Once There Was a Town

“From the varied threads of the Luboml and other memory books, Ms. Ziegelman weaves an animated tapestry of the daily routines, religious rituals and changing communal interactions among Jews and Christians…In sealing the names of the dead within them, the yizkor books refill that emptiness with the promise of memory.”
–Wall Street Journal

“Bittersweet… introduces readers to a remarkable but little-known artifact of the Jewish diaspora: yizkor books, or memory book… Alongside charming accounts of daily life drawn from several different yizkor books, Ziegelman shares poignant stories of her own family’s immigration to America and the terrible fate of the Jews of Luboml. It amounts to an immersive, dreamlike window into a tragically lost world.”
–Publishers Weekly

“A story of what might be called a shtetl sublime…evoking a world of song and story, faith and belonging.”
–Kirkus

“Demonstrate the importance of remembrance and storytelling in Jewish culture. Memories of love and family show the beauty that existed even under the most difficult circumstances.”
–Booklist

“A superb introduction to yizkor books that also works as a rich but concise overview of everyday life in a shtetl and as an affecting personal memoir (her family, not all of whom made it to the United States, was from Luboml, then in Poland and now in Ukraine). Ziegelman… is a fine prose stylist whose descriptions of domestic life… absolutely sing. But her keenest authorial decision was to structure Once There Was a Town by adapting the conventions of a typical yizkor book… After finishing her narrative, you will understand how our forebears chose to tell their stories to themselves and record them for their descendants; that, in its way, is as meaningful as the stories they told.”
–Jewish Federation of the Berkshires

“Masterfully weaving her own family’s story through the aching nostalgia of Yizkor books, Ziegelman brings the interwar years alive…. a deeply moving read.”
–Gwen Strauss, author of Milena and Margarete

“For the Jewish people, our books are our monuments. Once There Was A Town–like the yizkor books it chronicles–takes us on a phantom stroll through a landscape alive with stories, offering a window into a world lost but not forgotten.”
–Ilana Kurshan, author of If All the Seas Were Ink

“Ziegelman’s rich exploration of the nearly forgotten Yizkor books–arguably among the most essential European Jewish history ever collected–resurfaces generations of shtetl culture and Jewish life and tradition. With Once There Was a Town Ziegelman fulfills the mission of the Yizkor book authors and her own family, Holocaust survivors who came together after unspeakable loss to build a monument “of paper and ink”, to ensure future generations would never forget what happened to Europe’s Jews. This book could not arrive at a more critical moment.”
–Rebecca Frankel, author of Into the Forest

“A loss is not an absence but layers and layers of missing presences, which can be recalled with words and with care. The memory books of east European Jews, scattered like surviving Jews themselves, can together reveal those presences. With grace and sensitivity, Jane Ziegelman takes us from the pages of one such book to the shape of a world.”
–Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands and On Freedom and more

“Courageous, heartfelt history and storytelling. ‘How did we get here?’ at its finest.”
–Michael W. Twitty, James Beard award winning author of Koshersoul

“In luminous, tender prose, Jane Ziegelman brings to life the lost world of the shtetl… This book is both an elegy and a celebration, a testament to the power of remembrance and the resilience of a people who refused to be forgotten.”
–Benyamin Cohen, author of The Einstein Effect, senior writer, The Forward

Jane Ziegelman is the author of the classic 97 Orchard, and coauthor of the James Beard Award winning A Square Meal. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn, New York.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.