Across Generations: Oral Histories of Soviet Jewish Immigrants in Greater Boston

Collection

Call Number: MS084

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Scope and Contents

The collection contains four audiotapes of interviews and a bound volume of transcribed interviews in Russian and in English. This oral history project was coordinated by David Sloane, Associate Professor of Russian at Tufts University. With students in his third year Russian language class, he identified Soviet Jewish immigrants in the Boston area and had the students conduct oral history interviews. The interviews were transcribed and proofread by the students and interviewees. Though the interviews were conducted in Russian, the transcriptions are available in both Russian and English.

Dates

Majority of material found within 1995 -- 1998
1995 -- 1998

Creator

Sloane, David

Language of Materials

English

Russian

Conditions Governing Use

Some material in this collection may be protected by copyright and other rights. Please see “Reproductions and Use” on the Digital Collections and Archives website for more information about reproductions and permission to publish. No documentation is available regarding the intellectual property rights in this collection.

Arrangement

This collection is organized into one series.

Extent

0.25 Linear Feet

Additional Description

Biographical / Historical

David Sloane was Associate Professor of Russian at the Department of German, Russian, Asian Languages and Literature at Tufts University for over thirty years. Born in New York, Sloane completed a bachelor at Williams College. After the Vietnam war during which he taught Russian, he earned a PhD in Russian literature at Harvard University in 1979 and started teaching at Tufts University that same year.

He founded and developed Tufts Russian exchange program with Mendeleev University in Moscow and taught a range of classes in language and literature also at Middlebury College's intensive language school during many summers. His influence as academic adviser and mentor was extensive directing as he did a vast number of independent studies and theses. He also directed students in an oral history project among Russian-Jewish immigrants in the Boston area which was subsequently published in a volume titled 'Across Generations.'

At Tufts, Professor Sloane served on the Executive Committee, Curriculum Committee, Tenure and Promotion, Budget and Priorities, EPC and he acted as Marshal for Phi Beta Kappa for over 10 years. Professor Sloane has published extensively on Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Pushkin and Alexander Block, on women poets in the nineteenth century, and about Mikhail Bakhtin.

David Sloane is married and the couple has one son, Timothy Sloane. He retired from Tufts in May 2011.

Custodial History

Given that there is no collection documentation, this collection is restricted unless the audiotapes contain all necessary release information. Interviews were eventually published in a volume, Across Generations, available at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.