Homes of the Past

"The powerful story of how immigrant Jewish scholars in 1940s New York attempted to build a museum to commemorate their lost world and people. Among the Jews who arrived in the United States in the early 1940s were a small number of Polish scholars who had devoted their professional lives to the study of Europe's Yiddish-speaking Jews at the YIVO Institute (Yiddish Scientific Institute). Faced with the devastating knowledge that returning to their former home and resuming their scholarly work there was no longer viable, they sought some way to address their profound sense of loss. They wished to document those lives, places, and ways of living that were being destroyed and to continue their work, under radically different circumstances, as scholars. In pursuing this daunting agenda, they made a remarkable decision: they would create a museum that would memorialize East European Jewry and educate American Jews about this legacy. YIVO pursued this undertaking for several years, publicizing the initiative and collecting materials to exhibit-but sadly the Museum of the Homes of the Past was abandoned shortly after the war ended. With insight and clarity, noted historian Jeffrey Shandler draws upon the surviving archival sources to tell the story of the purpose, development, and ultimate fate of the Museum of the Homes of the Past. Particularly revealing is an assessment of the relationship between the museum's European subject and its American venue as envisioned by the museum's creators. What materials did they plan to display, and what new values were ascribed to these objects, by dint of the museum's mission? Furthermore, what seismic challenges did YIVO face by attempting to create the museum in the middle of the war, while the Holocaust was still occurring? At the conclusion, Shandler steps back to consider what the Museum of the Homes of the Past reveals about the desires that prompt people to create museums as sites of remembrance in response to tragedy on a grand scale"--