Narratives of Being: Anthropological Perspectives on Historical Identity (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798186906780)

What does it mean to be made by history?

For more than four decades, anthropologist Florence Heymann has studied how individuals and communities become historical beings - shaped not only by wars, borders, and revolutions, but by names, silences, family stories, and inherited fears. In Narratives of Being, she draws that lifetime of research into a single, searching inquiry: how do human beings live with histories they did not choose?

Moving between concept and case, archive and kitchen table, the book examines identity as something narrated rather than fixed - composed through kinship, displacement, language loss, and catastrophe. At its center stands Czernowitz, the vanished multiethnic city of Heymann's own family memory - Austrian and Romanian, German-speaking and Yiddish-speaking, imagined and real - and the deportations to Transnistria that reduced its Jewish inhabitants to a single imposed category before their destruction.

From there, the inquiry turns to Israel: not as the resolution of exile, but as a new and difficult form of historical being, one that must hold Jewish vulnerability and Jewish sovereignty together without letting either erase the other.

Writing as a scholar, a descendant, and - in her words - someone working "from the middle," Heymann refuses easy separations between memory and archive, intimacy and analysis, inheritance and authority. What emerges is a rigorous, humane framework for thinking about identity not as possession, but as relation - and an ethics of historical being that asks not what we inherit, but what we do with it.

Spanning the anthropology of Judaism, memory studies, and the afterlives of catastrophe, Narratives of Being speaks to anyone grappling with the weight - and the responsibility - of a past they never chose.