Once There Was a Town
The Memory Books of a Lost Jewish World
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A powerful exploration of the books created by Jewish Holocaust survivors to honor their lost world
"An animated tapestry." —Wall Street Journal
By the close of World War II, six million Jews had been erased from the face of the earth. Those who eluded death had lost their homes, families, and entire way of life. Their response was quintessentially Jewish. From a people with a long-history of self-narration, survivors gathered in groups and wrote books, yizkor books, remembering all that had been destroyed. Jane Ziegelman’s Once There Was a Town takes readers on a journey through this largely uncharted body of writing and the vanished world it depicts.
Once There Was a Town resounds with the voices of rich and poor, shopkeepers and tradespeople, scholars and peddlers, Zionists and Communists, men and women telling stories of the towns that were their homes. Stops are made in the bustling market squares where Jewish merchants catered to local farmers; study houses where men recited Torah; kitchens where homemakers baked 20-pound loaves of bread; cemeteries where mourners conversed with departed loved ones and wooded groves where young couples met for the occasional moonlit tryst. Of the many towns on Ziegelman’s itinerary, she always circles back to Luboml, her family’s ancestral shtetl and the point of departure for her own journey of discovery.
In conversation with classics by IB Singer and Roman Vishniac, Once There Was a Town is a landmark of rediscovery, and a love song to a vanished world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this bittersweet account, culinary historian Ziegelman (A Square Meal) introduces readers to a remarkable but little-known artifact of the Jewish diaspora: yizkor books, or memory books. When the author was growing up in 1980s Queens, family dinners were "high-spirited affairs" during which her elderly relatives recollected details about their former home of Lubloml, Poland. Yet "the great mystery how and why Luboml had met its end" was not apparent to her until she stumbled upon "a yizkor book... sandwiched into the bookshelf in my parents' bedroom where it sat, undisturbed, for decades." Written, compiled, and privately published by former residents of towns and communities destroyed during the Holocaust, yizkor books were an attempt to preserve memories and honor those who were lost, but they also named perpetrators, including the antisemitic neighbors who betrayed them. Penned by ordinary folk, not scholars, passages frequently went into colorful digressions about clothing, habits, and customs of all sorts, including food ("Sundays through Fridays, the shtetl diet was built around bread and potatoes"; delicacies like chicken soup, chopped liver, and gefilte fish were saved for the Sabbath.) Alongside charming accounts of daily life drawn from several different yizkor books, Ziegelman shares poignant stories of her own family's immigration to America and the terrible fate of the Jews of Luboml. It's an immersive, dreamlike window into a tragically lost world.
