INTRODUCTION

Migration is invariably connected to a voluntary or involuntary loss of home. In the ideology of Israel, the ‘Law of Return’ guaranteeing every Jew the right to become a citizen is one of the main legal acts of the country.1 Moreover, providing Jews with a homeland was the main reason for forming the State of Israel (Richmond 1993). So, newcomers are referred to as ‘repatriates’, people returning to the lost home and ‘recalling’ the language of their forefathers. Yet, the majority of the people who emigrated from the former Soviet Union (FSU) to Israel in the 1970s, 1990s and in the present century are descendants of families that lived in the Russian Empire and then in the USSR for many generations. Most of them were secular and did not observe Jewish traditions in their countries of origin. Therefore, together with other scholars, I view their coming to Israel as immigration followed by gradual immersion into the culture which was previously either vaguely familiar or completely unknown to them (Al-Haj 2004; Fialkova and Yelenevskaya 2018; Remennick 2007; Ryazantsev et al. 2018). Like migrants every-where, members of this group have various problems integrating into the host society, both in terms of socio-economic and identity challenges (see, e.g., Fialkova and Yelenevskaya 2013; Remennick 2012; Zbenovich 2016). While many aspects of the immigration experience of Russian-speaking Israelis have been thoroughly researched, so far their material culture – and the culture of homemaking in particular – has seldom been the focus of anthropological, sociological or linguistic research. Among the few exceptions are Lipshitz 1997, Fialkova and Yelenevskaya 2007 and Levin 2014. Yet it is from the interaction with objects in homes that we can learn about their owners’ interests, customs, values and language habits; in other words, people's material environment can give us important insights into their everyday practices and inner world.

The project reported in this chapter analyses the perception of home by first-generation immigrants from the FSU. Using the convenience sampling method of finding research participants, I conducted thirteen focus interviews with sixteen people, all of them in Russian.2 The participants can be divided into two groups. The first group consists of those who arrived in Israel as adults. Three other interviewees, although technically first-generation immigrants, underwent socialisation while already in Israel: one was nine years old upon arrival in Israel, the other two were mere infants.