BOOK
REVIEWA lament for
the death of a shtetl
THERE ONCE
WAS A WORLD: A 900-Year Chronicle of the
Shtetl of Eishyshok
By Yaffa Eliach, Little,
Brown, 818 pages, $68
by IRENE TOMASZEWSKI
THERE
IS renewed interest in the history and culture
of Eastern European Jewry, and Yaffa Eliach's
There Once was a World is the latest addition to
a growing body of literature on the subject.
Eliach is a professor of literature and history
in the department of Judaic studies at Brooklyn
College, and the creator of The Tower of Life,
the three-storey gallery of photos from
Eishyshok, the shtetl (now in Lithuania) where
she was born, at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. In
1944, when Eliach was 4, she and her family and
a handful of others escaped the slaughter of
Eishyshok's inhabitants by the Nazis.
A 1998 U.S. National Book Award
finalist, There Once was a
World focuses on this shtetl, beginning
its story with the first Jewish settlement there
1,000 years ago. She is a descendent of those
first families, and writes about them with an
intense love and pride. Eishyshok, she writes,
was a renowned centre of Jewish scholarship, its
people endowed with a love of learning and a
devotion to their faith and their traditions.
Their story, illustrated with dozens of
photographs, reads like a collective oral
history, their legends and anecdotes woven
together in a tapestry of life -- religious,
family, social and work.
As a history, it is narrow in scope, too
narrow. Eliach concentrates on her own class,
the shtetl's elite, and though she mentions in
passing the various other classes -- artisans,
the poor, the Jews who lived beyond the village
or those in cities near and far --
There Once was a
World does not give us a picture of the
diversity of views, experiences, religious
expressions or political differences.
Socialists, Communists, the Hasidim, and reform
and secular movements were all of little
importance, alien thinking brought in from the
outside. Only Zionism, starting at the turn of
the century, had any bearing on the lives of the
shtetl.
Even more striking is the exclusion of the
gentile world. Some references to Russian or
Polish officials, fond memories of the German
occupiers during the First World War, and a
rabble of "peasants" in the market constitute
the non-Jewish presence. Poles are crude,
drunken, sadistic, anti-Semitic and largely
stupid. Eliach makes it quite clear that she
holds Poland and the Polish people, especially
the Polish underground, responsible for the
Holocaust, as much as, if not more than, the
Germans. This is a serious and irresponsible
distortion of history. Given the trauma of
Eliach's childhood, it is difficult to criticize
her, but she is a historian and there she must
be challenged.
Eliach does not recognize Germany's murderous
policies toward Polish Christians. Believing a
statement that "Hitler is searching for Jews to
kill, not Poles," she ignores all documented
history to show "the good fortune of the local
Poles." I will assume that Hitler's policy
toward Poland is too well known to spend more
time on this.
There Once was a World
is an unbearably sad book. If the shtetl
is somewhat idealized, it is because this is, in
many ways, an obituary. Our horror of war pales
beside the horror of genocide, and we have to
understand the bitterness. But we must try to
understand history, too.
Irene
Tomaszewski's latest book is I Am First a
Human Being: The Prison Letters of Krystyna
Wituska.Related
Reading
Shtetl:
The Life and Death of a Small Town and the
World of the Polish Jew, by Eva Hoffman
(Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
Kokin: A
Quest, by Theodore Richmond (Jonathan Cape,
1995).
write
to David Irving