Roman Vishniac

A documentary record of the lives of the Jews of Eastern Europe 1934-1939, with commentary by the photographer.

The vibrant, intimate world of Vishniac's photographs contains shepherds and sages, waifs and dignitaries, cheder boys and traveling salesmen, housewives, shopkeepers, and "carriers of heavy loads." In the Carpathians, a man walks to work with a saw under one arm, a prayer shawl under the other. In Lublin, a woman sells baked goods at the Old City wall, while in the yeshiva, "entranced young faces look beyond earthly existence." In Vilna, children play ball at the entrance to the ghetto. For Vishniac, the glance or gesture of each mother, each child, was a story that had to be told. As Cornell Capa writes at the beginning of this volume, Roman Vishniac "was selected through divine grace to give us his memory of a world that has vanished, a world you are holding in your hands." Includes nearly 140 photographs as well as brief excerpts from Vishniac's unpublished diaries.

"Between 1935 and 1938 the celebrated photographer Roman Vishniac explored the cities and villages of Eastern Europe, capturing life in the Jewish shtetlekh of Poland, Romania, Russia, and Hungary, communities that even then seemed threatened. Using a hidden camera and under difficult circumstances, Vishniac was able to take over sixteen thousand photographs, many of which survived the war. With the publication of Children of a Vanished World, seventy of these photographs are available, thirty-six for the first time. The book is devoted to a subject Vishniac especially loved, and one whose mystery and spontaneity he captured with particular poignancy: children."--BOOK JACKET. "The photographs are accompanied by a selection of nursery rhymes, songs, poems, and chants for children's games both in Yiddish and in English translation."--BOOK JACKET.