Translator's note:

As a translator of Yiddish, I follow the internationally recommended YIVO standard for the transliteration – also known as the romanization – of the language. In the context of translating into English, I avoid mixing this system with others, such as the Soviet JaN 1966 method, which uses Slavic letter forms and diphthongs like ej and aj.

Only in rare cases do I depart from the YIVO standard – for example, when a particular spelling has become widely accepted, or when the bearer of a name insists on a specific form.

Yiddish uses vowels and vocalic markers to make the precise pronunciation of a word visible. In this way, we can still “hear” the sound of a language that once shaped the lives of millions. The Yiddish-Ashkenazic pronunciations of Hebrew and Aramaic terms are likewise part of this living, historically layered tradition.

For me, preserving these linguistic nuances is an act of respect – an attempt to honor the people who carried this language, and whose lives were taken from them with a cruelty beyond words. By keeping their language as it once sounded, we allow a small part of their world to live again. In doing so, we return to them, in some measure, a fragment of their identity, their presence, and a faint echo of the life that was taken from them.

Beate Schützmann-Krebs

Dear Reader,

This book is not easily defined.

It might be described as a Yizkor book, yet it is much more than a memorial volume. It is a collection of voices, memories, impressions, testimonies, biographies, documents, lists, and fragments of remembrance. Read from beginning to end, it resembles a mosaic; viewed from another angle, it becomes a kaleidoscope in which each contributor reveals a different facet of Jewish life in Kobryn.

Within these pages, the reader encounters rabbis and revolutionaries, Chasidim and Zionists, teachers and tailors, physicians and wagon drivers, students and artisans. Streets, houses, schools, synagogues, youth organizations, marketplaces, family celebrations, political debates, hopes, disappointments, and tragedies all appear side by side. Through countless small details, an entire world gradually emerges.

Especially valuable are the chapters devoted to language, customs, and folk life. They preserve local expressions, sayings, nicknames, beliefs, remedies, religious practices, and everyday habits that rarely find their way into conventional histories. Through them, Kobryn emerges not merely as one Jewish community among many, but as a distinct expression of East European Jewish civilization.

One of the book's most remarkable qualities is that it does not allow Kobryn to become merely a place of destruction. The tragedy of the Holocaust stands at its center, but the community is never reduced to its end. Long before the reader reaches the accounts of the ghettos and mass murder, one has already come to know the town and its people. And after the destruction, the narrative continues through the survivors who rebuilt their lives in Israel, Argentina, North America, Shanghai, and elsewhere.

The contributors were not, for the most part, professional historians or writers. Their accounts frequently contain inconsistencies, inaccuracies, typographical errors, differing spellings of names, and sometimes contradictory recollections. Yet these imperfections form part of the book's historical value. The reader encounters not a polished historical narrative, but the living voices of people who experienced the events themselves and felt compelled to preserve what remained of their destroyed world.

In preparing this translation, I have sought to remain as faithful as possible to the original text. This occasionally results in phrasing that may seem unusual in English. Wherever possible, I preferred to preserve the character of the original Yiddish rather than smooth away its distinctive rhythm and texture. The language itself preserves echoes of the community from which it emerged.

This translation is offered as a donation to JewishGen, with my heartfelt gratitude for the extraordinary work the organization has done, and continues to do, in preserving and making accessible the memory of Jewish communities and families across the world.

Most of the people whose names appear in these pages are gone. The world they inhabited has largely vanished. Yet through this remarkable collection, they speak again.

I would therefore invite the reader not to approach this volume as a conventional history of a vanished Jewish town. It is better entered as one enters a town itself.

Wander through its streets. Listen to its many voices. Pause with its teachers, merchants, rabbis, workers, dreamers, and survivors. Follow its people from Kobryn to Warsaw, Argentina, Israel, Shanghai, North America, and beyond.

For what survives in these pages is more than memory alone.

It is the life of a community.

It is Kobryn itself, told through many voices at once.

Beate Schützmann-Krebs

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