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After their communities were shattered by the Holocaust, survivors and refugees constructed monuments — not of stone, but of words.

In Yiddish, they are known as yizkor-bikher, or memorial books. And while they remember human lives now gone, they also memorialize something larger: the town itself, and the web of relationships and place that constitutes its fabric.

����ֱ�� Professor of History and Judaic Studies Eliyana Adler is currently working on a book about the yizkor-bikher and the process involved in compiling them. The California native is new to the University, having most recently taught at Penn State; her first year at ����ֱ�� was spent on sabbatical as she completed a fellowship at the United States Holocaust Museum.

Holocaust survivors and war refugees began compiling memorial books after the end of the Second World War, although the phenomenon took off in the 1960s and ‘70s, she said.

“After the war, they were living all over the world. They would pool their memories, knowledge and financial resources to put together these potluck books,” she explained. “The books were created for the people from that town, and they were chiefly written in Hebrew and Yiddish. They were an internal form of monument and memory, keeping a connection to a place they couldn’t go back to.”

Around 1,000 of these books exist; Adler focuses on the more than 500 books memorializing Polish communities. In fact, there are a few in the ����ֱ�� Libraries.

In the days before the Internet, the work it took to create these books — and to find former neighbors scattered around the globe — was considerable. The projects were entirely volunteer-driven and often messy.

A former community member now living in Brazil may contribute a poem, while someone in Tel Aviv may send a memoir they wrote about what it was like to grow up in that town. Perhaps a writer in New York shares their testimony of the Holocaust, while someone from Los Angeles sends in a family photograph or their mother’s favorite recipe.

Sometimes, the compilers hired a professional historian to write an introduction, but it was just as likely to be written by an insurance salesman or hatmaker.

“On the whole, historians and literary scholars haven’t paid a great deal of attention to these books, but I’ve always loved them,” Adler said.

Piecing together these memories was also painful work — both in terms of the memories themselves and the compilation process. The books often contain a necrology, a list of everyone in the town who died during the war. The compilers worked to contact as many survivors as they could, but acknowledged that they couldn’t reach everyone.

Photographs and other materials were lost in the mail or thrown out by children after their parents’ deaths. Writers fretted about how their work was edited, or a nephew stewed about what an article said about an uncle.

Town life, after all, has always been complicated, filled with both fellowship and disagreements. The virtual towns of the yizkor-bikher were no different.

Also affiliated with ����ֱ��’s Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, Adler will teach a graduate course on historical monuments this fall, looking specifically at the U.S. Civil War, Soviet history and the Holocaust. During the upcoming academic year, she will also teach courses on American Jewish history, Holocaust history and women in the Holocaust.

Her research and her coursework often center on how history and memory intertwine. It’s a complicated business, much like town life; while memories inform history, they are not always reliable.

“With history, we sometimes lull ourselves into believing that it is reliable and ‘objective,’ whereas just like memory, history is very much influenced by who’s writing it and in what context,” she reflected. “Bringing history and memory into conversation has the potential to help us look more critically at history and historiography.”