Giving People their Stories Back

Ryken Farr’s affinity for history sprung from a general interest in World War II, and when he learned about the Holocaust, he knew he wanted to help preserve the stories of the people who witnessed it.

Farr came to the university as a day-one history major, later adding minors in Jewish Studies, German, and Museum and Curatorial Studies. Through his coursework, he started reading about the displaced persons period, when millions of people, including more than 250,000 Jewish refugees, found themselves without a home to return to when WWII ended.

While this period has gained more academic attention in the past decade, it’s still a part of the story that isn’t often discussed.

“Helping fill this gap in the scholarship has given a deeper purpose behind my work. It’s more than just personal interest for me at this point. It’s helping to further the field. It’s helping to share and talk about people’s stories and their lived experience,” Farr said.

Farr is a student assistant archivist in the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives (UMJA) at the Libraries Archives and Special Collections, a position he’s held for the past year. He helps run the reading room and registration desk, pulling materials for classes and researchers.

The bulk of his work is processing materials for UMJA, distilling the chaos of new donations into uniform boxes with nice clean folders, organized by subject, Farr said. He also fields reference questions from researchers, and retrieves and returns archival materials from storage.

Farr helped fashion UMJA’s new exhibit, “Faith in the Press: Jewish Printing and Printers in the Twin Cities, 1890-1950,” which covers letterpress printers that made materials in Yiddish and Hebrew for the local Jewish community.

UMJA has a few collections about Holocaust survivors, so the position aligned with Farr’s research interests. And UMJA frequently collaborates with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS), as well as Farr’s senior thesis advisor, Dr. Sheer Ganor.

Starting the summer before his sophomore year, Farr was a student worker with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, where he worked on Minnesota Shoah Stories, an interdisciplinary project headed by UMJA and CHGS. The project collects the stories of Holocaust survivors who relocated to Minnesota, and compiles them into an online tool for educators and students.

Farr worked with UMJA Archivist Kate Dietrick to restore the story of Holocaust survivor Jeanette Frank, born Eugenia Lewin, who was presumed dead. Lewin spent years in a displaced persons camp, where she joined a community theater troupe.

Her scrapbook about the troupe ended up in UMJA’s care, and the team used it, as well as other materials, to show that Lewin and Frank were indeed the same person, that she survived the war, and that she immigrated to St. Paul, where she lived the rest of her life.

In response, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, updated their online database about the victims and survivors of the Holocaust to reflect the real story of her life.

“His research on the background of Jeanette Frank allowed us to clearly prove that Jeanette Frank was born Eugenia Lewin,” Dietrick said. “By doing this work, we have given a woman her life and legacy back. This literally would not have been done without Ryken’s steadfast research.”

“Personally that felt really great,” Farr said. “It was an impactful moment, a living archives moment.”

Farr has been given more responsibility than student workers are typically assigned because of his impeccable work, Dietrick said. He’s processed over 60 cubic feet of materials, more than double any student worker she’s overseen in her 13 years, and he even helped the team acquire the Torah ark from Agudas Achim in Two Harbors, Minnesota.

“Never before has a student been such an assistance with an acquisition,” she said. “I know he is a bright and driven future archivist, and I look forward to having him as a colleague in this profession in the future.”

Farr originally wanted to become a professor, but through working at the Libraries, he now has a different idea on how to use his history degree. He wants to work in archives and museums, where he can foster students and researchers at all levels, educate community members, work with professors, and still pursue his own research.

“It’s one of the reasons I decided to go into the profession, because everybody in this building [Andersen Library] is just awesome,” Farr said.

After graduation this semester, Farr is heading to the East Coast for a dual degree program, studying Archives in Public History at New York University, while getting his Master’s of Library and Information Science at Long Island University.

He loves the culture at Andersen Library the most, talking with the other archivists and curators, picking their brains about the profession, hearing about their research and new acquisitions. It’s a great place for history majors, he said.

“A lot of history majors don’t think about the archives at the undergraduate level, and I’d really like to challenge them to, because it’s a great way to boost studies and academic work,” Farr said. “You feel a lot more connected to whatever you’re studying. You can hold documents from it, read about people’s lived experiences in their own words, in papers they may have written themselves. It just makes everything feel more real.”

This article is an excerpt of a longer article published by the University of Minnesota Libraries. Read the original article.