When Yizkor Tells A Story

Pre-Shoah communities come back to life in collections of essays found in Yizkor Books.

Dear Reader,

Today, Yom HaShoah, is a day of mourning for the loss of millions of innocent Jewish men, women and children in Nazi Europe. It seems appropriate on this day to reflect on the lives they lived in a world that is no more.

I’m honored to offer this essay by Theodore Steinberg, an author and retired English professor, who describes what he has learned in translating several of these literary memorials from Yiddish into English.

Gary

Entering a lost world: A student’s query resulted in the author’s discovering details of Jewish communities in early 20th century Europe.

Theodore Steinberg

After a session of my Introductory Yiddish class, a student asked if I knew what  Yizkor Books were.  Of course I did, I said.  They are the pamphlets that synagogues use for Yizkor memorial services.  “No, not that kind,” he said.  “The other kind.”  It is “the other kind” that have become my retirement project, translating them into English, and that are the subject of this essay.

“The other kind” are collections of essays that were put together during, but mostly after, the Shoah, usually under the aegis of landsmanshaftn, organizations of residents from cities, towns, and shtetls who had survived the destruction of their communities.  These landsmanshaftn—located mostly in Israel, the United States, and Argentina—solicited essays and photographs from their members on virtually any aspect of their disappeared communities in Eastern Europe (or in Yiddishland, as it is coming to be known).  An editorial board reviewed and assembled the essays, and the volumes were published in small numbers, mostly for other members of the landsmanshaft.  No one knows exactly how many of these were printed, but the latest count that I know of is well over a thousand.  There are Yizkor Books for large cities, smaller cities, and even smaller towns.

The contents vary from book to book.  There are essays about the town’s history, about famous or distinctive people, about sports clubs, political movements, religious life, experiences during the Shoah, and about residents’ post-Shoah lives, among many other subjects.  

Reading the essays is a wonderful experience.  Readers must remember that almost none of the authors was a professional writer, so some of the essays are, if not slightly disorganized, then digressive.  Nonetheless, they provide invaluable insights into pre-Shoah life—the hopes, the problems, the relationships, the quarrels, the alliances, all the things that constituted everyday life.  There are descriptions of food, of synagogues, of chasidic prayer houses, of workingmen and women, of charity and social welfare organizations, and, of course, of anti-Semitic incidents.  In other words, these Yizkor Books describe a world that was destroyed – a real, vibrant, rich world that may often appear over-romanticized in modern retellings.

One notable aspect of the Yizkor Books is that the editors almost invariably include an introduction that makes a touching point: each Yizkor Book is a monument to its location.  The inhabitants of the towns may have been slaughtered and they may have lacked burial and gravestones, but these books can serve as their monuments, keeping alive their memories, their lives, their joys and sorrows.  Often the essays contain strings of names—here are the members of this board or the founders of this charitable organization or all the kosher butchers in town.  Some readers might find these lists extraneous, but as I translate them, I feel that I am helping to preserve their memories, contributing to a posthumous victory over their killers.  These are our people, and these were their lives, too often cut short, but beautiful in their own ways, and important, as all life should be.

There are in these Yizkor Books a number of poems as well, mostly written by ordinary people who were moved to express their memories and feelings in verse.  None of them is a Keats or a Yeats, or to put it in Yiddish terms, a Mani Leib or a Moyshe Leib Halpern, but their poems are heartfelt and poignant, “a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion,” as Wordsworth would say.

I referred above to my translating these precious works.  My Yiddish student, having shown me the Yizkor Book from his mother’s town, Wolomin (near Warsaw), asked if I might be interested in translating it.  He explained that the Jewish Genealogical Society was working to have all the Yizkor Books translated and put online.  Would I, he asked, be interested in translating this one.  I was, and so I did, and after that, five more, so far. 

The essays are primarily written in Yiddish and, because many of the survivors lived in Israel, some are in Hebrew.  I do only the Yiddish sections, largely because of my own attraction to Yiddish language and culture.  But I do encourage everyone to go to the website of the Jewish Genealogical Society to look into the Yizkor Book project.  You might want to look up the towns where your ancestors lived to see whether a Yizkor Book exists and whether it has been translated yet.  Or you might want to choose towns at random, just to see what life was like in Yiddishland before the Shoah.  And for those who are really interested, the Jewish Genealogical Society has also printed a number of the translations in book form.

Understandably, the essays occasionally romanticize the lost world that they are describing, but they also capture the spirit of that world.  Here’s one example.  In the Wolomin volume, Shmuel Zucker contributed an essay called “Erev Shabbos.”  He describes Friday afternoons, when schools closed early, when the smell of baking challahs filled the air, when people rushed to the bathhouse and then put on their finest clothes.  He describes the home preparations and candle lighting.  Then he jumps to the next day, to activities in the beis-medresh (synagogue) between the Mincha and Ma’ariv services.  Some of the men are learning Talmud, either alone or in groups, while others are talking politics.  Everyone is trying to stay warm in the poorly heated building.  And then, Zucker writes: “It sometimes happened that…suddenly would be heard a lament from an unhappy mother whose child was seriously ill.  Then everyone would immediately begin reciting Psalms.  We could feel in the air a great Jewish unity and care for each other.”

I find that short paragraph profoundly moving, as Zucker, having described a central community institution, shows how, at a time of crisis, the men who were gathered there put aside their own concerns and joined together in prayer for a mother in distress.

Each essay in these Yizkor Books shows such insights into a world that we can only visit through the records left by those who lived there.  They are an incredible resource that should be more widely known.  

Theodore Steinberg was Distinguished Teaching Professor in the English Department at SUNY Fredonia (NY) and is the author of several books, including a study of the 19th century author known as Mendele Mocher Seforim (Mendele the book peddler), widely considered the grandfather of Yiddish literature. Steinberg currently is translating a Yizkor Book from the Belorussian city of Vitebsk, home of artist Marc Chagall.