Map making as memory practice: The historical geography of East European shtetls as expressed in Jewish yizker bikher

Abstract

This article argues that the spatial subjectivity of the map maker is a crucial component of historical geography and uses maps in post-Holocaust yizker bikher to demonstrate how these hand-drawn geographies are invaluable counterweights to perpetrator mapping projects. To develop the argument, the article analyzes three selected yizker bikher maps, renderings of towns inhabited by Jewish and non-Jewish communities in prewar Poland as representations of the subjective idea of an historical place embedded in post-genocide memories of individual spatial experience. Yizker bikher are Jewish memorial books, historical publications compiled by communities of Holocaust survivors after World War II; they often feature hand-drawn maps from the perspective of the survivor. Building on a scholarship regarding cognitive mapping and the role of emotions in map-making, the article provides a deeper understanding of the yizker bikher drawings as a form of memory practice. Unlike the other sketches representing town spaces that are referred to in most of the cognitive mapping scholarship, the shtetl drawings not only represent a historical geography but also express the map maker's awareness of loss and grief, while working as a point of reference for sustaining the site- and community- oriented identity of the Jewish survivors displaced after the Holocaust.