Accented memory: Russian immigrants reimagine the Israeli past

This article seeks to understand the place of the Russian immigrant community in the larger Israeli culture and to explore how immigrants themselves negotiate their position. One site of such negotiation is the film Paper Snow (2003) created predominantly by Russian-Israeli filmmakers. Their distinct vantage point emerges through the film's casting, genre, style, and language. Paper Snow features such iconic figures of Israeli culture-in-the-making as actress Hanna Rovina and poets Alexander Penn and Avraham Shlonsky, but represents them as part of the Russian intelligentsia. In this way, the film adheres to the familiar story of nation building, but tells it with an accent: by emphasizing the Russianness of the Israeli national past, the film inscribes contemporary Russian immigrants onto the grand narrative of the nation. By revising the official collective memory, Paper Snow produces accented memory.

Keywords

• Hanna Rovina,
• Alexander Penn,
• Avraham Shlonsky,
• Russian immigration,
• Israeli collective memory,
• accented cinema,
• Israeli cinema,
• Habima theater