To give them light

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 Includes nearly 140 photographs as well as brief excerpts from Vishniac's unpublished diaries.