"From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry", edited and translated by Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin (Book Review)

Carefully selected by the editors, these 77 excerpts reveal this destroyed world. They cover the topics of Our Towns, Townspeople, Lifeways, Events, Legends and Folklore, Holocaust, Return, and The Townspeople Abroad. The descriptions of the shtetls before the Holocaust in the section "Our Towns" -- such as "Light and Shadow" (Khelm) and "Girls' Kheyders" (Horodets) -- contrast eerily with the chapters on the Holocaust in the section called "Holocaust." The excerpts "Kol Nidre in Auschwitz" written by Yoysef Vaynberg in the Struzhuv yizkor book, and "The Capture of Girls," by Tala Maska-Shults in the Kolo yizkor book, are heartbreaking first-person narratives on the horror of the Holocaust, standing in contrast to the descriptions of Jewish life in pre-1939 Polish shtetlach. Many Jewish genealogists have been drawn to yizker bikher as sources of primary information about their relatives who died in the Holocaust as well as first-person narratives on how their relatives lived. To overcome the language barrier and to make the yizker bikher accessible to all researchers, translations of yizkor books are now being commissioned or being done by volunteer translators. Because of the cost and time involved in translating an entire book, usually only sections -- typically the table of contents and the necrology -- are translated first (additional sections are translated later as time and money permit), and these are put on the web site of JewishGen, Inc., a group which focuses on genealogical research on the Internet and hosts a Yizkor Book Translation Project. Much oft his current recognition oft he value of yizkor books and the interest in having the books translated and made accessible to all researchers can be attributed to the efforts of [Jack Kugelmass] and [Jonathan Boyarin] in From a Ruined Garden to point people to the function of memorial books in revealing Jewish experience in history.