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If Andreapol, the lazy Russian town on the banks of the Dvina River, gave young Isaiah Berlin his first taste of Russianness, it was on the banks of the Thames, in London, that he had become a Russian-Jew. This hyphenated label, which Berlin later came to use to define himself, was a product of immigration and acculturation pressures and processes. It was a type of identity that emerged after displacement, as part of a reorientation in a new environment and a hosting society. Categorizing Jewish East European immigrants as "Russian-Jews' was a common Anglo-Jewish practice. More than anything else, it was part of the new community's social language and typology. The category was neither available to nor necessary for Berlin and his family in preindependence Latvia or in revolutionary Petrograd, and the acquisition of such an identity trope, unconscious as it may be, should be understood as taking place in the wake of anglicization. By "angliciza-tion" I refer to the conscious effort to integrate into the new society, accept its central norms and cultural values, and acquire certain English character traits, which make one seem as a sociable and respectable person by upper middle-class standards. Reinventing oneself as a "Russian-Jew," this chapter argues, was not contradictory to but rather compatible with this effort, and it allowed young Berlin to maintain that delicate equilibrium between what he denounced as "assimilation" and what we would probably prefer to call "acculturation." ¹ Becoming a Russian-Jew, however, was a process, not an event. To understand its crystallization one must take into account the type of education and new kind of interaction with non-Jews that the adolescent Berlin experienced in London.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137015723_3

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