There Once Was a World -- Yaffa Eliach

There Once Was a World -- Yaffa Eliach: In the soaring, three-story space that is the Tower of Life at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., sixteen hundred photographs collected by the historian Yaffa Eliach give face to a murdered people. In There Once Was a World, Eliach brilliantly and movingly records the history of that people. Nineteen years of scholarship, a poet's ear, and a storyteller's voice have yielded what is perhaps the richest, fullest, most detailed portrait of Eastern Jewish life that we will ever have, a book that encompasses both the sweep of history and an intimate view of the day-to-day lives of generations of small-town Jews, in all their uniqueness and universality. Eliach's own roots in Eishyshok - she is a descendant of one of the five founding families and herself one of only twenty-nine survivors - give her work an unrivaled depth and passion.

Eliach, a writer, historian, and professor, is the founder of Brooklyn's Center for Holocaust Studies and the creator of the Tower of Life exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The author was born in a small Jewish market town in Lithuania. In September 1941, the Germans killed almost 5,000 Jews there. The few who survived, including the author, were in hiding until their liberation in July_ 1944. Eliach has spent the past 17 years documenting the town's Jews, poring over diaries, letters, and birth and marriage certificates. She obtained Lithuanian archival records for the years 1857^-1940. Eliach vividly brings to life the community's synagogue and study house, its schools, its bathhouse, its mutual aid societies, and its rabbis and their wives. She describes the town's economic life: the work of farmers, shopkeepers, livestock and fur traders, foresters, artisans, and craftsmen. She depicts the shtetl's households, including relationships within the family, marriages and divorces, and the celebration of holidays and the Sabbath.

Hardback and Soft Cover -- 818 pages - sixteen hundred photographs - Best Price: MileChai.com