Product Description
Revisiting the process of political community building in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, this book analyzes the roles that international actors have played in these processes and assesses the unintended consequences of this involvement. The study differs from other works on ethnic minorities and nationalism in the former Soviet Union by exploring the use of minority rights discourse and the salience of historical memory. Case studies examine the transformation of nationalism in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - all former Soviet republics - which have experienced Soviet nationalities policy first-hand. Primarily intended for an academic audience and practitioners interested in promoting tolerance in multiethnic societies, the book's historical narrative will also appeal to readers with a general interest in the former Soviet Union and post-Communism. ... Read more

Product Description
"In the soaring, three-story space that is the Tower of Life at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., sixteen hundred photographs collected by the historian Yaffa Eliach give face to a murdered people. In There Once Was a World, Eliach brilliantly and movingly records the history of that people.

Nineteen years of scholarship, a poet's ear, and a storyteller's voice have yielded what is perhaps the richest, fullest, most detailed portrait of Eastern European Jewish life that we will ever have, a book that encompasses both the sweep of history and an intimate view of the day-to-day lives of generations of small-town Jews, in all their uniqueness and universality. Eliach's own roots in Eishyshok, as a descendant of one of the five founding families and herself one of only twenty-nine survivors, give her work an unrivaled depth and passion.

Two million visitors a year enter the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where 1,600 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-story 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 the history of that people.

Eliach's nine-century saga of Eastern European Jewish life is richer and fuller than any ever 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. Confronted with the near total disappearance of the world of the shtetl, Eliach was indefatigable in her search for the truth-of a people, a place, a culture.

Some of what she found was as familiar as the chicken soup on a Jewish table, or an image from a painting by Chagall; other findings were more unexpected. Her research on family life, for example, shows that the "world of our fathers" was actually a world in which all the affairs of daily life were run by mothers. Her profound understanding of medieval history illuminates her description of early Lithuania, the last pagan country in Europe and the only one where Jews lived on equal terms with the rest of the population. Access to family letters ,and memorabilia and interviews with shtetl survivors gave her startling insight into one of history's most troubling questions: Why were the Jews so blind to the Nazi threat? In Eishyshok, she learned, as in hundreds of communities in Eastern Europe, the German occupiers of World War I had been so civilized that no one could believe their sons would be any different. Yet the June day in 1941 when Nazi troops roared into Eishyshok marked the beginning of the end for the shtetls 3,500 Jews.

In this book, as in her Tower, Eliach has sought to emphasize life over death. Nineteen years of scholarship, a poet's ear, and a storyteller's voice have yielded a book that contains both the sweep of history and an intimate portrait of the day-to-day lives of generations of small-town Jews, in all their uniqueness and universality. But it is Eliach's own roots in Eishyshok, as descendant of one of the five founding families and one of only twenty-nine survivors, which give her work its depth and passion." Amazon.com Review
Eishyshok, in Lithuania, was for nine centuries a center ofJewish life in Eastern Europe, where Jews lived "under all the variousgovernments that had fought for control of it: Lithuanian, Polish,German, Russian, and Soviet." But as a result of the Holocaust, writesEishyshok native Yaffa Eliach in this rich, vastly detailed history,"nearly a millennium of vibrant Jewish life had been reduced to starkimages of victimization and death." Eliach offers his chronicle by wayof a memorial to those lost citizens and their disappeared history,working through archives, family photo albums, and the memories ofsurvivors. It is a fine and fitting memorial indeed, one that ranksalongside the important work of RaulHilberg and LucyDawidowicz. --Gregory McNamee ... Read more

Customer Reviews (22)

Wonderful Book, great amazon service.
I had this book along time ago, and gave it to someone to borrow, and never got it back...I was looking around on the internet to purchase it from a bookstore since I could not find it locally. I found the best price for it on Amazon, and was exstatic! I recieved it in the condition stated by the seller in a timely manner and the transaction itself was smooth. I felt that if I needed to contact the seller for any reason, it would have been a wonderful experience anyway! Thank you, and I will continue to shop with Amazon!

A book that is richly-detailed and gives compelling insights into a lost world
Yaffa Eliach's "There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok" is a compelling book of a lost world -the Jews of Eishyshok who were mostly murdered in massacres carried out by the Nazis and their collaborators between Sep 25-26th, 1941. In this book, Eliach documents the richness of Jewish life in Eishyshok, Lithuania - the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, their unique way of life,providing intimate glimpses into a vanished world that no longer exists after the Holocaust.

The book reads a lot like a novel, and I was so absorbed that I finished the book in less than three days. There are numerous photographs throughout this book, and it is amazing that a lot of them depict people who had either perished during the Holocaust or survived. It shows the great amount of effort that must have gone into compiling all the information to trace the fates of most of the people pictured in this book. It is heartrending to read the stories in here, and yet it made me realise how very important this work is - it stands as a testament to the rich Jewish culture that flourished for 900 years in Eishyshok, and of the decimation of that very culture at the hands of monsters. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the Holocaust.

Polish and Lithuanian denials
I feel renewed horror that, to this day, Polish and Lithuanian reviewers use this format to try to deny their participation in the murder of the Jews who lived in Eishyshok and all over Poland.. even blame the victims.They murdered Jews, stole their property, and beat, murdered, and intimidated Jews who survived the holocaust and tried to return to their homes, tried to reclaim any small portion of their property.I am disgusted by the cowardliness of those naysayers and blamers who try to pass their crimes off onto the victims even to this day, further abusing people that they killed or helped kill and who are unable to defend themselves.

a lost world that lives in the soul of all jews...
In her very detailed and extensive account of life in a jewish market town of Eastern Europe, the author gives a vivid glimpse of the daily life, emotions and longings of its members. A real interesting book that transports us to the middle of a vibrant community that lived, cried, and smiled during all their history until the bitter end.

A must read for anyone intereste in the jewish culture and it's ethos.

An important and moving book.
This meticulously researched book chronicles the 900-year-old settlement of Eishyshok, a center of culture and tradition that was virtually extinguished by the Holocaust.Rather than focus on the terrible end, the author has endeavored to revive the town and its inhabitants through salvaged photographs, narratives, and history gathered over many years of travel and research.The author has produced a moving and well documented book that serves history while respecting and memorializing the individual people who gave the town its spirit.I have to doubt the motives of those who are using this review space to disect the author's own life and memories, which are not the subject of this book. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume was published in 1864.

This is an easy read for those who love to read about mid-19th century Eastern Europe and Russia from the viewpoint of an outsider.The author shares touching stories about the royals as well as the peasants and, as you can see below, he covers a variety of subjects.

Chapters:

Chapter 1 - The English Government and the Poles
Chapter 2 - Prince Wittgenstein's Letter
Chapter 3 - Wilna
Chapter 4 - General Mouravieff
Chapter 5 - Prison Hospitals
Chapter 6 - Wounded Insurgents
Chapter 7 - Political Prisoners
Chapter 8 - Political Assassins
Chapter 9 - Courts-Martial
Chapter 10 - Peasant-Duputations
Chapter 11 - Werkey
Chapter 12 - The House of Radzovill
Chapter 13 - The Bisons
Chapter 14 - Memories of 1812
Chapter 15 - Bad Omens
Chapter 16 - Napoleon's Writing Table
Chapter 17 - Flight from Wilna
Chapter 18 - Repentant Insurgents
Chapter 19 - State of Lithuania
Chapter 20 - Warsaw
Chapter 21 - The Consul General
Chapter 22 - Count DeBerg
Chapter 23 - The Spirit of the Press
Chapter 24 - The Grand Duke Constantine
Chapter 25 - The Grand Duchess
Chapter 26 - Assassination and the Catholic Church
Chapter 27 - The Soiree at the Viceregal Court
Chapter 28 - The Citadel of Warsaw
Chapter 29 - The Prison Diet
Chapter 30 - Female Prisoners
Chapter 31 - The Male Prisoners
Chapter 32 - Torture of Political Prisoners
Chapter 33 - Attempt to Murder Count DeBerg
Chapter 34 - The Panic
Chapter 35 - The Monasteries
Chapter 36 - The Catholic Priesthood and the Poignard
Chapter 37 - General Trepoff
Chapter 38 - A Mother's Prayers
Chapter 39 - The Carbonari
Chapter 40 - Sentenced to Death
Chapter 41 - Torture at Warsaw
Chapter 42 - Manifesto of the National Government
Chapter 43 - Pack the Press
Chapter 44 - Foreigh Journals
Chapter 45 - Poland and Italy
Chapter 46 - Actual State of Poland

A few excerpts from the book:
-" You will be surprised when I tell you," the Grand Duchess said, "that I leave this place with the greatest regret.It is a general idea that we are only attached to places where we have been happy, but yet this palace is dear to me, though it is here that I have first known real sorrow.It was here, in this room,
that I received my wounded husband the night the attempt was made upon his life.He had changed his dress and mastered the pain of his wound, and also his weakness from loss of blood, so that I might not be alarmed; for the doctor thought that in my then state of health any violent shock might have a fatal effect."

- When the secret of the Polish revolution was discovered, when numbers of the anti-Russian Poles perceived that they had been deceived, that they had unwittingly sold themselves to a secret society, which as Kossuth expressed it, saura se faire obeir, they would most willingly have retired from the trap into which they had fallen, but the issue was barred with poignards. The exactions of the soi-disant National Government were exorbitant.There is scarcely a landed proprietor in the country
whose revenue has not become embarrassed by the sums he has been obliged to pay to the revolutionists. I have seen nobles and
large landed proprietors living in hourly terror of assassination, barricaded in their own houses, dreading the entrance of the " hanging gendarmerie," to whose presence in the country they might have been themselves instrumental, but who now kept them in perpetual terror.

... Read more

Product Description
Oral history, commentary, anecdotes from Lithuanians and Lithuanian-Americans. Numerous b/w photos. Footnotes. Chapter reading lists. Discussion questions. Glossy throughout. ... Read more

Product Description
Illustrations From Small Town, My Destroyed Home, A Recollection by Issachar Ber Ryback ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Family Stories: Travels Beyond the Shtetel
An important book treating a serious subject with charm and humor through brief, poetic vignettes.The wanderings of a Jewish family come alive without pathos or sentimentality, taking the reader from their home in Lithuania in the 1920's through Germany and Switzerland, to arrival in the United States in 1939.I have given this book as a Bar/Bat Mitzvah present and been told that the whole family was entranced by it. ... Read more