A journey to the Polish Yiddishlands - on the Yiddish roads of the oral history in contemporary Poland

• In Event: OHA Poster Session and Project Bazaar

Abstract

Few generations ago Yiddish was a spoken language for millions people but it nearly died out as a result of the Holocaust, Communist repression, and assimilation. But although the number of Yiddish speakers has fallen dramatically since the Second World War, the language is still spoken in parts of the world and its original place, Eastern Europe still exist on the map of spoken Yiddish.
For over two weeks in the end of May 2016 prof. Dov Ber-Kerler and Agnieszka Ilwicka were collecting oral stories from the Yiddish native speakers living in Poland. We preserved the uniqueness of the narrators for the future generations both on the video-camera and in the collection of the beautiful photographies. This project is a story of the scholars journey through the world what is not longer there.
Now you can listen to Eastern European Yiddish speakers discuss their lives and culture at the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (AHEYM, meaning “homeward” in Yiddish), part of a project supported through an NEH grant to Indiana University in 2009. The collection of interviews provides a window into the world of the shtetl as it once existed. Interviewees, many of whom lived through World War II and the Holocaust, discuss their families, religion, communities, culture, education, health, recreation, food, and folklore. They perform songs remembered from childhood, tell stories, or recite poems, and many identify sites such as former synagogues, shops, schools, Jewish cemeteries, and mass graves of Holocaust victims. Their stories touch on the contrast between the sacred and the secular and include harrowing tales of survival, first-hand accounts of life under Communism, and stories of love--all part of the rich history of pre-war Jewish life in Eastern Europe that might otherwise be lost. The National Endowment for the Humanities features AHEYM online and helped to digitize the Yiddish-language interviews we conducted throughout Eastern Europe

Author

• Agnieszka Ilwicka, University of Wrocław