Интервью

Interview with Robbie Coleman

Абигейл Фергусон

Robbie Coleman is a recent William & Mary graduate and a personal friend of mine. He is pursuing a PhD in history at Carnegie Mellon and is concentrating on Holocaust and genocide studies. More specifically, Coleman’s research centers on cultural production and daily life during the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. He is examining how songs, literature, religion, and other forms of Jewish cultural production in ghettos and camps reveal insights into collective memory, social dynamics, gendered experiences, and interethnic relations. Coleman continues his Russian studies which he began at William & Mary last year and has also taken up learning Yiddish last semester. Both languages are essential to his research.

How did your experience in the Russian program at William & Mary, shape your academic or professional journey?

“My most formative experience for my research in the Russian department was the Vilnius study abroad trip which shaped a lot of my research questions about Soviet-Jewish life and the Holocaust. Seeing the sites where Jews were persecuted, whether it be the ghetto or
Ponary. That really guided a lot of my research questions such as:  how do people live under Nazi persecution? Or what were interethnic relations like?”

Your research focuses on musical and cultural life during the Holocaust, in the former Soviet Union, what drew you to that particular focus? 


“I was a musician by training and thought I was gonna go to music school. Then, I decided to do history, because I had a history teacher in high school who inspired me about historical questions. Then at William & Mary, I was enrolled in a COLL 150 course about Latin American music. I wrote a final paper about Latin American Jewish music and Yiddish Tango which was wildly popular before the Holocaust in central Europe and in the Terezin ghetto. I found all that to be really interesting, so that was my entryway into looking at cultural life during the Holocaust. Then, I was drawn to studying the Soviet Union after talking to Professor Corney, for example, and learning there's not a lot of scholarship on the Holocaust or the Soviet Union. Then, I wrote my honors thesis on the Holocaust in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, and I knew in my PhD I wanted to combine Holocaust, the Soviet Union, and cultural production. Now, I look at cultural life during the Holocaust, particularly in Belarus because not a lot of scholarship has been written about that.“

Why study music as historical sources? Why does this kind of research matter? 

“First of all, uncovering cultural life gives a lot of insight into how people in daily life respond to persecution. For my research, a lot can be learned in how Soviet-Jewish life and identity changes and stays the same through cultural production. I'm looking at a couple sources where Jews are singing both Russian and Yiddish songs in the Minsk ghetto that they sung long before the Holocaust, showing both continuity and change of Soviet Jewish culture in the Holocaust, or songs written during the Holocaust in response to the pogroms and mass murders.”

Your work looks at everyday experiences, including gender, class, and ethnicity. How do these factors reshape how we understand Jewish life under Nazi occupation?

“Another reason why cultural life is important is because it gives insight into inter-ethnic relations, class relations, and gendered experiences. I'm trying to find ways to incorporate gender into this as well because gender is implicit in everything, so no one's really looked at how it intersects with cultural life because a lot of the sources that we have from cultural production are from men. I think it's important to explore that more.”

You are currently researching musical life in Minsk Grodno ghettos.  What drew you to these locations and what makes this region significant within Holocaust studies? 

“Belarus is one of the most understudied aspects of the Holocaust, even though Belarus was arguably the center of Jewish life and culture before the Holocaust. Research lags far behind Poland, Lithuania, or Ukraine. In my research in particular, one thing I'm also finding is that in Belarus, you see an influx of both Yiddish and Soviet culture, and I don't think we really see that in other parts of Europe…maybe in Ukraine, but I'm really finding it in Belarus.”

What projects are you most excited to pursue in your dissertation? 

“I'm still very early on in the process, but right now, I'm interested in looking at how Jews are responding to persecution under Nazi genocide, specifically in the Soviet Union. That's what the heart of my research is. I'm interested in how are Jews engaged in culture, how they drew on their experiences from before the war and translated them into wartime conditions or into work time conditions. I'm interested in changes in Soviet Jewish culture, from before the war into the Holocaust.”

How do you hope your research will shape public understanding of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union? 

“In American Holocaust education there's a very general narrative of the Holocaust or what you should take away from it: the rise of Nazi Germany, anti-Jewish persecutions, and Auschwitz. But we never really talked about what happened in the Soviet Union, even though the majority of Jews died in the Soviet Union, not at Auschwitz. The stories of Jews in the Soviet Union are almost forgotten in many ways in the American Holocaust dialogue. One of my goals is to first shed light on this massively important but forgotten area of the Holocaust.”

A special thanks to Robbie for letting me interview him! Robbie also wanted to shout out Professor Corney, Prokhorov, and Bella Feliksovna, and the whole Russian department :)

Photos of Robbie and I during study abroad last summer