FROM THE PUBLISHER: Two million visitors a year enter the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where 1,600 photographs from the shtetl of Eishyshok constitute what many consider to be the most moving exhibit in the museum - the Tower of Life. Eliach's nine-century saga of Eastern European Jewish life is richer and fuller than any ever written. Her research took her from family attics on six continents to state archives no scholar had seen since the start of the Cold War. Her research on family life, for example, shows that the "world of our fathers" was actually a world in which all the affairs of daily life were run by mothers. Her profound understanding of medieval history illuminates her description of early Lithuania, the last pagan country in Europe and the only one where Jews lived on equal terms with the rest of the population. Access to family letters and memorabilia and interviews with shtetl survivors gave her startling insight into one of history's most troubling questions: Why were the Jews so blind to the Nazi threat? SYNOPSIS When asked to work on a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, Yaffa Eliach decided that the best way to remember the dead was to honor the lives they lived. So in 1979, she set about a 17-year project to reconstruct the 900-year history of Eishyshok, a small Jewish settlement in Poland where no Jews remain. There Once was a World chronicles the centuries of Jewish life that so violently came to an end in World War II. A finalist for this year's nonfiction National Book Award, There Once was a World is a richly detailed history of changing life and enduring traditions in the small Polish shtetl. FROM THE CRITICS 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.

Every town has its history, and even though Eishyshok was a small Polish community, it reflected the trends and tendencies of the wider world. Eliach (Judaic studies, Brooklyn Coll.; Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, LJ 10/1/82) has spent 17 years researching the Jewish community where her ancestors were among the first settlers and where she spent her early years. Although Jewish history there had a grim finale in the Holocaust, Eliach set out to write a book celebrating the town's robust and creative past. What she has accomplished is a scholarly masterpiece for the informed lay reader. OVERSIZE SHIPPING!

 Little, Brown & Company 0-316-23252-1 / 9780316232524
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