Transmissions of Non-material Familial Jewish Legacy

This study explores acts of non-material familial Jewish legacy, beginning with the Jewish ethical will of Yiddish comic writer Solomon Rabinowitz in 1916, and closing with a collaboration of wordless music with legend in the contemporary moment in Canada. This research provides a modality of Jewish familial legacy that highlights individual voice to illuminate how individual memory moves as an active force, a dynamic Aleida Assman describes in her essay, Canon and Archive as active remembering (Collective Memory Reader 334-337). This individual voice functions as a strategic disruption that has an impact on what is remembered, what is transmitted, as well as what is excluded and forgotten. In positioning the concept of transmission as its primary organizing principle, the dissertation examines four modes of transmission : the democratized machinery of oral performance embedded within Rabinowitzs ethical will, the impact of an accidental transmission upon Canadian novelist Alison Pick, a counter transmission by Canadian teacher Henia Reinhartz linked with a postwar counter memorial movement and, in conclusion, an embodied transmission through wordless melody. Looking at individual strategic acts of non-material legacy as components of Jewish cultural memory, the project redefines what memorialization and modes of transmission can explore, upend and suggest. In its totality, this dissertation argues against a passive model of storage by examining these strategic creators and the reception of their works. In so doing, the project illuminates the field of individual acts of cultural memory. Reception reveals the intriguing and unpredictable afterlives of the transmissions. In moving voices from the periphery into the centre, this project explores the creative possibilities of historical remembrance as a form of moral witnessing, and reveals a spectrum of acts of resistance against erasure.