Table of Contents:
  • Preface ; Acknowledgments ; Introduction ; A Precarious Position: Not a Victim, but a Citizen?; Research Arenas and Frames; Questioning and Performing the Civic Subject; The Presence of the Past; A Community or Not?; The Research: Loci, Population, Methodology; Book Overview; Part I. Spaces of Consumption ; 1 Building Projects of Well-Being ; In Pursuit of ... ; Consuming Europe ; Moving between Two Worlds ; Consumer, Commuter, Citizen? ; 2 Khaliava ; The Khaliava Concept ; The State-Subject Relationship in the Soviet Context ; The Lucky Ticket ; The German State as Kormushka.
  • 3 Reflections over a Full Supermarket Cart Golden Cage Realities ; Condemned to Consume ; Images of Homo Consumens ; The Contours of Inclusion and Exclusion ; Part II. Work and Employment ; 4 Working Nonworkers ; "Become an Entrepreneur" ; Trying to Whip the Cream Somehow ; Performances of Work and Employability ; "Something is going wrong with my life" ; Like Cows that Nobody Comes to Milk ; 5 The Sotsial'shchik ; "Did I Come Here To Work?" ; A Genealogy of the Sotsial'shchik ; A Feeble Jewish Man, an Idler, a Loser? ; It's the "Soviet Man" Living in Us ; Living Simply Vnye [Outside].
  • "They Owe Us [Oni nam dolzhny]" Conclusion: The Welfare Bog ; 6 Work as a Line of Demarcation ; Workaholics and Workaholism ; I Don't Want to be a Part of These People ; The Uncertain Position ; Not Just a Sausage Migration ; Part III. Reinventing Tradition ; 7 Playing at Being Jews ; The Children of Lieutenant Schmidt ; The Rules of the Game ; The Floating Signifier ; "It Is Easier for Me to Play a Non-Jewish Role" ; The Haunted Man ; "What Actually Makes Me Jewish?" ; "We Try to Become Jews Slowly, Step by Step" ; 8 Haunting Images ; Sensing the Place ; The Shtetl Jew ; The Zhid.
  • The Jewish "Tradesman" "Normal People Don't Come to the Community" ; The Vicious Cycle ; 9 The Instrumentalization Trope ; Putting on and Tearing off the Mask ; Food, Gemeinde, and Khaliava Jews ; Lost in Nonreciprocation ; "Those Working as Jews Are Not at Work Today" ; "Real" Jews or Impostors? ; Conclusion ; Between the Present and the Past ; Haunted by Themselves ; Condemned to Consume as Civilized Exclusion ; (Re)constructing Jewishness ; Notes ; References ; Index.