults worked to maintain parental control over their geographically (but also at times emotionally) distant children. This presentation will consider emotions as a site of contestation between parents and children and a locus of contested family hierarchies. For youth, emotional withdrawal and evasion served as a means of asserting autonomy and agency, despite their surely emotionally painful and anxiety-inducing circumstances of familial separation. For parents, grasping onto a sense of normality and stability—and above all familial unity—could often mean attempting to exert traditional familial power relations through emotions. In this talk, we will see parents anxious about the increasing linguistic and geographical gap between them and their children, and trying to grasp as much control and knowledge as possible over their children’s lives and experiences. In essence, they wanted a window into their children’s emotional inner worlds and requested more emotionally forthright letters. In making these arguments, this talk will employ methodologies that see emotional articulation as a form of performance (as opposed to necessarily an accurate representation of an individual’s particular feelings) and scholarship that stresses how the question of who, when, which, and how individuals and social groups communicate emotions is intimately tied to the possession of power or a bid for power.