ABSTRACT
The chapter tells the story of Olga Wermer, one of many Jewish women doctors and psychoanalysts left out of the recorded past. The reconstruction of her biography, using long-forgotten archival materials and present-day interviews with family members, reveals another story: of the erasure of the multicultural, multireligious, non-national Galicia with its Jewish populace and their Yiddish language, customs, schools, institutions of philanthropy, and religion. The chapter discusses her familial, religious, cultural, and educational backgrounds, the circumstances of her immigration to the United States at the cusp of World War II, and the loss of her family in the Shoah. Once in the US, the experience of necessary perseverance became Olga’s, as a first-generation migrant needing to promptly reestablish and reinvent herself, adjusting to a new environment and a new language, while raising a family and bearing heartbreaking losses. Olga Wermer’s story, along with those of other Jewish female psychoanalysts, helps us illuminate the importance of remembering and discussing interconnectivities in history and contemporaneity, in particular in the connections between women, immigration, racist (antisemitic) violence, and other of humanity’s ongoing, age-old achievements and often traumatic difficulties.
