Yaffa Eliach – författare

Based on interviews and oral histories, this collection of 89 stories is the first anthology of Hasidic stories about the Holocaust, and the first ever in which women play a large role.

Derived by the author from interviews and oral histories, these eighty-nine original Hasidic tales about the Holocaust provide unprecedented witness, in a traditional idiom, to the victims'' inner experience of "unspeakable" suffering. This volume constitutes the first collection of original Hasidic tales to be published in a century."An important work of scholarship and a sudden clear window onto the heretofore sealed world of the Hasidic reaction to the Holocaust. Its true stories and fanciful miracle tales are a profound and often poignant insight into the souls of those who suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis and who managed somehow to use that very suffering as the raw material for their renewed lives." -- Chaim Potok"A beautiful collection." -- Saul Bellow"Yaffa Eliach provides us with stories that are wonderful and terrible -- true myths. We learn how people, when suffering dying, and surviving can call forth their humanity with starkness and clarity. She employs her scholarly gifts only to connect the tellers of the tales, who bear witness, to the reader who is stunned and enriched." -- Robert J. Lifton"In the extensive literature on the Holocaust, this is a unique book. Through it we can attain a glimpse of the victims'' inner life and spiritual resources. Yaffa Eliach has done a superb job." -- Jehuda ReinharzFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

Two million visitors a year enter the US Holocaust Museum, where 1600 photographs from the shtetl of Eishyshok constitute what many consider to be the most moving exhibit in the museum - The Tower of Life. In this soaring, three-storey space we see the people of Eishyshok at their weddings and bar mitzvahs, their social clubs and literary gatherings, their winter sports and summer camps. Now Professor Yaffa Eliach, whose haunting collection of photographs gave faces to a murdered people, has written their history. Eliach's nine century saga of East European Jewish life is richer and fuller than any other written. Her research took her from family attics on six continents to State Archives no scholar had seen since the start of The Cold War. Eliach's own roots in Eishyshok, as a descendant of one of the five founding families and herself one of only 29 survivors of the Nazi massacre of the 3,500 inhabitants of the shtetl gives this book its depth and passion.