Memorial Books of Eastern European Jewry: Essays on the History and Meanings of Yizker Volumes

303 Pages·2011·1.837 MB·English

by  Rosemary Horowitz (editor)

Memorial Books of
Eastern European Jewry
ALSOBY
ROSEMARYHOROWITZ
Elie Wiesel and the Art of Storytelling
(McFarland, 2006)
Memorial Books of
Eastern European Jewry
Essays on the History and
Meanings of Yizker Volumes
EDITED BY
R H
OSEMARY OROWITZ
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Memorial books of Eastern European Jewry : essays on the history
and meanings of Yizker volumes / Edited by Rosemary Horowitz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-4199-0
softcover : 50# alkaline paper
1. Memorial books (Holocaust)—History. 2. Holocaust,
Jewish (1939–1945) 3. Jews—Europe, Eastern—History—
20th century. 4. Holocaust survivors—Intellectual life.
I. Horowitz, Rosemary.
D804.195.M46 2011
940.53'18—dc22 2011002748
BRITISHLIBRARYCATALOGUINGDATAAREAVAILABLE
© 2011Rosemary Horowitz. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover image © 2011Shutterstock
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Contents
Introduction 1
Part I: History
1 A History of Yizker Books (ROSEMARY HOROWITZ) 7
2 Israel as the Cradle of Yizker Books (MICHLEAN AMIR) 28
Part II: Landmark Essays
3 Landsmanshaftn Literature in the United States During the
Past Ten Years (PHILIP FRIEDMAN) 43
4 Review of Yizker Books—1953 (JACOB SHATZKY) 54
5 Review of Yizker Books—1955 (JACOB SHATZKY) 68
6 A Survey and Evaluation of Yizker Books (ELIAS SCHULMAN) 81
7 “Memorial Books” as a Source for Research into the History
of Jewish Communities in Europe (ABRAHAM WEIN) 89
Part III: Studies of Yizker Books
8 Reception of Memorial Books in Poland (MONIKA
ADAMCZYK-GARBOWSKA) 107
9 “To Hold Our Own Against Silence” (ADINA CIMET) 122
10 “Write This as a Memorial in the Book”—A Jewish Pattern
for Memory (RONI KOCHAVI-NEHAB) 143
11 Blood Ties: Leib Rochman’s Yiddish War Diary (JAN SCHWARZ)163
Part IV: Studies Using Yizker Books
12 Authenticating the Historical Fiction of Uri Orlev
(ROSEMARY HOROWITZ) 183
v
vi PART I : HISTORY
13 Yizker Books and Photographic Form (DANIEL MAGILOW) 200
14 The Others in Yizker Books (RIVKA PARCIAK) 222
15 Klezmer Memories in Yizker Books (YALE STROM) 244
Part V: Bibliography
16 A Survey of Reference Books (ROSEMARY HOROWITZ) 261
17 A Survey of Collections (AMY BURNETTE AND ROSEMARY
HOROWITZ) 265
About the Contributors 289
Index 291
Introduction
From the Russian civil wars through the Nazi years, the Jews of Eastern
Europe were targets of ongoing violence throughout the first half of the twen-
tieth century. One response by some people to their extreme personal and
communal losses was to compile a memorial book. The earliest such books
from that time are the 1921volume to Zhitomir; the 1924 volume to Prosk u-
rov; and the 1937 volume to Felshtin.1 To an extent, those books, written
dur ing the interwar period, established the pattern for the Holocaust-era vol-
umes. Influenced by religious, historical, and cultural practices, the Holo-
caust-era works, known variously as yizker bikher, sifre zikaron, or pinkeysim,
are monuments in print commemorating the life and death of a place and its
people. While these volumes started appearing in the 1940s, their numbers
peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. Distilling information from one bibliography
shows that 25 books were issued in the 1940s, 117 in the 1950s, 188 in the
1960s, 180 in the 1970s, 65 in the 1980s, 37 in the 1990s, and a few later on.2
About language, one analysis finds that 216 of 348 volumes were written pre-
dominately in Hebrew, 82 in Yiddish, 35 in English, 8 in Hungarian, and 7
in other languages.3Some books have the same article in two languages making
it possible for those who did not know one language to read about their ances-
tral hometowns in the other; others have summaries or introductions in
English. Ultimately, about 75 percent of all books were published in Israel.
Publication trends changed in the 1980s when English translations of earlier
books started to be issued, and then again in the 1990s, when new media ver-
sions appeared.
No conclusive total number of Holocaust-era books is available due to
various ways of defining the genre. Some people restrict the definition to those
volumes prepared by landsmanshaftn, the mutual aid organizations comprised
of immigrants from the same region or town; others count volumes written
by individuals. Thus, the more narrow definition would not classify Melody
Amsel’s Between Galicia and Hungary: The Jews of Stropkov as a yizker book.
1
2 INTRODUCTION
Similarly, neither Liliana Picciotto Fargion’s Il libro della memoria, gli Ebrei
deportti dall’Italia 1943–45, a reckoning of Jewish Italian losses, nor the books
commemorating Western European communities would be included. The sig-
nificant work Lerer yizker bukh, a volume dedicated to the teachers of Poland,
would not count either.
The total number of books published during any particular period
depends on how and when the books were counted. In 1973, Abraham Wein
estimated that about 400 books had been published in the previous thirty
years; that same year, David Bass counted 342 books. David Kranzler iden-
tified about 600 in 1979, and Paul Hamburg identified 800 in 1998.4Currently,
Yad Vashem lists over 1,000 books in its yizker book collection. Counting
translations would further increase the total.
For the Holocaust survivors and their compatriots, yizker books were
oriented toward the past, as well as the future. Among other reasons, the
books were written to memorialize the hometown and to inspire its descen-
dants. Genealogists, academics, librarians, and curators have also expressed
interest in the books. For instance, to genealogists, the books are very useful
for the pictures that may show a relative in a class or a youth group meeting;
the maps that may show the name of the street where the family lived and
the proximity of the home to the school, synagogue, or market; the descrip-
tions of common local professions that may apply to family members; and
the necrologies and lists that may contain family names. For librarians, in
addition to an interest in contents, there are professional issues related to col-
lection development, collection management, and other concerns. For cura-
tors, the books are artifacts, the actual products of the survivor community,
which may be displayed as material culture.
Critical attention to the volumes has varied. The first group of scholars
to evaluate the books, which included Jacob Shatzky, Beryl Mark, Philip
Friedman, Elias Schulman, and Abraham Wein, primarily viewed the books
as flawed historical sources. While aware of the quantity of material in the
books and its usefulness for certain types of studies, the reviewers in the 1950s
and 1960s tended to point out the deficiencies in the books for historians. As
Philip Friedman articulates in one assessment:
It is true that it is not easy to write historical monographs when it is known
that all archival sources, national as well as communal, have been destroyed
or are now behind the Iron Curtain. Even the local periodicals and newspap-
ers, so important to the history of previous decades, are mostly no longer in
existence. We must therefore reconstruct the historical past from available
fragments and rely on recollections and memoirs. Jewish historians and editors
of yizker books have more than once pointed to these difficulties. Compare
for example Dr. Jacob Shatzky’s foreword in Pinkes Mlave to Dr. Refoel
Introduction 3
Mahler’s foreword in Tshenstokhover yidn. As a result, the place of honor
in many yizker books is not relegated to historical material but rather to
descriptions of ways of life; institutions, folklore, idioms, contemporary mem-
oirs, biographies, various episodes and experiences of the Nazi era, and the
like.5
His point is that while the books may be problematic sources for the
study of history, they contain much material for the study of culture. In the
1970s, researchers started re-evaluating the books. During that period, a couple
of monographs using the books as sources were published, specifically William
Glicksman’s volume on Jewish social welfare institutions in Poland and Isaiah
Trunk’s on the Judenrat. During the 1980s, Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan
Boya rin’s From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry and
Annette Wieviorka and Itzhok Noborski’s Les Livres du Souvenir: Memoriaux
Juifs de Pologne, two groundbreaking publications, introduced the genre to a
new audience.
Memorial books continue to receive attention. The work of Robert Moses
Shapiro and Andrew Koss shows that yizker books may be useful for the study
of previously overlooked topics, such as Soviet Jewry. Besides that, new
approaches of study with new units of analysis are also emerging. The work
of Natalia Aleksiun, Daniel Magilow, Katharina Hall, and Jeffrey Veidlin ger
represents these new directions in research. Aleksiun uses the concept of gender
to examine the representation of women in yizker books; Magilow stud ies
photographs to examine the visual aspects of yizker books; Hall uses the con-
cept of memory to examine literature and yizker book traditions; and Vei-
dlinger uses the books to study Jewish cultural life. International interest
in the books is growing as scholars in Germany, France, Israel, Australia,
Poland, and elsewhere turn to the books. The work of Monika Adamczyk-
Garbowska, Adam Kopciowski, and Andrzej Trzciüski, who are introducing
the books in translation to a new generation of Polish readers, is especially
exciting.
Taken together, these studies underscore the value of yizker books as
objects from the survivor culture and as sources for genealogical and scholarly
research. They also suggest different theoretical and methodological approaches
from which the books may be analyzed. Much may still be gleaned from the
books, including information about education, religion, politics, commerce,
recreation, language, culture, youth, social welfare, literature, and other topics.
Additionally, along with their memory maps and photographs, the books con-
tain other illustrative material, for instance, line drawings, paintings, repro-
ductions, and religious images. All that and more needs to be studied. Thus,
the overarching goal of this collection is to deepen the appreciation of the
books and encourage their use.