Quick Take
- Narration: Lisa Cordileone reads Ziegelman’s prose with an intimacy that honors the memorial quality of the yizkor books; she is unhurried in all the right places.
- Themes: Holocaust memory, Jewish communal life in Eastern Europe, the act of collective remembrance
- Mood: Quietly devastating and deeply human
- Verdict: One of the most important audiobooks I have encountered this year, a landmark piece of literary history-writing that rewards slow, attentive listening.
I finished Once There Was a Town on a grey Sunday afternoon, and I sat with it for a while before doing anything else. Jane Ziegelman has written something that I want to call a work of literary archaeology, though that metaphor does not quite capture the tenderness of it. The yizkor books she explores, memorial volumes compiled by Holocaust survivors to record the worlds that were destroyed, are not academic objects. They are acts of grief so practical they become transcendent: communities writing themselves back into existence because existence, for them, had been violently revoked.
Ziegelman’s entry point into this body of writing is personal. Her grandmother and three brothers emigrated from Luboml, a shtetl in what is now western Ukraine. When Ziegelman asked about the family members who remained, she received evasive answers, the kind that communicate catastrophe without naming it. The yizkor books became her way of answering questions that living relatives could not or would not answer. In that sense, Once There Was a Town is as much a memoir of research as it is a work of history.
Our Take on Once There Was a Town
What makes this book remarkable is how Ziegelman uses the yizkor books not as sources but as voices. She moves through the market squares, study houses, kitchens, and cemeteries of pre-war Jewish Eastern Europe not by summarizing what the survivors wrote but by opening the writing itself to the listener, rich and poor, Zionist and Communist, scholar and peddler, all present in their own words. One reviewer described the experience as finding it almost impossible to set the book aside despite intending to read only part of it on an afternoon. I understand exactly that feeling. There is something about the specificity of the detail, the twenty-pound loaves of bread, the moonlit wooded groves where young couples met, that creates a presence rather than an absence.
Why Listen to Once There Was a Town
Lisa Cordileone’s narration is essential to how this book lands in audio form. Ziegelman’s prose has a quality that the best reviewer here identified precisely: it asks you to slow down, not skim. Cordileone reads it with exactly that pacing, unhurried, finding the individual weight in what might otherwise become historical generalization. At six hours and six minutes, this is a short listen in absolute terms, but it is dense with presence. The reviewer who called it a love song to a vanished world is right. Cordileone makes it feel like a vigil rather than a lecture, a distinction that matters enormously for material this weighted.
What to Watch For in Once There Was a Town
Listeners expecting a conventional historical account of the Holocaust should know that this book largely takes place before the catastrophe, not during or after it. Ziegelman’s focus is the world that was destroyed, its texture and variety and arguments and daily life, rather than the mechanics of its destruction. The violence is always present as the horizon toward which the book moves, but Ziegelman does not dwell there. This is a choice rooted in the yizkor books themselves, which were also primarily acts of reconstruction rather than documentation of atrocity. In conversation with I.B. Singer and Roman Vishniac, as the publisher notes, this book situates itself in a tradition of Jewish self-narration that insists on the fullness of the life that was lost, not only on the fact of its loss.
Who Should Listen to Once There Was a Town
Anyone with a serious interest in Jewish history, Holocaust memory studies, or literary history will find this indispensable. Readers who loved books like Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, or who have engaged with oral history projects documenting vanished communities, will feel immediately at home. The six-hour runtime makes it manageable for a long weekend of listening. Those who prefer history as narrative event rather than texture and testimony may find the lack of dramatic throughline challenging, but that is also the book’s most important argument: that the texture of ordinary life is what genocide destroys, and that ordinary life deserves the fullest possible attention.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are yizkor books, and does Ziegelman explain them for listeners unfamiliar with the tradition?
Yizkor books are memorial volumes compiled by Jewish Holocaust survivors to document and honor the communities that were destroyed. The word comes from the Hebrew for ‘to remember.’ Ziegelman explains the tradition clearly for listeners who have not encountered it before, making the book fully accessible without prior knowledge.
How does Ziegelman’s personal connection to Luboml shape the book?
Her grandmother and three brothers emigrated from Luboml in Poland. The town becomes both the personal anchor for her research and a recurring point of return throughout the book. This dual function, family history and representative example, gives the narrative a grounded intimacy that purely scholarly accounts of the yizkor tradition lack.
Does Once There Was a Town document the Holocaust itself, or focus on pre-war Jewish life?
The book focuses primarily on the pre-war life documented in the yizkor books, the markets, study houses, communal institutions, and daily rhythms of Eastern European Jewish communities. The destruction is always present as a frame, but Ziegelman’s intention is reconstruction of what was lost, not documentation of how it was lost.
Is this book appropriate for listeners who are not Jewish or do not have a personal connection to the Holocaust?
Completely. The book operates as literary and social history, and Ziegelman writes for a general audience. The reviewer pool on record includes people who came to it with no prior connection to the material and found it deeply affecting. It is a book about memory and community that speaks beyond its specific historical subject.
