Customer Reviews

Diaspora: Homelands in Exile (2 Volume Set)

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French photographer Frederic Brenner has brilliantly documented Jewish life in the Diaspora with his magnificent photographs. He has spent the last twenty-five years traveling through over forty countries, on five continents, creating and compiling this collection of images of Jewish communities, faces and culture. Brenner has woven a thread, through the visual image, that shows a people united in their heritage.

This beautiful two volume set is presented in a heavy laminated slipcase. Volume I, PHOTOGRAPHS, contains 262 of Brenner's black and white photos, 2 two-page color photographs, and one map. There are images of a Jewish Harley-Davidson motorcycle club with members posed in front of a Miami Beach synagogue; Jewish workers and their children from Birobidzhan, the former Soviet Union's Jewish autonomous region; portraits of modern Jewish writers living in Austria and Germany; women who have lost their children to the secret police in Argentina; Marranos in Portugal who continue the tradition of celebrating the Passover secretly; Jewish men selling Christian souvenirs in Rome's St. Peter's Piazza; a spiritual gathering of Navahos and Jews in Arizona; Jewish barbers from Tajikistan and merchants from Calcutta. The only color photographs in the book show a yellow swatch of cloth printed with the Star of David that Jews were forced to wear under the Nazis. There is an entire room covered in the same cloth - a photograph commissioned for the Vienna State Opera that hung there as a stage curtain.

Volume II, VOICES, contains writings - essays and commentary from such modern intellectuals and authors as Carlos Fuentes, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Georges Steiner, André Aciman, Jacques Derrida and the voices of the people photographed.

Frederic Brenner wrote, "The Jews I have photographed are all contemporary, but together they reflect a full spectrum of space and time . . . Diaspora: An experience of dispossession and discontinuity. . . . The photographs enable us to see and acknowledge the multiple threads from which we are woven, to listen to and acknowledge the multiple voices within us, even when paradoxical and discordant."

These massive albums represent a tremendous achievement. Brenner has given a gift to us all. These books deserve a place of honor in the home.
JANA

This is a book remarkable for its depicting the so many facets of UNITY. Its stated and documented variety in unity is achieved by capturing the unity in variety of all self-described Jews. Yet, such generous conclusion soon becomes the premise of an inference, one cannot abstain from, about the unity of all humankind.

Great photos that span over several decades, continents, countries, and one people along a vast continuum. The subjects do a certain amount of posing as if in preparation for the moment the reader meets them all. And the reader has the option to meet them in any sequence OR summon all these geo-temporal instances in one place, at one time.

Great photos, consistent quality and presentation technique, good commentary in the second volume. Excellent gift to us all!

I rarely enjoy a "coffee table book" but this is so much more. It is absolutely brilliant-- the many essays are brief but thoughtful and a wonderful companion for the photos which span the evolution of a 25 year career-- or rather-- vocation. Highly recommended.