Finished reading all 800 pages of the Yizkor (memorial oral history) book from my great grandfather’s hometown. what strikes me is the small townnness of it all.. the socialists hanging at the barber shop debating the well-heeled doctors, the local racist, the town gossip
everyone knew everyone, for better or worse. The intense humanity with which people are described makes the ending even more gutting- to read that book is to feel you know these people in all their aspirations and foibles. Out of over five thousand Jews, few dozen survived
After the holocaust, survivors of 1400 villages and cities compiled oral histories devoted to preserving the memories of their annihilated hometowns. Many of these books are online, and many translated. If you’re Jewish from Eastern Europe your ancestor’s hometown is likely there
If you know the name of your family’s hometown, you can start looking here. I promise you, these books will change how you think about the past-you will see it as far richer, funnier, more fraught, complicated, foreign and familiar than you ever imagined
jewishgen.org/yizkor/databas…
jewishgen.org/yizkor/databas…
The thing about these books is that they are not sentimental- even when the narrators are straining as hard as they can towards sentimentality they are still speaking about a real place that they knew well, filled with heroes and jerkheads, flirts and posers- not about a fantasy
