There Once Was A World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok

Two million visitors a year enter the US Holocaust Museum, where 1600 photographs from the shtetl of Eishyshok constitute what many consider to be the most moving exhibit in the museum - The Tower of Life. In this soaring, three-storey space we see the people of Eishyshok at their weddings and bar mitzvahs, their social clubs and literary gatherings, their winter sports and summer camps. Now Professor Yaffa Eliach, whose haunting collection of photographs gave faces to a murdered people, has written their history. Eliach’s nine century saga of East European Jewish life is richer and fuller than any other written. Her research took her from family attics on six continents to State Archives no scholar had seen since the start of The Cold War. Eliach’s own roots in Eishyshok, as a descendant of one of the five founding families and herself one of only 29 survivors of the Nazi massacre of the 3,500 inhabitants of the shtetl gives this book its depth and passion.