In 1955, the young State of Israel was in a hurry. David Ben-Gurion’s policy of mizug galuyot — the blending of the exiles — demanded that Jews arriving from Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, Poland, Romania and a dozen other points on the compass shed the cultural garments of the Diaspora and step into the uniform of the new Israeli. Speak Hebrew. Serve in the army. Become a Sabra. The past was baggage, and the state had no room for it.

That same year, a short, quiet man from Galicia walked into the newly opened Museum of Ethnology and Folklore in Haifa and began doing the opposite. Dov Noy did not want the immigrants to forget. He wanted them to talk.

Noy had earned the right to be heard on what memory was worth. Born in Kolomyia in 1920, he lost his entire family in the Holocaust — every member, save his brother Meir, a composer. He had reached Palestine in 1938, served in the British Army during the war, and afterwards taught Holocaust survivors in the British internment camps on Cyprus. He knew what it meant to have a world erased. And he understood that the stories people carry in their heads are sometimes the last trace of civilisations that no longer exist in any other form.

After completing a doctorate at Indiana University under Stith Thompson — the foremost classifier of world folktales — Noy returned to........

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