Ms. Ziegelman weaves an animated tapestry of the daily routines, religious rituals and changing communal interactions among Jews and Christians as the Nazi rule of Eastern Europe spread. She doesn’t flinch from the brutal scenes from which her relatives had spared her when she was young ... Like the memory books she describes, Ms. Ziegelman chronicles the journeys of those family members who found their way to the U.S., as well as the fates of those who remained.
In this bittersweet account, culinary historian Ziegelman (A Square Meal) introduces readers to a remarkable but little-known artifact of the Jewish diaspora: yizkor books, or memory books ... It’s an immersive, dreamlike window into a tragically lost world
