Poyln: Jewish Life in the Old Country [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover)

by Alter Kacyzne (Author) "The old castle and the synagogue (right), connected by an underground passage..." (more)
Key Phrases: Biala Podlaska, Visoke Litovsk, Wysokie Litewskie

Editorial Reviews

Review
"An unforgettable testimony . . . Poyln is brilliantly evocative of a significant slice of Jewish reality." -- Abraham Brumberg, Los Angeles Times Book 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
-- Review

"Long after closing this book, the images stay vividly in the mind . . . This is photojournalism with a poetic vision." -- Sandee Brawarsky, Jewish Week --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of 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, New York Times Book Review

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; 1st edition (November 6, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805050973
• ISBN-13: 978-0805050974
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 10.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #680,910 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

81 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars On par with Vishniac. A great treasure, November 12, 1999

By A Customer

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A slice of the old country, January 29, 2005

By	Uncle Bob (Pennsylvania, USA) - See all my reviews

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Priceless Collection Of Images, May 21, 2004

By	Jana L. Perskie "ceruleana" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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