Once There Was a Town: The Memory Books of a Lost Jewish World

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 you