When Memory Comes : The Unbearable Lightness of Being

For nearly a thousand years, Jews formed an integral part of the Polish landscape; by 1945, they were gone. What remains are memories--and these are quickly fading--and photographs. The photography of Alter Kacyzne, compiled in “Poyln”--Yiddish for Poland--are an unforgettable testimony to this tragic transformation. They are the preface to the events that, by some accounts, have come to define the century.

The rich and varied world of Polish Jewry before World War II was a world still partly mired in the confines of the traditional shtetl, yet it was slowly yielding to the onslaught of modernity. It was a world in which secular Yiddish and Hebrew schools were succeeding religious schools and academies, where the authority of writers, poets and political leaders began to supplant that of the rabbis and tsadikim (saintly men). By the end of World War I, youth organizations, sport clubs and political parties of all stripes from left and right were proliferating. Western dress became the norm, even for many pious Jews. A vibrant secular Yiddish literature and culture (newspapers, theater, journals) attracted a large and loyal following; a worldly bourgeoisie was sending its offspring to study in Geneva, Paris and Berlin and Jewish doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers became a conspicuous social presence in Poland’s cities and towns, much to the dismay of a large number of Polish politicians and the Catholic Church, which mounted a campaign to exclude Jews from the professions and universities and eventually to “evacuate” the Jews from the country altogether. (The campaign, nefarious and idiotic at the same time, ran out of steam by 1939.)

Yet in the country, you could find wooden synagogues filled with pallid young men studying the sacred scripts for months on end while their wives were busy looking after the home and children. The yeshivahs and kheydorim (religious schools), often located in the wretched home of the melamed (teacher), lived cheek by jowl with the stalls and workshops of petty artisans and luftmentshn (literally “men of the air”), the latter hovering around the market or train station in the hope of landing a job to tide them over for a day or two.

Writer, playwright, poet, journalist, literary executor and photographer, Alter Kacyzne was not the only photographer to turn a camera on this way of life, nor is this the first postwar book on this vanished era. Perhaps the most impressive of those books was “The Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864-1939,” compiled by Lucjan Dobroszycki and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, which was also turned into a successful documentary. And then, of course, there was Roman Vishniac, a Latvian-born photographer living in Berlin in the 1930s, who took several trips to Eastern Europe on the eve of the war, returning with superb portraits.

Unlike Vishniac, Kacyzne lived in Poland, and he repeatedly crisscrossed the country, cameras poised. All of Kacyzne’s professional and personal belongings disappeared during the Nazi occupation, and he himself was hacked to death in a hideous four-day pogrom staged by eager Ukrainian collaborators of the SS. His wife met her end in a Nazi death camp.

For years, Kacyzne photographed many of the astonishingly vigorous, creative, disputatious, irrepressible men and women who for three decades belonged to Warsaw’s Yiddish Writers and Journalists Assn. and who formed the avant-garde of the Yiddish literary world. Yet these writers and poets, many of them Kacyzne’s personal friends, are not to be found in the pages of “Poyln.” Rather, “the real subject,” as editor Marek Web puts it, “is the shtetl as a historical place and a state of mind.” The photographs assembled here have been drawn from the hundreds that Kacyzne took in the early 1920s on commission, first from the Hebrew Immigrant Society in New York and later from Abraham Cahan, editor of the largest Yiddish newspaper in the United States, the Jewish Daily Forward. And these images of “the Old Country,” to use Cahan’s words, were indeed closest to Kacyzne’s heart.

Kacyzne’s photographs are nearly all masterpieces of psychological insight, poetic sensitivity and technical brilliance. Though most of them are suffused with lyrical melancholy, they nonetheless succeed in exemplifying the many contrasts of Polish Jewish life, some of them existing side by side, some inhering in the same subject. What can be more poignant yet enchanting than the boys at the cheder; what more telling than the contrast between sportsmen on one page and the Hasidic boys at a summer camp on the facing page?

Though several pictures feature men and women in Western garb (members of a workers’ cooperative, for instance, and the women of a Zionist socialist group on their farm), most of Kacyzne’s subjects, whether scholars or workers, wear traditional clothing. The men sport beards, the women show little evidence of Western influence, the surroundings by and large bespeak unending toil and crushing poverty. Few city professions are on display here; we see instead the work of shtetl-dwellers such as carpenters, knife sharpeners, fishmongers, tavern keepers, locksmiths, tailors and seamstresses, umbrella makers and rope spinners.

Though not comprehensive, “Poyln” is brilliantly evocative of a significant slice of Jewish reality. At the same time, it is worth noting that the pace of change was so dynamic that even a decade later, in the mid-1930s, some aspects of that reality were no longer quite the same.

I spent my childhood in Warsaw, on the eve of World War II, in a Yiddish-speaking secular socialist environment. My father, a fairly prominent member of “the Bund,” the Jewish socialist organization, was deputy director of the Medem Sanatorium for Children, a progressive educational-cum-medical institution that won critical acclaim among educators and public health officials in Poland and Western Europe. As I look at the three photographs of the Medem Sanatorium in Kacyzne’s book, I am struck at the same time by how much they accord with my memories of that institution and how they diverge from them.

Perhaps it is the clothes of the children gathered around the birdhouse that best explain my mixed reaction. The ragged trousers and shirts clearly bear the earmarks of the impoverished background from which the children came. (My mother, a nurse and social worker who made home visits to determine which children particularly needed admission to the sanatorium, would come home every night with heart-rending reports of what she had seen and experienced.) By the time these children arrived in the sanatorium, however, they looked quite different. They donned shorts and short skirts; they were scrubbed and groomed; they received medical treatment and healthful food. Coming in some cases from hovels whose windows barely reached street level, they responded quickly to the fresh air and sunshine, the warmth emanating from the staff of teachers and nurses, and literally within days their drawn, sad faces began to radiate contentment and even mirth. The hovels were all too real. But so were the shorts, the birdhouse, the smiling faces, the children wrapped in thick blankets and reclining in chaise longues on an open snowbound terrace (a photo also in this book). Indeed, for the men and women who built and maintained the sanatorium, the latter embraced the reality both of the present and of the future, in which they ardently believed.

Though “Poyln” is not the first album of photographs of Jews in prewar Poland to appear in the United States, it is among the best. It is haunting and eloquent, evocative, a memory of the past, a link to the present.