In Once There Was a Town: The Memory Books of a Lost Jewish World (St. Martin's, Jan.), food historian and urban anthropology expert Jane Ziegelman explores Holocaust survivors' yizkor books, which document the towns they once knew.
The first two books by Ziegelman, the former director of the Tenement Museum's culinary center, examine the role of food in the Depression (A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression), coauthored with her husband, the James Beard winner Andrew Coe, and its role in the immigrant experience in New York City (97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement).
She spoke with PW about Once There Was a Town and how Holocaust survivors endeavored to keep their memories and heritage alive through writing.
What is a yizkor book?
Yizkor means "remember." Yizkor books were compiled to preserve memories about towns that no longer existed. They contained stories written by ordinary people, which described the people, culture, and history of such towns.
What interested you to write about yizkor books?
Few people know that yizkor books exist. I happen to be very lucky in that my family was closely involved in the production of one of them. In the 1970s, my great-uncle was instrumental in publishing the yizkor book of his hometown, Luboml, in Ukraine. Roughly 30 years later, my father arranged for a translation into English. When I paged through that, I understood that I was holding a treasure. When I did some research, I learned that there are thousands of these books. A large part of my motivation in writing this was to bring knowledge of these books to a larger audience.
Why do you think that so few people, even those familiar with writings from the Holocaust, know about them?
The writers of Yizkor books were torn by competing impulses. On one hand, there was an impulse to document, to make sure the world never forgot, and to make sure the world had the full story. On the other hand, when they brought these books into their homes, they wanted to protect their children and their grandchildren from the horrors that they had experienced. In many cases, these books were put on top shelves where children couldn't reach them, or were never brought into the home at all. So, that ambivalence on the part of the people who wrote them is part of the answer. Another is that these books were largely dismissed by historians as the work of amateurs, and therefore unreliable.
But surely many historical accounts are the work of amateurs?
Yes, it was really a kind of academic superiority complex. These writers were untrained, and therefore presumably lacked the intellectual architecture to sift out fact from fiction. That's not what these books are about. These books are about eyewitnesses, telling what they saw. While there's plenty of objective information in them, just as importantly, there's also plenty of subjective information. For example, the contributors to a yizkor book often wrote as if they were writing a eulogy. In a eulogy, you don't tell all what was wrong with the guy. So, I do think that there is some effort to not include the bad stuff, such as domestic abuse and alcoholism, which certainly existed in these towns. It's that balance between what people report that they see, and what they feel that makes the books so powerful to read.
Do you anticipate your book being of interest beyond Jewish readers with European backgrounds?
Yes, even for non-Jews, there's something very universal in these stories. I was always trying to weave together stories of individuals—history on a very small scale—and their relevance to history on a large scale. There is a refrain that you see over and over in yizkor books—remember me, remember us, remember this. To remember, in Judaism, is to connect you with your past, and with other people who share your past. So, it's a really important way of holding people together as a group, and it's been intrinsic to Jewish survival. It's that desire—which is profound and a universal human desire—to leave some kind of mark after our mortal selves are gone that yizkor books speak to. I want to be clear that yizkor books are not a unique cultural phenomenon. There are other cultures that have produced something along these lines, such as after the Cambodian massacres, when similar books were written.
How can someone find out if there's a yizkor book for the town that their family came from?
JewishGen.org, administered by the Museum of Jewish Heritage, has a full staff to help people find lost relatives and to find materials such as yizkor books.
