4. The Other Side of the Curtain?

Abstract

I interrogate my historical and current positionings in this chapter by recalling memories of growing up during the Cold War but on the other (Western) side of the so-called Iron Curtain. Focused on a specific example from my minoritized but otherwise quite privileged background in the north of England, I explore what returns to me now as either topicalised or occluded by, presumably, the cultural-political construction of the Cold-War period that dominated my own place and time. Specifically, I attempt to retrieve my memories of what I knew and understood about the ‘Save Soviet Jewry’ campaign in the 1970s, and consider what it these might indicate about how now-former Soviet and allied communist countries were perceived. During this process, I encounter memorial gaps and obstacles and address the temptation to fill these in and to elaborate upon them my recollections from my current geopolitical, chronological, and biographical position. What emerges is the impossibility of ‘looking back’ without also reflecting on the ‘now’ and how it shapes the perspective from which the review takes place.