The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

Life Writing as a Way to Process Displacement and Trauma: Jan Schwarz on Yiddish Autobiography

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Jan Schwarz, Associate Professor in Yiddish at Lund University, cites his own migrations and sense of displacement as the impetus for his interest in Yiddish autobiography, a genre that served as a powerful tool to cope with life stories that involve rupture and uprootedness. He reflects that the therapeutic quality of life writing is not limited to the Yiddish world, but rather is a defining characteristic of the globalized world in general.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Jan Schwarz.

This excerpt is in English.

Jan Schwarz was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1954.