Gender and Nostalgia: Images of Women in Early Yizker Bikher

Abstract

The yizker bikher—books Holocaust survivors created to memorialise their lost communities—have left the historian a rich trove of information about the lives of Jewish women during an era when their roles were being torn between the twin poles of tradition and revolution. Although the memorial books contain much more material on the lives of men than women, the choices the authors made about which female-centred material to include reveal much about the lost communities' ideas of family, education and leadership. Remembrances of women for their involvement in charity, for their service to the needs of community, and for their piety and knowledge appear even in the sections devoted to religious leaders of the community. The very same volumes include images of pious rebbetzins and of socialist revolutionaries. Nostalgia and a sense of loss proved the common denominator in uniting the memory of two very different Jewish worlds. The diverse materials in the dozens of these memorial books express the personal and communal crisis in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The sense of mourning and alienation from the emerging modern Jewish identity of the inter-war period led to the construction of an idealised memory of Jewish life.