Rethinking the "postcolonial" in the postcolonial interview.

Beginning in 2007, the author spent a decade researching the flight of European Holocaust refugees into the Soviet interior, Central Asia, and the Middle East. She traveled to Russia, Uzbekistan, Poland, and Israel, and – via an intermediary – Iran. She conducted interviews in Syktyvkar, Samarqand and other places where descendants of former refugees and locals who were in contact with them now live. She also unearthed testimonies and interviews that were conducted with refugees and locals in the 1940s. The result was a multi-faceted mosaic that complicates commonly held views about the relationship between east and west, empire and native, migrant and the nation-state. The article discusses the challenge this research poses for some of the basic assumptions of canonical postcolonial theory and argues for fine-tuning the latter's often binary perspective between the west and the Other by combining it with the sociological insights of the field of memory studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]