Max Weinreich in Copenhagen, 1939-1940: from Vilna to New York City in a century of YIVO

The YIVO Institute for Jewish – Yiddish - Research is dedicated to fostering knowledge of the history and culture of (East) European Jewry. Launched in Vilne (the Yiddish name of Vilnius) in 1925, it was relocated to New York City in the early 1940s due to the Nazi-destruction of Jewish life in Europe and Soviet occupation of Lithuania. A series of vital moments in an otherwise tragic sequence of events made YIVO a legend on both sides of the Atlantic.

A storied repository of the intellectual life of Jewish Vilna, it faced multiple challenges and opportunities in its scholarly continuity. Firstly, in Copenhagen in 1939-1940, when one of the founders of YIVO, the linguist and cultural historian Max Weinreich (1894-1969) and his son Uriel stranded in Copenhagen at the outbreak of World War II. YIVO aspired to becoming the center of learning of Yiddishland, a kind of Yiddish university.

Jan Schwarz discusses the history of YIVO with a focus on Max Weinreich’s sojourn in Copenhagen.

Jan Schwarz is emeritus professor of Yiddish Studies at Lund University, Sweden, the only academic position in Yiddish in Scandinavia. He took up the position in 2011 and retired in 2023. Previously, Schwarz was Assistant professor at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1998-2002, adjunct at Northwestern University, 2003-2005, visiting professor at University of Pennsylvania, 1994-1995 and Senior Lecturer in Yiddish Studies at University of Chicago, 2003-2011.

Schwarz is the author of two books about Yiddish culture and literature: Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers (2005) and Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (2015 & 2021), and has published numerous articles and edited volumes in the fields of Yiddish, American-Jewish and Scandinavian literature, and Holocaust studies, for instance I.B.Singer, In the World of Chaos: Early Writings with Daniel Kennedy & Rose Waldman (Academic Studies Press, early 2026) and a special issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature (fall 2025) about new approaches to I.B. Singer’s work with Prof. Zehavit Stern.

Schwarz is the Danish translator of Scholem-Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman (2009) and Abraham Sutzkever’s Green Aquarium: Stories from the Jerusalem of Lithuania (2017), and editor of The Golden Chain: An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Literature (Rhodos 1994).

He is working on a book in Danish, Mine Rejser i Jiddischland about the intersection between his Polish Jewish family and Yiddish literature.

http://www.sol.lu.se/person/JanSchwartz https://www.facebook.com/YiddishAtLundUniversity