Before reading Paper Tombs, had you ever heard of yizker bikher? What surprised you most about learning that survivors created hundreds of these memorial volumes in the years after the Holocaust?

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Rather than focusing only on the years of the Holocaust, contributors to yizker bikher recorded the vibrant lives of prewar Jewish communities. Why do you think they made that choice? What does it tell us about what they wanted future generations to remember?

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The memorial books were created collectively by committees of survivors from the same town. How is shared, collaborative remembering different from one person writing a memoir? What might the process have offered to the survivors themselves?

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Yizker bikher were made by ordinary people, generally without any training as historians or writers. How does that inform your thinking about the volumes? What do amateur, homemade memorials offer that official monuments don’t?

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Most readers of Paper Tombs will never read Yiddish or Hebrew, the primary languages of yizker bikher. What responsibilities do we have when encountering another community’s private acts of mourning?

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We’re now losing the last generation of Holocaust survivors. What happens to memory when no one alive experienced the event firsthand? Can objects like yizker bikher carry memory across that gap? What are our obligations to the volumes?

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What might the yizker bukh tradition offer other communities recovering from violence or displacement? What is culturally specific about this form, and what is transferable?

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Has Paper Tombs changed how you think about your own family history? Is there a story, place, or person that deserves its own act of deliberate remembering, and what form might that take?