Jennifer Rich first interviewed her grandmother in 2009 about her life in Kostopol (today, Kostopil), a small town in western Ukraine. Not long after, a book called Sefer Kostopol arrived in the mail. The musty volume was one of more than a thousand yizker bikher, or placed-based memory books, published after the Holocaust.
Hoping to understand the pre-World War II shtetl of her grandmother’s youth, Rich still found the bygone world of Kostopol elusive. However, in the pages of Sefer Kostopol, Rich discovered the closest thing she could to a connection with that lost community.
Years later, Rich, now the Executive Director of the Rowan Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at Rowan University, has published Paper Tombs, a study of 280 volumes just like Sefer Kostpol.
Painstakingly assembled by prewar émigrés and Holocaust survivors in the United States, Israel, and Argentina, these books were created primarily for the descendants of people who shared the same hometown. Some editors and contributors had bigger aspirations, hoping their work would reach future historians and writers.
Decades ago, scholars first dismissed these memory books as amateur histories; they’ve also been discounted for their meandering or “haphazard” qualities. Indeed, Rich’s close readings show that most memory books meld visual content with unusual narrative structures and repetitive or even contradicting testimony. This sometimes makes for a disjointed reading experience.
Rich convincingly argues that this should not lead historians, or anyone else interested in Eastern European Jewish history and genealogy, to see the collections as unreliable. Readers are encouraged to approach them as “mosaics of stories,” whose pieces, when viewed together, offer richly textured portraits.
One of the highlights is Rich’s moving “narrative tour” of the fictional town of Heimish. The twelve-page essay is inspired by the style and content found in yizker bikher remembrances.Among the most vivivid descriptions is that of mothers washing clothes in a river and whipping them against stones, the sound “reassuring the children swimming that their mothers were close by if they were needed.”
Also noteworthy is Rich’s analysis of how the earliest modern memory books — created in response to the ferocious pogroms of the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1921 — influenced the yizker bikher produced after Nazi Germany’s invasion of these same territories just two decades later.
This intimate history testifies to the fullness of prewar Jewish life and to the people — contributors, committees, editors — who gave something of themselves to preserve its memory.
Maksim Goldenshteyn is Seattle-based writer and the author of the 2022 book So They Remember, a family memoir and history of the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine.
