Children of a Vanished World

by Roman Vishniac (Photographer), Mara Vishniac Kohn (Editor)

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―not by destruction and extermination, which no one foresaw, but by change. Using a hidden camera and under difficult circumstances, Vishniac was able to take over sixteen thousand photographs; most were left with his father in a village in France for the duration of the war. With the publication of Children of a Vanished World , seventy of those 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.

Selected and edited by the photographer's daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, and translator and coeditor Miriam Hartman Flacks, these images show children playing, children studying, children in the midst of a world that was about to disappear. They capture the daily life of their subjects, at once ordinary and extraordinary. The photographs are accompanied by a selection of nursery rhymes, songs, poems, and chants for children's games in both Yiddish and English translation. Thanks to Vishniac's visual artistry and the editors' choice of traditional Yiddish verses, a part of this wonderful culture can be preserved for future generations.

Earlier books of Roman Vishniac's photographs include To Give Them Light: The Legacy of Roman Vishniac (1995), A Vanished World (1983), and Polish Jews (1947).

A major exhibition titled "Children of a Vanished World: Photographs byRoman Vishniac" is scheduled at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. The show will open to the public on March 7 and run through June 4, 2000.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Jewish, Photography, Art, World War II

156 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 1999

About the author

Roman Vishniac was a Russian-American photographer, best known for capturing on film the culture of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. [from wikipedia]

Reviews

[Lewis Weinstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

heart-wrenching photos of children who would soon be murdered by the Nazis, smuggled out of Germany during the 1930s and unpublished for many decades.

[Zoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I grabbed this book yesterday in the nursing home library and was very happy I discovered it. Not only does it display beautiful reproductions of 1930s photographs of Jewish children in the Eastern European ghettos, but it also prints bilingual renditions of Yiddish folk songs, children's songs, and lullabies contemporary to the photos, on the facing pages. A real gem, and so accessible --although the text point-size is quite small. My 100 year-old friend liked it very much, and so did I.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

The amount of work this auhtor went through to capture these pictures was amazing. From having to hire a horse that was dying from hunger to getting the negatives across to the U.S. was such a huge undertaking. The world that he captured on film is worth the struggle as you take in every picture of a world that has vanished. More of a picture book with songs to read through.

[Maurice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wonderful photographs of Jews living in Poland prior to WW II. I didn't read all the commentaries; I was mostly interested in getting a sense of what it was like to live there at that time.

[Libby Stott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and sacred.

See my other comment on Vishniak work.