A Voice from The Lost Town of Trochenbrod

This English translation from Hebrew and Yiddish is the first compilation of Yisrael Beider’s surviving life work. The collection includes extraordinary poems, essays and letters by a son of Trochenbrod - an exclusively Jewish town that was completely destroyed in the Holocaust and its population, including Beider, slaughtered. The destruction of Trochenbrod, the only exclusively Jewish town outside of Israel, is a mostly overlooked Holocaust tragedy. This book pulls together a collection of extraordinary poems, essays, and letters by Yisrael Beider, a son of Trochenbrod and a descendant of generations of rabbis tracing back to the MAHARAL. Beider perished in the Holocaust, but these writings survived to become rare documents to emerge from Trochenbrod. Although Beider published portions of his work in prominent Hebrew and Yiddish papers, most of his work remains unknown. This translation assembled the entire surviving collection to shed light on Beider’s literary and historical work, and to provide an eyewitness account of life in Trochenbrod and western Ukraine between the two world wars.