Once There Was a World: A 900 Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok, by Yaffa Eliach (oversize HC, 818 pages, 1998, $5)
Professor Eliach 's collection of photographs from the small village of Eishyshok, exhibited as "The Tower of Life", are a must see at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Eishyshok was Eliach's early childhood home. It was also one of the oldest Jewish settlements "in that part of the world", "home to generation upon generation of Jews, going back to the 11th century." The timeline abruptly ends with the Holocaust. The land survived, but the people and their culture vanished. Eliach wants us to remember these people, her people, as more than skeletal camp survivors, or crematorium ashes. We all know how these people died, but how had they lived? What was their day-to-day life like over the centuries?
Professor Eliach set out to build a memorial, not to the death of a people, but to their amazing 900 years of life.
Look for this book on the new non-fiction table. (?)
