Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award
In 1921, photographer Alter Kacyzne was comissioned by the New York Yiddish daily, Forverts, to document images of Jewish life in the "old country." Kacyzne's assignment was to become 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. Now the work of this lost master is restored to the world in a volume of extraordinary force and beauty.
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, New 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.