One way Jewish survivors of the Holocaust sought to reclaim their lives and memories was by collaboratively authoring yizker bikher, memorial books, devoted to the lives and deaths of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. There are over 1,000 of these place-based volumes, written to memorialize the hometowns of the writers and to pass collective community memory to descendants of both the victims and the survivors.
Created not as objective monographs but as portable containers of memory, yizker bikher are both books and objects, and contain text and images that work in tandem. They are comprised of rich descriptions of everyday life before the war and – only towards the very end of any given volume – individual and communal experiences during the Nazi era. Equally present in the books are hand-drawn maps, sketches, religious iconography, photographs, and documents from daily life.
Editors of, and contributors to, yizker bikher commonly asserted that the books were intended as matzeyve, gravestones. Through an examination of the narrative, visual, and material structures of the volumes, my paper considers yizker bikher as sacred objects, and explores the implications of that claim on the critical examination of the material they contain.
One way Jewish survivors of the Holocaust sought to reclaim their lives and memories was by collaboratively authoring yizker bikher, memorial books, devoted to the lives and deaths of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. There are over 1,000 of these place-based volumes, written to memorialize the hometowns of the writers and to pass collective community memory to descendants of both the victims and the survivors.
Created not as objective monographs but as portable containers of memory, yizker bikher are both books and objects, and contain text and images that work in tandem. They are comprised of rich descriptions of everyday life before the war and – only towards the very end of any given volume – individual and communal experiences during the Nazi era. Equally present in the books are hand-drawn maps, sketches, religious iconography, photographs, and documents from daily life.
Editors of, and contributors to, yizker bikher commonly asserted that the books were intended as matzeyve, gravestones. Through an examination of the narrative, visual, and material structures of the volumes, my paper considers yizker bikher as sacred objects, and explores the implications of that claim on the critical examination of the material they contain.