Let this Book be a Monument: Yizker Bikher and Jewish Collective Memory

Abstract

In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Eastern European Jews turned to a rich tradition of remembering lost peoples and cultures, and organized the collaborative writing of memorial books. There were over 1,000 of these place-based memory texts written by survivors and pre-war emigres in order to shape knowledge about the war, to emphasize the vibrancy of their prewar lives, and to share their memories and perceptions with future generations. This corpus of material has been largely overlooked by scholars over the past seventy years; this article begins to fill the gap in what is known about postwar memorial books.