- Paperback: 864 pages
- Publisher: Back Bay Books (Oct 6 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0316232394
- ISBN-13: 978-0316232395
- Product Dimensions: 19 x 3.8 x 25.4 cm
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 Kg
- Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #794,928 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon.com
Eishyshok, in Lithuania, was for nine centuries a center of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, where Jews lived "under all the various governments that had fought for control of it: Lithuanian, Polish, German, Russian, and Soviet." But as a result of the Holocaust, writes Eishyshok native Yaffa Eliach in this rich, vastly detailed history, "nearly a millennium of vibrant Jewish life had been reduced to stark images of victimization and death." Eliach offers his chronicle by way of a memorial to those lost citizens and their disappeared history, working through archives, family photo albums, and the memories of survivors. It is a fine and fitting memorial indeed, one that ranks alongside the important work of Raul Hilberg and Lucy Dawidowicz. --Gregory McNamee
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
It's hard to imagine that one Jewish town could keep a reader enthralled for so many pages, but Eliach pulls it off. Equal parts history and memoir?the author survived the Holocaust in Eishyshok as a child?the book focuses on the rich lives built by the Jews in the community, which, depending on the year, was under Polish, Lithuanian, Russian or German control. After detailing the central role that the synagogue and religion played in shtetl life, Eliach uses oral history, written documents and numerous photos to describe how Eishsyhok's Jews went about their daily affairs. The Brooklyn College professor deftly demonstrates how the Jewish population reacted to forces outside the shtetl. Some of these forces were political?the 1648 Chmielnicki massacre, the Russian takeover of the town as a result of the final 18th-century partition of Poland?while others were intellectual?the Jewish Enlightenment and the growth of Zionism, both of which modernized life in the town. What results is a case study that sheds light on the entire Eastern European Jewish experience. While Eliach goes to great lengths to focus on the world that the Jews created, the book's most moving moments come in its final chapters, as some of Eishyshok's residents, including the author herself, struggle for survival in the face of genocide. As in her "Tower of Life" exhibit on Eishyshok at the United States Holocaust Museum in D.C., Eliach revives a people and a place that seemed irrevocably lost. 430 b&w photos.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
IN AUGUST 1979 I WAS ON MY WAY TO RUSSIA, IN THE MIDST OF A FACT-FINDING MISSION to Eastern Europe. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
IN AUGUST 1979 I WAS ON MY WAY TO RUSSIA, IN THE MIDST OF A FACT-FINDING MISSION to Eastern Europe. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Yaffa the Historian Versus Yaffa the Storyteller?,
By J. K. (North America) - See all my reviews
This review is from: There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok (Paperback)
Having read this book, I don't quite know what to make of it. On one hand, she gives a tremendous amount of detail, including photographs, in showing the reader what life was like in the shtetl at Eisyshok. Not only does one learn about the rites of passage in shtetl life, but one also learns such seldom-discussed topics as the care of the mentally ill, and the treatment of converts to and from Judaism. She expresses sadness that the shtetl is gone (whence her title, There Once Was a World), but on the other hand one must remember that the Jews now have their own homeland, something which was only a distant dream (if that) for the centuries of Jews who lived in Eishyshok. I find it ironic to hear her defenders denounce the fact that her father, Moishe Sonenson, was a communist collaborator, in view of the fact that he is quoted, towards the end of her very book, as protesting his exile to Siberia in view of all of the work he did on behalf of the Soviet communists! Other things she writes are not so clear, and, forgive me if I find it hard to believe them. Can we seriously believe that her parents' killers, so observant that they noticed a scratch on the floor, suddenly forgot that little Jaffa might still be alive under her mother Zipporah's body? Or that there might be others hiding in the attic-closet? And who, especially under the trauma of a killing in action, counts and remembers the number of bullets fired by the assailants? Furthermore, after the killings of much of her family, she says that the Poles might come back to mutilate the bodies. Can we seriously suppose that a guerilla group would take the risk of a succeeding military operation just to mutilate bodies? These and other statements of hers do not seem to partake of reality.
3.0 out of 5 stars
What Did Then 7-yr Old Yaffa Eliach Personally Know?,
By A Searcher for Truth (Illinois, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok (Paperback)
There is an ongoing controversy about this book. Was her family killed by the Polish underground, with her the only lucky survivor, because they were Jewish or because they were Communists? The Poles have documentary evidence to support their case. And those who have followed Eliach's claims over the years allege that Eliach has changed her story a number of times. As for her personal experience, one wonders how the then 7-yr old Eliach could determine what the motives of her killers were anyway. Not too many 7 yr olds can make such judgements, and so Eliach's opinion, as the adult author of this book, can only rest solely on extraneous Polonophobic sources. As for Polish collaboration with the Nazis, Winston Churchill praised the Poles for being the only European nation not to produce a Quisling. Was he a victim of propaganda for making this statement?
5.0 out of 5 stars
Timely & Relevant,
By A Customer
This review is from: There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok (Paperback)
This book is especially significant and timely in light of the recent apology by Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski for the wartime massacre of Jewish villagers by their Polish neighbors 60 years ago. Read this book for a wonderfully detailed account of a town and a way of life that has been lost forever. It's disheartening to see how many of the Polish reviewers of this book are victims of the decades of propaganda that has taught them to believe that Poles were not collaborators in Nazi atrocities.
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