Poyln - Softcover

Kacyzne, Alter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805068295 ISBN 13: 9780805068290

Publisher: Henry Holt & Company Inc, 2001

Synopsis

In 1921, photographer Alter Kacyzne was commissioned by the New York Yiddish daily, Forverts, to document images of Jewish life in the "old country". Kacyzne's assignment became a ten-year journey across "Poyln", as Poland's three million Yiddish-speaking Jews called their home, from the crowded ghettos of Warsaw and Krakow to the remote villages of Otwock and Kazimierz. Candid and intimate, tender and humorous, Kacyzne's portraits - of teeming village squares and primitive workshops, cattle markets and spinning wheels, prayer groups and summer camps - tell the story of a way of life that is no more. For the last sixty years, Kacyzne's Forverts photographs - the sole fragment of his vast archive to survive World War II - lay unseen. In this volume the lost work of this master is restored to the world in a volume of extraordinary force and beauty.

About this title

Review:

"An unforgettable testimony..."Poyln" is brilliantly evocative of a significant slice of Jewish reality."--Abraham Brumberg, "Los Angeles Times Book Review""Exquisitely detailed, haunting portraits of a lost world"--Susan Shapiro, N"ew York Times Book Review"

About the Author:

Born in 1885 in Vilna, Alter Kacyzne was a Yiddish poet, dramatist, journalist, and editor, as well as a photographer. During the 1920s and 30s he was a central figure in Warsaw's lively Yiddish cultural scene and his photographic studio was a local landmark. Kacyzne was killed in a Ukrainian pogrom in 1941.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company Inc
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0805068295
• ISBN 13: 9780805068290
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192