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A town recalls its past: narratives about Jewish craftsmen and handicrafts

There exist two major ways of dealing with the Jewish past in the former Pale of Settlement: to forget this past as something not prestigious and thus not worth remembering, or to use it in the “romantic‐nostalgic” context. Contemporary materials collected among the inhabitants of provincial townships in Ukraine show that the Jewish past has become very “popular” nowadays; it is not only a part of the familial history of Jews, but also a key element of the local history. Jewish age‐old professions (handicraft, trade, etc.) is an important theme in people’s narratives; this article focuses on stories of this type from the point of view of how they “ethnicise” and “exoticise” the local past.