Last Folio: Textures of Jewish Life in Slovakia

Last Folio features stunning photographs taken by Yuri Dojc of once-vibrant Jewish communities throughout Slovakia. Dojc's photographic journey began in an abandoned school in Bardejov where time had stood still since the day in 1942 when its students were taken to concentration camps. The books were still there, along with student essays marked with corrections and school reports--all disintegrating on dusty shelves. Dojc's eloquent photographs treat the decaying books as survivors, the last witnesses to what had been a thriving culture. Last Folio also includes portraits of aging Slovak Holocaust survivors and images of the poignant ruins of schools, synagogues, mikvahs, and cemeteries. With texts by Lucia Faltin, Katya Krausova, David G. Marwell, and Azar Nafisi, Last Folio presents a stirring tribute to a vanished culture.

"In the context of the trauma of the Holocaust, Dojc has delivered hauntingly beautiful images--jewel-like tokens--that link us by imagination to a lost world and time.... As we look at these images of all that remained, we remember all that was lost." --David G. Marwell, Director, Museum of Jewish Heritage

"Each picture not only grabs your attention because of the technique and chilling content, but also because of the raw emotion of the images, themselves beautiful objects. Dojc's work reminds us of a once vibrant community now lost." --Bloomington Herald-Times Indiana University Press

"Books in these photographs... are possessed by spirits exorcised through Yuri Dojc's magical eye: as they disintegrate into dust, the camera illuminates how that moment of disintegration is also a moment of immense energy and movement, one last and glorious statement of defiance, resisting both death and oblivion." --Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

"This slim catalog of the recent exhibit by award-winning photographer Yuri Dojc gives the reader a new viewpoint of the indescribable loss of the Holocaust. The accompanying text describing the journey that produced these pictures is well written and concise." --AJL Reviews

"Dojc's images beautifully commemorate the history of the Jewish people and culture of slovakia.... The texts by Katya Krausova, Azar Nafisi, and Lufia Faltin provide meaningful context, and the subject matter is treated with deep respect and sensitivity." --www.photolife.com

"[This book] is visually stunning and verbally bold." --Canadian Jewish News Indiana University Press

Yuri Dojc is an internationally acclaimed photographer whose work is included in the collections of the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Canada, and the National Museum of Slovakia. An emigre to Canada from Czechoslovakia, he received a medal of honor from the Slovak Ambassador to the United States in 2001 for We Endured, a series of portraits of Holocaust survivors.

Katya Krausova, a television producer who emigrated to Great Britain from Czechoslovakia in 1968, is a co-founder of Portobello Pictures, an independent film and television production company in the United Kingdom that won the 1997 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for Kolya.

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments and Sponsors

Photographic Memory David G. Marwell

The Journey Katya Krausova

Map of Slovakia

All That Remain Azar Nafisi

Plates

Last Folio: In the Context of History and Memory Lucia Faltin

Survivors

Jews in Slovakia: A Chronology

Biographies