There Once Was a World: Nine Century Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok

Hardcover. As New/As New. As new. Appears never read. No marks, writing, clean and tight. HARDCOVER. Photo boards + mylar cover printed sides.FIRST EDITION, First Printing.xiv + 818 pps. Yaffa Eliach was a member of President Carter's Holocaust Commission, which was charged with making recommendations for a US memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Her travels took her to her native town, which¿according to her¿is the site of one of the oldest Jewish settlements in Eastern Europe. During the trip, she decided that she would create a memorial to life, not to death. "Rather than focusing on the forces of destruction as most memorials do, mine would be an attempt at reconstruction. I wanted to recreate for readers the vanished Jewish market town I had once called home" (p. 4). She also wanted to create a photographic exhibit of the people of Eishyshok. "The 1,500 photographs that line the walls of the Tower of Life in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC were the ultimate results of that decision" The book consists of six parts: Part I Beginnings and Endings; Part II The Shufhoyf; Part III Shtetl Economy; Part IV Family and Community Life: Part V Modern Times; Part VI The Bitter End (1933-1941).The last 120 pages of the book are taken up by Notes, Glossary, and Index. The book is rich with historical photographs and maps.n an act of inspired resistance, Yaffa Eliach returns us the lived history of the shtetl of Eishyshok¿nine hundred years that came to an end in just two days at the hands of Nazi death squads. A densely woven tapestry of history, memory, ethnography, and family autobiography; this chronicle celebrates, in spare and powerful prose, the triumph, human pageant, and moral sacredness of an extraordinarily rich, and now lost, civilization. HEAVY - addtl shppg may apply. Nonfiction Finalist for the 1998 National Book Award