There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok

It's hard to imagine that one Jewish town could keep a reader enthralled for so many pages, but Eliach pulls it off. Equal parts history and memoir--the author survived the Holocaust in Eishyshok as a child--the book focuses on the rich lives built by the Jews in the community, which, depending on the year, was under Polish, Lithuanian, Russian or German control. After detailing the central role that the synagogue and religion played in shtetl life, Eliach uses oral history, written documents and numerous photos to describe how Eishsyhok's Jews went about their daily affairs. The Brooklyn College professor deftly demonstrates how the Jewish population reacted to forces outside the shtetl. Some of these forces were political--the 1648 Chmielnicki massacre, the Russian takeover of the town as a result of the final 18th-century partition of Poland--while others were intellectual--the Jewish Enlightenment and the growth of Zionism, both of which modernized life in the town. What results is a case study that sheds light on the entire Eastern European Jewish experience. While Eliach goes to great lengths to focus on the world that the Jews created, the book's most moving moments come in its final chapters, as some of Eishyshok's residents, including the author herself, struggle for survival in the face of genocide. As in her ""Tower of Life"" exhibit on Eishyshok at the United States Holocaust Museum in D.C., Eliach revives a people and a place that seemed irrevocably lost. 430 b&w photos. (Oct.)