There Once Was a World, A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok (review)

Abstract

There Once Was a World, A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of EishyshokIf one were have walked the streets of the shtetl on a summer day in the first decades of the twentieth century, one would have been accompanied by the steady hum of Singer sewing machines. By the 1920s, most of the town's tailors and seamstress workshops -- and, indeed, nearly all young Jewish women -- had come rely on the machines. And if one were have walked along the streets of this town, one might happen by the garden of Hayya Sonenson, rare among Jewish gardens in that it boasted a colorful array of flowers as well as the vegetables upon which the town's Jewish residents relied. If one were have wandered into the town's bathhouse (located near a tributary of the river Kantil on Bod Gessl, Bathhouse Lane), be bled by leeches, perhaps, or receive a massage, one would undoubtedly have encountered the Jewish barber Alter der Sherer and his assistants, themselves Muslim Tatars and Christians.One can, of course, still walk the streets of (Eisiskes, as it is known in Lithuanian), but in the wake of the Holocaust, its Jewish comers must be reconstructed and remembered rather than witnessed. At least until recently. For with the publication of Yaffa Eliach's extraordinary There Once Was a World, one can -- borrowing from the Eishyshkian Yiddish proverb -- become farkrokhn in Eishyshok (lost in Eishyshok) once again. This work, the product of seventeen years of exhaustive, indeed obsessive research, succeeds in reconstructing Jewish with staggering detail and grace. In it, the sounds, smells, and richness of Jewish are remarkably palpable: one perceives a town that was very much alive and entirely unaware that it could be extinguished.As Eliach attests her in introduction, this project was born of a single goal, recreate for readers the vanished Jewish market town had once called home. To this end, Eliach meticulously reconstructs the 900-year history of this town, paying particular attention its vibrancy in the first decades of the twentieth century and the gruesome fate of Eishyshok's Jewish residents during the Holocaust. I was determined, Eliach writes, to find some kind of authentic documentation, visual or written, archival or anecdotal, on every Jewish person who had lived in the shtetl in the twentieth century, including those who had emigrated from it, those who had been privileged die a natural death in it, those who perished there or nearby during the Holocaust, and the handful of Holocaust survivors who had somehow lived tell the tale. …