We Are Few, Annette Fromm’s dutiful "documentation of a Jewish community" (179), reads like a time capsule on two levels. On one level, Fromm meticulously presents the folklore and religious practices of a tiny Greek-Jewish community whose sense of identity relies heavily on memories of earlier (pre-Holocaust) times. On another level, this book itself reflects the early 1990s, when Fromm submitted this work (with an additional theoretical chapter and a slightly different text) as her dissertation. This study’s publication, then, fills a lacuna in Greek-Jewish folklore, while opening the question of why Fromm, who has remained an active scholar, decided not to update her work when bringing it to publication.
Fromm begins We Are Few with an evocative description of the northwestern Greek town of Ioannina, complete with a lively introduction to her interactions with its small Jewish population. Her humorous account of middle-aged former resident David-John, who unsuccessfully attempted to return from Athens during the Jewish High Holidays to find a wife (xv-xvii), immediately sets the focus on Fromm’s larger theoretical contribution. While the community’s folklore provides the groundwork for her study, Fromm sets her sights on former residents’ (and their descendants’) pilgrimages back to Ioannina as “more vital and important to ethnic identity than the maintenance of Jewish customs and practices” (xviii). This well-considered idea, which addresses the eternal dilemma of identity within ethnographies of Jewish populations, helps the community activate and sustain what might otherwise appear a largely memory-based culture.
A facile, brief chapter on the history of Jews in Ioannina, including their mass deportation to Auschwitz during the Holocaust, helps set the scene for the folkloric discussions to follow. Of particular interest, Fromm notes, the Ioanniote Jews have long used Greek as a vernacular language (as opposed to Judeo-Spanish used by many other Greek-Jewish communities), leading to a relatively unique social and cultural configuration between the Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, not to mention surrounding Jewish communities.
After this interesting start, the work takes an unfortunate shift to a dissertation-like tone. Fromm presents separate chapters on Ioanniote Jews’ contemporary life-cycle and holiday-cycle practices as a kind of “salvage ethnography,” largely chronicling remnants or recollections of traditions that have fallen out of currency (xviii). While thorough, these descriptions too often retain the catalog-like quality of an academic exercise, complete with a heavy reliance on the passive tense, unedited quotations that can seem overlong, and passages of thudding syntax (for example: “Death is the final stage of the life cycle. Many customs and rituals are associated with it” [92]). The compulsory nature of much of this description--which lacks even the illustrations Fromm had included in her dissertation--can make for laborious reading. More interesting sections, such as Fromm’s discussion of “Small Purim,” seem like comparative oases.
These chapters also bring with them some odd scholarly choices that epitomize the book’s broader weaknesses. Fromm anchors her discussions of Jewish beliefs, practices, and holidays by referencing classic works of Jewish folklore such as Joshua Trachtenberg’s 1939 Jewish Magic and Superstition, and Haim Schauss’s 1938 The Jewish Festivals. While important, these early studies’ pedantic styles and armchair-based approaches seem to clash with Fromm’s nuanced ethnographic project, and occlude a livelier and more interesting presentation of the material that could have been supported by recent work by Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and a host of others. Fromm’s entire bibliographic base, moreover, remains unchanged from its 1992 state (even Benedict Anderson’s seminal Imagined Communities, revised in 1991, remains stuck in 1983 here). The last sixteen years have seen a flourishing of Jewish cultural and ethnographic scholarship that had begun in the late 1980s (and Katherine Fleming has since entered the field as one of the few important new scholarly voices on Greek Jewry). Without attempting to address recent literature, this study reads more as a product of an earlier time than as a probing contribution to scholarship on Jewish communal life.
Fromm culminates her work with her promised discussion of pilgrimage to Ioannina. Her analysis of the several visits she observed by former members of the Jewish community and their descendants helps link memory and lived reality in the town, and places the folkloric material in an important context. “What [these pilgrimages] accomplish in the end,” she claims, “is a strengthening of the conviction among community members living in Ioannina that a larger community that was kept alive by memory still exists” (177). Indeed, although the chapter seems to veer unevenly between pilgrimage narratives and stories of past migration away from Ioannina, it nonetheless zeroes in on the relationship between modern forms of population movement and attempts to retain a meaningful sense of place-related identity. While this idea could have been more intensively discussed as part of a restructured (and streamlined) version of this study, it nonetheless brings useful issues to the fore on place, tradition, and self, particularly as practiced by Jews in a small community.
We Are Few, in the end, succeeds in documenting the folklore and identity practices of a small Jewish community, and it shows Fromm’s skill as an ethnographer, folklorist, and archival researcher. Yet reading this essentially unchanged study many years after its creation evokes a feeling of time gone by rather than the excitement of new discovery.
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[Review length: 873 words • Review posted on September 24, 2008]