Narrative and Proverbial Artistry: Commemorating a Vanished Jewish Diaspora

Wolfgang Mieder is renowned for his expertise in paremiology and the promotion of its international scholarship via numerous projects, crowned by the Proverbium journal and its supplement series, both of which he edits. Somewhat less known (due to Mieder's self-effacing modesty) is his commitment to, and support of, Jewish studies with an emphasis on the Jewish communities and culture destroyed in the Holocaust. Mieder is a senior and active member of The Center for Holocaust Studies at The University of Vermont and has promoted the study and awareness of the exterminated European Jewish communities and individuals (& Scrase, 1996 & 2001; & Kahn Keimowitz, 1999; Scrase & Mieder, 2001). As a Holocaust narrative researcher, I wish to express my identification with this part of Mieder's activity by contributing to his 70th birthday festschrift an article about an exemplary Holocaust survivor, who devoted his stories and proverbs to the commemoration of his bygone, destroyed Jewish community.