Buried under the rubble of time, forgotten by the vicissitudes of history, lie two small towns, both shtetls that until recently have been lost to memory, especially to the memory of families who ended up in the English-speaking world. They were sister towns, no more than a mile apart, and their economies, cultures, institutions, and families were so intertwined with one another that some residents later hyphenated the town names, as if they were one place. In the end, residents of the two towns were liquidated together in an area along the road between them.

The larger of the two towns, Mlynov (also spelled Mlinov among other variations), still exists on maps today as Mlyniv, in what is now western Ukraine, close to Dubno. There was a small Jewish community residing there not long after the area became part of Tzarist Russia in 1793. The smaller of the two towns, called Mervits ( Muravica,
Muravista, among other variations), no longer appears on maps today and its prior location is just outside the existing border of its larger and still existing neighbor.

This new translation of the memorial volume opens a window into life as once lived in these two thriving, interconnected shtetls in the period from 1900 until 1942. Partly a collection of childhood recollections, folklore and stories, combined with the horrifying accounts of these towns’ bitter end, these essays are a gift to those in the next generation who are seeking to understand where their ancestors came from and to honor their memories.