When Memory Comes : The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Is there anything more revealing than a photograph? And is there anything more impenetrable? Roman Vishniac’s celebrated images of prewar Eastern European Jews are instantly evocative of that vanished time and place, dramatic in their rendition of light and shadow and sometimes almost eerily intimate. Yet there is so much we will never know: Who are the figures in those images, the Hasids and the businessmen, the Orthodox Jews in long black garb walking down picturesque Central European streets? What are their stories, thoughts and feelings? What happened to them after the moment arrested by the camera?

We assume we know. The photographs were taken between 1935 and 1938; within a few years, most of the people caught so nimbly by Vishniac’s camera had perished. Usually, the sense of imminent doom we bring to documents of this period involves a kind of anachronistic falseness: The subjects of those documents did not imagine themselves to be living in the shadow of an oncoming catastrophe. They may have been affected by thepolitical insecurity of the time, but that is very different from anticipating annihilation. Vishniac’s work, however, is a rare case in which a premonitory reading might be justified. His sense of mission was apparently fueled by the conviction that the world he was chronicling was slated for destruction. He felt he was memorializing a world even as he was recording it.

Yet that is not what is most striking about the images in “Children of a Vanished World,” the latest book based on the vast photographic archive Vishniac left behind at his death in 1990.

The collection itself has a unique history, recounted in the preface by Mara Vishniac Kohn, Vishniac’s daughter and one of the book’s editors. Initially, Vishniac, a Jew of Latvian origin who grew up in middle-class Berlin, went to Eastern Europe at the behest of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in 1935 to take photographs for their fund-raising campaign to help the impoverished Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. This turned out to be an assignment made in heaven. Most Westernized, assimilated German Jews in Vishniac’s milieu viewed traditional religious Eastern European Jews with suspicion and even disdain--as backward, crude and not fully civilized. Vishniac was one of the exceptions. According to Kohn, as soon as he arrived in Vilna, “the Jerusalem of the East,” he felt he had found a world that was somehow his own. After finishing his first assignment, he went back several times, traveling through Poland, Romania, Russia and Hungary with his Leica and Rolleiflex, in sometimes arduous physical circumstances, taking pictures with a seeming obsessiveness. He traipsed through cities, towns and shtetls--those little towns and villages dotting Eastern Europe in which part or the majority of the population was Jewish. Often, to get around the Orthodox prohibition on images, he hid his camera under his coat and took his snaps through a small opening.

By the time he was finished, Vishniac had taken 16,000 photographs, which he then had to save from Nazi predations. With the help of his father and a friend, he succeeded in transporting the negatives to the United States. Vishniac himself was briefly interned in a detention camp in France, but through the efforts of his wife, the family obtained visas to come to the United States in 1940.

For “Children of the Vanished World,” Kohn has culled from this treasure trove images of children--at work, play, study; alone, in groups or accompanied by adults. These are juxtaposed with texts of songs, nursery rhymes, poems and chants that those children would have known and that are printed in the original Yiddish and in English translation by Miriam Hartman Flacks. The scores to some of the songs are included as well. This combination makes for a lovely book, and one that elicits poignantly mixed feelings.

Vishniac’s great talent was for immediacy, for catching the unguarded, unstaged, uncomposed moment and making it burgeon with expressiveness. For a photographer with this disposition, children are a rewarding subject; the portraits in this book are so vivid, so communicative, so utterly unmasked as to call for some reciprocal gesture of response. And in some ways, these children are like children anywhere: They smile radiantly and sulk defiantly; they look pensive, shy and bored. Here are two little boys, sauntering down an unpaved street in their short pants, one holding a long thin stick upright, both exuding merriment seemingly provoked just by the pleasure of a sunny day. Here’s a young miss of perhaps 9 or 10, an attractive dusting of snow sprinkling her matching coat and beret, smiling at the camera with the elegant composure of a budding grande dame. Here’s a group of kids walking down a wintry town street, arms interlinked, scarves wrapped round their heads, the vigor of winter evident in their step. And here’s yet another little boy grinning fit to burst under his cap and curled earlocks--could it be on account of a little beauty standing behind him, her face framed by thick braids?

But the world of children, aside from having its own laws, reflects the world of adults; and the society suggested by the background and context of Vishniac’s photographs has its sometimes harsh particularities. The material deprivation and poverty depicted in many of the images is bitter, frightening, baffling. In two of the photos, a little girl, clearly ill, is lying in a swarm of filthy bedding and pillows with sharp stuffing coming out. Some broken pieces of wood are piled behind the bed, and her face is smudged with dirt. In another, a boy sits fully dressed on a chaotic unmade bed, in a space for which the word “room” seems elevated. In picture after picture, the children’s clothes are tattered and unwashed, their faces none too clean.

Perhaps because of the nature of his assignment, Vishniac concentrated on the poorest parts of the Jewish communities. The wealthy parts--and there were such--are entirely missing from his range. His photographs remind us that in the ‘30s, Eastern Europe was suffering from a severe economic depression; hard though it is to believe, the Jews of Poland, for example, where most of the photographs were probably taken, were statistically better off than the rest of the Polish population. Still, one cannot help but wonder: How could the inhabitants of those terrible interiors tolerate this level of misery and squalor?

What the photographs cannot tell us is that certain conditions within the shtetls may have contributed to the desperate state of people’s houses, if not their souls. The value and achievement most highly prized in these communities was religious learning, and men often devoted themselves entirely to study, while women tried to scrabble together a livelihood and manage their often large families. Most of the women in Vishniac’s photos look worn, hurried and harried.

To be fair, the division between religious and physical labor occurred less consistently in the poorest families, whose men often could not afford to become scholars. There are renditions of men at work in “Children”--including two cobblers, both watched by rather sad young sons. One of these photographs is counterpointed by a song on the facing page, whose last verse runs, “I have no money, / I have no funds for spending. / I am a cobbler, / my children’s shoes need mending.” There are children performing various labors--a boy carrying a large load of hay on his back and another seated at a piece of machinery. But the book’s most frequently reiterated motif has to do with children hard at study--or hard at avoiding it. Mostly, they are portrayed at cheder (religious elementary school), sitting at long tables, contemplating large opened tomes. The youngest of these boys--for only boys received this kind of schooling--does not look more than 3 or 4; this was when Orthodox Jewish children were inducted into the rigorous but narrow regimen of Talmud studies, under the supervision of rebbes (teachers), who were often given to corporal punishment. (“The rebbe’s tale, dear Dad, is not all true: An evil man and always cursing; About the hitting he does not tell you, The black-and-blue mark still is hurting,” goes a verse of one song.)

Some of the young scholars poring over the tomes look beautifully inward and pensive; others perplexed and penned in. The outdoor shots in “Children of a Vanished World” are a relief, suggesting a sense of freedom, space and sometimes bucolic landscapes. In these, groups of kids play ball under spreading trees or walk barefoot with their elders through lively peasant markets. In a lovely composition, a man with a white beard and a flowing long caftan sits propped up against a tree, looking like some sun-basking Hindu swami, while a young boy wearing a traditional skullcap and short pants with crooked suspenders seems to be engaging him in a little schmooze. A group of schoolgirls gathered on a stoop with their notebooks and satchels would not look out of place in one of Truffaut’s charming child scenes; a trio of adolescents manage to look like Paris flaneurs or young radicals despite their Orthodox garb as they saunter down an urban street, engaged in vigorous conversation. But of course, radicals are exactly what some might have become, were they allowed to continue their lives. The shtetl, aside from struggling with poverty, was in the 1930s seething with political activity, with dozens of political parties, young people’s organizations, Zionism and revolutionary stirrings.

The last verse of a little ditty included in “Children of a Vanished World” perhaps reveals the bittersweet secret of Eastern European Jewish life and the fantastic explosion of creativity that emerged from its deprivations: “I have me a nothing of ancient design / And not a stitch of it can stand the test of time. / One day an idea came to me: / From that nothing this little song we see!” From nothing, what can you make except a song, a poem, a book--and sometimes, to be sure, a great fortune? Some of those who managed to elude the Nazi inferno went on to nourish other places and cultures. For the many who did not escape, for the children whose moments Vishniac so vividly rendered, the pity--the great pity of it--was that they did not have a chance to change or fulfill their lives.

The world Vishniac discovered in Eastern Europe was not an ideal world, and his was not an idealizing vision; it was a place tumultuous with ordinary life, with childish griefs, joys and hopes, and these he rendered with empathy, affection and understanding. “I wanted,” he said, “at least to save their faces.” This he has accomplished, and by doing so, he reminds us of what, and how much, has been lost.