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

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 [of] 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. (Jan.)