ONCE THERE WAS A TOWN

Lifting up their voices.

For Jewish communities after the Holocaust, so-called Yizkor books were put together to recall the particulars of towns, the names of families, and the material culture of a vanished world. Ziegelman, author of 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement, brings together stories of her family to re-create the everyday experience of that world. We get everything from the mundane to the sublime. “The potato occupied the base of the shtetl food pyramid,” she writes. Although men could escape the potato world of the senses by devoting themselves to lives of prayer and study, it was the women who lived in the here and now. “While the men were at synagogue singing and dancing, back at home, wives and daughters sat in total darkness, waiting for the first three stars to appear in the sky, the signal that Shabbos was over and the new week had started. They told stories and chatted with neighbors.” There is a poetry to this life, and the author points out the possibilities of beauty in a time of want. This is really a book about the place of women in creating beauty, a story of what might be called a shtetl sublime. Often silenced by judgmental men, women “commiserated with each other….Yizkor books provide flashes of what those conversations sounded like: Grandmother used to say, ‘Lift up your voice in front of the whole world and shout I am alive!’” Ziegelman offers such a shout, affirming the nature of Judaism not so much as a set of creeds but as a practice of storytelling. Jewish life centers on the word. But it centers, too, on the awareness that words are imperfect mirrors to the world. No words can describe past horrors. The author makes a valiant effort, evoking a world of song and story, faith and belonging.

A moving collection of reminiscences of European Jewish life before the Holocaust.