Passport to the past | Alan Duben on discovering Jewish Tykocin

Alan Duben was born in New York City in 1943. In 1948 his family moved to the suburbs of New Jersey. His grandmother on his mother's side came from Tykocin. she immigrated to the US in 1907. In 1973, Alan earned his doctorate in anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he met his future wife. Before studying in Chicago, he was involved in teaching English in Turkey, among other things. From 1973 to 2014, he worked at universities in Turkey and the United States, where he conducted research and prepared publications on Turkish social anthropology. He first visited Poland in 1966. He returned in 2014, and as of 2019 began researching the perception of Tykocin's Jewish heritage in the context of the local culture of memory.