Review by Booklist Review
Decades after immigrating to the U.S., Jane Ziegelman's family's hometown of Luboml--now in Ukraine, near the Polish border--still sat at the center of her family. Using yizkor books, stories of lost towns put together by ordinary people, Ziegelman (A Square Meal, 2016, with Andrew Coe) gives readers a true sense of Jewish life in the shtetl. While the focus is on where her family lived, she draws upon yizkor books from other villages to paint a vivid picture of a world completely destroyed by the Holocaust. Ziegelman does not shy away from describing the poverty and persecution Jews experienced, even before the Nazi invasion. These yizkor books demonstrate the importance of remembrance and storytelling in Jewish culture. Memories of love and family show the beauty that existed even under the most difficult circumstances. Along with readers who enjoy glimpses of daily life in the past, anyone who finds value in books like There Once Was a World or Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, both by Yaffa Eliach, will welcome this book.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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 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.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Curious about her family's Polish history, Ziegelman (coauthor of A Square Meal) looked through an old volume she found on her parents' bookshelves. It was a yizkor (memory book) book from her relatives' hometown of Luboml, Poland. Groups of Holocaust survivors wrote yizkor books at the end of World War II to preserve their memories of Jewish life before the war. Jewish towns kept these books as chronicles of daily life and notable events. Luboml's yizkor book includes information about its markets, prayer and study halls, stories and folklore, and religious factions. It also describes an educational system that segregates boys and girls. Only boys could study Torah and Talmud at the town's religious school. Girls attended the public school, where they learned local languages, literature, and general subjects. Readers learn of Sabbath and holiday celebrations, which are followed by antisemitic attacks, boycotts of Jewish businesses, war, and the destruction of a way of life. Although Ziegelman's family escaped Europe, most Jewish citizens did not. Today, the yizkor books that survived provide valuable information for historians, genealogists, and those seeking information about their families. VERDICT A beautiful tribute to the people lost and the memory books created to preserve their memories.--Barbara M. Bibel
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 of97 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 shoutI 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
