Sunrise, Sunset
The long, rich history of a single vanished shtetl of eastern europe

Author: By Jonathan Dorfman

Date: SUNDAY, December 20, 1998

Page: K1

Section: Books

There once was a world
A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok
By Yaffa Eliach. Little, Brown.
818 pp. Illustrated. $40.

Who returns to Chelsea? Certainly not the descendants of that city's Jewish community, now living comfortably in Brookline or Newton. The same could be said of Mattapan, Roxbury, and other turn-of-the-century Jewish redoubts. In truth, aside from the Stars of David on former synagogues (now, typically, churches or community centers), you will find virtually no trace of those places' once-teeming Jewish centers. No Jewish culture. No Jewish worship. No Jews.

Old neighborhoods evoke nostalgia. But the reality is that Jewish life in these places was doomed: The wider society was too attractive to keep their denizens contained or their culture from being transformed by the acids -- and opportunities -- of modernity and assimilation. In short, however disillusioned you are with the suburban synagogue, you would rather be a sociologist in Palo Alto than a Hebrew School teacher in Mattapan.

The same thing was at work in the shtetl, the European variant, as it were, of Chelsea. Ingrained in the popular imagination by ``Fiddler on the Roof,'' the shtetls were the small towns and villages in which the mass of Jews lived under the sufferance -- and pogroms -- of their Gentile masters. Modernity, too, doomed the shtetls: with the (grudging) emancipation of the Jews by Napoleon and other enlightened despots, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Berlin became magnets for Jewish secular and cultural energies. In Eastern Europe, however, for Jews too poor or powerless to leave, shtetls remained a fixture until their obliteration in the Holocaust.

Eishyshok, a Lithuanian shtetl, is the subject of ``There Once Was a World,'' a massive compendium about a place proverbially known as the Eastern European Jewish equivalent of Podunk. But author Yaffa Eliach, an Eishyshok native and Holocaust survivor who teaches at Brooklyn College, goes to considerable length to dispel the notion that Eishyshok was a provincial backwater. In Eliach's history, it was a place that, despite its political subservience, created a rich Jewish communal life of schools, culture, charity, and religion.

Her narrative begins in the 11th century, when Jewish farmers settled in the area. In encyclopedic detail, Eliach covers nearly a millennium of religious practice, commerce, agriculture, transportation, medical care, and education. Indeed, the shtetl of Eishyshok had its attractions, most notably its first-rate ``yeshivhot,'' or religious schools, which produced Haffetz Hayyim, a world-renowned 19th-century Talmudic scholar.

But life was hard. Anti-Semitism and poverty were rife. Even as the spark of the French Revolution gradually emancipated Jews throughout Western Europe, in Eishyshok, as in the rest of Poland and Russia, Jews' political and human rights were nil. The people of Eishyshok were exiles, powerless to determine their own fate -- or, indeed, to protect their lives. This was no mecca.

And the people of Eishyshok knew it. As Eliach writes, in the late 19th century ``began the most dramatic and crucial years in the history of East European Jewry in general, and Eishyshok in particular . . . when centuries-old traditions were overshadowed by secular movements: Zionism, socialism, and Communism.'' The arithmetic of emigration is conclusive: Between the 1880s and World War I, something like 2.5 million Jews fled Europe to America, Palestine, and other countries.

The scholarship in ``There Once Was a World'' is convincing: Eliach spent more than 17 years interviewing survivors, tracking down archives, and assembling the book's vast collection of photographs (which forms the Tower of Life, a three-story gallery in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.). So, too, are the obstacles she overcame in search of her story: ``For one photograph of the market square on market day,'' she writes, ``I paid with a color TV, a VCR, a radio, four jogging suits and four pairs of Reebok sneakers.''

Yet the 550 pages of Eliach's pre-Holocaust history, however comprehensive, make for onerous reading. The reader is introduced to the shtetl's personalities, but the textbook nature of Eliach's book prevents them from coming alive on the page. Her account suffers from (understandable) nostalgia. Hence we meet Eishyshok's scholars, but not the gangsters; the community leaders, but not the scoundrels.

In the last 150 pages, covering the Holocaust, the book generates pace. Most of Eishyshok's Jews were slaughtered in a September 1941 massacre. Not only Nazis, but also their Lithuanian neighbors engaged in live burials and torture with a gruesome, sickening delight. You recoil at their animalism; you are staggered by the grit of the Moshe Sonensen, Eliach's father, to keep his family together while hiding, sick and hungry, from the killers.

Even the defeat of the Nazis didn't end Moshe Sonensen's troubles: Polish forces of the ``Home Army'' killed his wife and baby son in their plan to ensure a Jew-free postwar Poland; and in a show trial against Jews, Russian communists sentenced him to 10 years' hard labor in Siberia. Equally appalling were the obstacles the British and Americans created in preventing emigration to postwar Palestine.

Yet even in these frightful passages, you feel an odd distance because of Eliach's decision to write in the third person. Here is a woman who at age 4 saw her townsfolk murdered before her eyes. While hiding in a hayloft, fellow Jews suffocated her baby brother to prevent his squeals from alerting German soldiers. After liberation from the Nazis, she narrowly escaped death at the hands of Polish soldiers, who still managed to kill her mother and second baby brother. Narrative detachment is a necessary device for the historian; but for Yaffa Eliach, a victim of the bloodiest, most horrific event in history, a memoir might have been a more natural literary form.

But talk of literary forms is sometimes beside the point. ``There Once Was a World'' follows the imperatives of the ``yizkor-bikher,'' or memorial books, in which survivors of Eastern European shtetls re-create the world that was lost to the Nazis. That such books are often sentimental about places that were losing their appeal well before Hitler is unavoidable. The important point is that the Jews of Eishyshok, their lives and community vaporized, now live on in the yizkor bukh that Yaffa Eliach so single-mindedly has compiled.