Poyln: Jewish Life in the Old Country

by Alter Kacyzne

Book Overview

Never-before-published, luminous photographs of Polish Jewish life in the 1920s by an undiscovered master. In 1921, photographer Alter Kacyzne was commissioned by the New York Yiddish daily, the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805050973
• ISBN13: 9780805050974
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 2.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 10.8" x 10.1"

Customer Reviews

Poland photo essay

Thrilling book that had a 90 year old picture in it of my wife's uncle who was waiting to leave Poland for America.

A slice of the old country

Alter Kacyzne was more than a photographer, recording the life and culture of the Jewish people of Warsaw and the provinces, he was a Poet, Author, Playwright, and after the Nazi invasion, a voice of resistance. His surviving photos, a portion of which are published in this volume, breath life back into small towns and their typical residents: the school teacher, the seamstress, the tinker, the carpenter, the baker, and the day labourers waiting in the square for the next job. The only thing I wished the editors would have done was to provide more context, the introduction is a useful short biography, but left me wanting to know more. I also wanted to know more about the people and places photographed, but there is nothing but the short, often cryptic descriptions subtitles like the one on page 24: A school teacher with his class of 5-6 year olds (probably distracted by Kacyzne and his camera), the subtitle is called "Giving a Hint." It is a beautiful photo but the star of the photo is not the bearded teacher giving the hint, but to the wide eyed boy next to the boy receiving the hint. Your eyes are drawn to his eyes, and you wonder if he survived what came after? If you have any ancestry from Polyn, the old country, you will want to buy this book, or at least read it and study the photos. In addition to his field work, Kacyzne had a studio in Warsaw. This made me look at my own family albums. The book states that the 700 photos (now in the archives of the Yivo Institute) sent to US for the Newspaper "Forverts" is his sole remaining legacy. However I found in my album a Kacyzne studio picture of my Great Grandfather and his sons (now donated to Yivo}, maybe there are others waiting to be discovered? That is part of the power of this volume. It lets you look back, but it will also make you look inward, and around, and maybe other Kacyzne photos will be found in family albums and in picture frames in the USA and elsewhere so that Alter Kacyzne's collection will expand and his artistry become known to further generations. I highly recommend this book.

A Priceless Collection Of Images

Alter Kacyzne was a poet, dramatist, journalist, political activist and photographer. A central figure in Warsaw's Yiddish literary scene and cultural world, Kacyzne began a ten-year journey in 1921 that was to prove much more important than anyone could have conceived. The New York Yiddish daily newspaper, the "Forverts," commissioned him to document images of the Jewish life in Poland he had already celebrated in his writings. In 1921 there were three million Yiddish speaking Jews living in Poland or "Poyln," "the old country" - from Warsaw and Kracow to the remote villages of Ostrog and Brisk. For ten years Kacyzne traveled across the country recording their lives on film.This collection of never before published photographs is truly a gift from the past. Luminous portraits, haunting images of village squares and primitive workshops, busy marketplaces, street peddlers, beautiful young women embroidering in a circle by a window, prayer groups and children at summer camp. Images of a people, a world, that is no more. Literally thousands of images were made - ten-year's worth of work. Yet the 700 photographs Kacyzne sent back to the "Forverts" are all that survived. His life's work was obliterated by the Nazis, just as millions of lives were obliterated...along with all the families' photographs. Photographic collections like Roman Vishniac's "A Vanished World," and "Poyln: Jewish Life in the Old Country" by Alter Kacyzne are what remain. They provide a valuable link to the past - to help all of us remember.JANA

On par with Vishniac. A great treasure

He was truly a renaissance man and center of intellectual life: essayist, journalist, founder of a left-wing daily, worshipped photographer of the great and humble, and editor of both Peretz and Ansky. He was murdered in a Jewish cemetery by Ukranians in Tarnopol after escaping the Nazi's. His daughter survived, and was instrumental in getting this book published. Unfortunately she died earlier this year prior to publication. This collection is a treasure. My favorites are the famed photo of a Lublin cheder (1924), and the one of Khane Kolski, taken when she was 106, in which she says that her son in America doesnt even believe that she is still alive. To me, the photos create a lost world; but to the readers of The Forward, for whom the photos were taken, it probably reminded them why they fled the shtetls for the Golden Land of America.