Once There Was a Town by Jane Ziegelman ~ a Review

by Donna Huber

By the close of World War II, six million Jews had been erased from the face of the earth. Those who eluded death had lost their homes, families, and entire way of life. Their response was quintessentially Jewish. From a people with a long-history of self-narration, survivors gathered in groups and wrote books, yizkor books, remembering all that had been destroyed. Jane Ziegelman’s Once There Was a Town takes readers on a journey through this largely uncharted body of writing and the vanished world it depicts.

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site. A free book was provided for an honest review.

January 2026; St. Martin's Press; 978-1250284334
ebook, print (240 pages); history nonfiction

Since I read so much historical fiction about World War II, I've been trying to read a bit of nonfiction about that time. Once There Was a Town is different than what I have read as nonfiction, but it did provide a lot of historical information on Jews in Eastern Europe (predominantly Poland, but Ukraine is also mentioned).

From the summary, I thought this would be mostly about the period around WWII (the 1930s and 1940s), but it actually covered quite a bit of time between the two wars. 

I know very little about being Jewish past Biblical times so this was an interesting read. Jane Ziegelman's family came from a town in Poland that no longer exists as it did before the war nor do most of the Jewish population of the town. Many of the stories shared are about her family and their town, but she also draws on memory books from other towns to give a broader view of what it meant to be a European Jew at the beginning of the 20th century.

While most of the book is focused on the time between the two wars, it does cover WWII and even the time after it as the surviving Jews try to pay their respects to those who didn't make it and record their memory so that they may never be forgotten.

For someone who is Jewish, this is probably a much more emotional read than it was for me. 

As a student, I always thought that anti-semitism just sprang up in the lead-up to the war, but after visiting a holocaust museum in Hungary, I started to understand that it had been occurring for centuries. 

In a lot of the fiction and nonfiction I read about the period, it is usually implied that Jews were well off. But reading about the culture and the everyday life of Jews in Eastern Europe - they didn't seem that well off. They had a meager amount of food - mostly bread and potatoes and worked long, hard days. The Sabbath was the only day that they might not seem poor, as they pulled out their finest and pooled their resources from simple living all week to provide a feast. 

The book covers a lot of subjects of daily life, and there are records of just the mundane everyday life things, which are so often glossed over or left out in order to make a book more "exciting". I found it interesting. It is also not boring or dry, as so many history books can be, as Ziegelman interweaves family stories with the facts.

Buy Once There Was a Town at Amazon

Donna Huber is an avid reader and natural encourager. She is the founder of Girl Who Reads and the author of how-to marketing book Secrets to a Successful Blog Tour. 

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