La signification changeante des souvenirs matériels chez les immigrés juifs polonais d’après-guerre en Isra l Relocating significance of materialized memories among postwar Jewish immigrants from Poland

The article is based on research made among Polish Jews who lived after the war in Lower Silesia region and in 1950s or in 1960s emigrated to Israel. I will show the two waves of emigration, concentrating on how they differentiate in constructing the image of Poland – both the past one and the contemporary one. My interviewees were mainly children of people who survived the Second World War in the Soviet Union. Their parents were convinced that Poland is not only hosting country Jews lived for centuries, but their homeland. Different levels of Jewishness coexisted with identification as Poles. Even though the discussions on return to Israel, were part of the collective consciousness, till the moment of the outbreak of the anti-Semitic events, they underlined rooting in Poland or were constantly living “on suitcases”, as they say, hesitating whether to leave or to stay. The external events made them decide to leave Poland. However, the imagine of abandoned homeland is being kept in their memories, being an important part of their self-identification.Are presented the immigrants’ attitude towards the mythologized past they incorporated to their life stories narratives. Immigrants cope with the absence of the past through creation of memories, embodied in and evoked by objects. The meaning inscribed to a particular object changes, depending on fluctuation of memories’ significance. An important part of their memory is related to the traumatic recollections. It is both the post memory inherited from their parents who survived the Holocaust and their own ones connected with an uprooting process caused by the anti-Semitism in the postwar Poland. These negative memories mingle with idealistic ones from their childhood and youth in the communist Poland and with most recent ones from their nostalgic journeys to Poland (both individual and group ones), they went on after 1989. Those memories are also embodied in the particular objects, among which photographs play a crucial role.