This modest volume presents a sampling drawn from perhaps fifteen out of the many hundred memorial books written by Polish Jews after World War II. The format of the ‘Archives’ collection in which this volume appears dictates that the editors frame the excerpts with commentary and background information. The background information provides little that is surprising or objectionable to scholars. The critical comments, on the other hand, constitute an implicit sociology of the yizker-bukh genre itself. The criteria suggested to distinguish the genre seem appropriate enough: ‘The existence of a typical structure, the mélange of documents, the presence of several first-hand accounts which we find in the immense majority of these books authorize us to speak of a literary genre’ (p. 25). The editors take this ‘authorization’ seriously. In most cases the commentary treats the relevant excerpts not merely as characteristic of what may be found in the original books, but as an illustration of an important aspect of the entire genre. The strategy is stimulating but is risky.

Neither the sources of the theory underlying the commentary, nor the theory itself, are made explicit. The editors’ references to ‘collective memory’, however, suggest the French concept of the sociology of memory set out in Maurice Halbwachs’ La Mémoire Collective (Presses Universitaires de France, [1950] 1968), where he writes:

But this prosaic example poses an obvious difficulty if we want to apply it to the memorial books: for those who committed their memory to yizkerbikher, there was no possibility of return. The point may be made relevant to the yizker-bikher in the following way: all memory exists within sets of relations (the ‘tableau’) and is inherently social. We retain memories because they provide evidence of our social identity at the time when the memories are set. We bring them to a conscious level and share them because of the significance they hold for our social identity in the present.