Commemorating and Constructing the Khurbn in Early Postwar Polish Jewish Memorial Books

• In Event: Yiddish Holocaust Memory in Eastern Europe: New Insights

Abstract

Between 1945 and 1950, post-Holocaust memorial books (Yid.: yizker bikher) commemorating destroyed Jewish communities in Poland were published in Poland, Displaced Persons camps in Germany, France, Mandatory Palestine, in the United States and in Latin America, most of them in Yiddish. How did survivors and refugees, still seeking new homes in the wake of the cataclysm, manage to gather the information and materials to create _yizker bikher_ so quickly and communicate with one another even as they moved around the globe? How did they understand the events that have come to be known as the Holocaust but which they termed the _khurbn_, i.e., destruction, in Yiddish?
The paper treats these early _yizker bikher_ as archives of memory and analyses the aesthetic, discursive, and evidentiary modes used to communicate the devastation of entire communities based on letters, photographs, testimonies, drawings, and necrologies. Examining the content and placement of these materials reveals when and why they were left in their original languages and when they were translated.

Author

• Eliyana R. Adler, Binghamton U