To turn the pages of 100 Objects is to enter the now van­ished world of East­ern Euro­pean Jew­ry. The one hun­dred objects fea­tured in this book reveal the cre­ativ­i­ty and per­sis­tence, in the face of hard­ship, of Jew­ish life in the four­teenth through the twen­ti­eth centuries.

Most East­ern Euro­pean com­mu­ni­ties kept records through­out this peri­od, but they were large­ly sta­tis­tics, with no doc­u­men­ta­tion of folk cus­toms and the small plea­sures and activ­i­ties of dai­ly life. As Europe mod­ern­ized, Simon Dub­now (1860−1941), the schol­ar and his­to­ri­an of world Jew­ry, issued a call in 1891 to col­lect mate­r­i­al on Jew­ish life in the Russ­ian Empire in order to cre­ate an under­stand­ing and full pic­ture of Jew­ish life. The ethno­g­ra­ph­er S. An-ski (1863−1920) was also con­cerned with the loss of Jew­ish folk cus­toms and toured the Pale of Set­tle­ment in 1912 – 1914 to record folk tales, music, rit­u­al objects, art, and any prac­tice — reli­gious, med­ical, super­sti­tious — that was part of dai­ly life.

Influ­enced by the work of Dub­now, An-ski, and oth­er researchers, YIVO (Yid­dish Sci­en­tif­ic Insti­tute) was found­ed in 1925 in Vil­na to col­lect ephemera and folk mate­r­i­al to add to the offi­cial records Jews kept. YIVO was relo­cat­ed to New York in 1940 as Ger­many advanced on Europe. With its col­lec­tions, YIVO seeks to edu­cate, stim­u­late schol­ar­ship, and enrich con­tem­po­rary cul­ture through its trove of folk mate­r­i­al and ephemera — the small details that add up to a big­ger sto­ry. In the words of its edi­tor, ​“This book cel­e­brates the small details.”

From the four­teenth cen­tu­ry is a frag­ment of a Rashi man­u­script used in the bind­ing of a Chris­t­ian book. To save mon­ey and get con­demned Jew­ish works out of cir­cu­la­tion, Chris­t­ian book­binders reg­u­lar­ly recy­cled parch­ment from Jew­ish man­u­scripts, pre­serv­ing in this strange way thou­sands of frag­ments. From 1949 comes Col­lege Yid­dish: An Intro­duc­tion to the Yid­dish Lan­guage and to Jew­ish Life and Cul­ture. A trib­ute to An-ski’s work are stained and edit­ed pages from his Yid­dish trans­la­tion of Der Dibek, which he orig­i­nal­ly wrote in Russ­ian. Charred rem­nants of a Torah scroll tes­ti­fy to the pogroms that marked the vio­lence after the breakup of the Russ­ian and Aus­tro-Hun­gar­i­an empires. A grog­ger designed around a swasti­ka, cre­at­ed in a dis­placed per­sons camp after World War II, is a small tri­umph. The pol­i­tics of the hard left are graph­i­cal­ly encap­su­lat­ed in William Gropper’s car­i­ca­ture of Franklin Roo­sevelt, top hat and all, as a spi­der whose legs bear the names of ills of capitalism.

100 Objects is divid­ed into ten equal sec­tions: Beliefs and Cus­toms, His­to­ry, The Writ­ten Word, Per­form­ing Arts, Visu­al Arts, Labor, Youth, The Holo­caust and Its After­math, Immi­gra­tion, and YIVO His­to­ry. Each object is beau­ti­ful­ly pho­tographed and accom­pa­nied by an explana­to­ry essay by a lead­ing schol­ar. The qual­i­ty of the pho­tographs and large for­mat allow the read­er to linger and take in the full impact of the object.

100 Objects may speak to Amer­i­can Jews, con­cen­trat­ing as it does on East Euro­pean Jew­ry, from which many Amer­i­cans are descend­ed. The select­ed objects — from a col­lec­tion of 24 mil­lion, stored in count­less col­lec­tion box­es — lean toward the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­turies and may kin­dle many memories.