Undiscovered Master

SUZANNE CHESSLER
Special to the Jewish News

A

lter Kacyzne spent a good
deal of his life photograph-
ing the Jewish community
of pre-World War II Poyln,
Yiddish for Poland. A working pho-
tographer, he sold 700 prints to the
New York Yiddish daily Forverts,
where the goal was to appeal to immi-
grant readers who would recall the
images left behind.
Kacyzne's pictures bring back the
day-to-day experiences of the 1920s —
peddlers selling their wares out of horse-
drawn carts, children wading through a
pond, a grandfather looking over a
youngster's studies. Together, the photos
communicate a lifestyle common to the
3.1 million Jews who lived in Poyln
when Kacyzne was in his prime.
It's impossible to know how many
Kacyzne pictures circulated through-
out Poland because the Nazis
destroyed them along with the pho-
tographer's papers, manuscripts and
family documents. In contrast, the
photos that came to America were
safeguarded very carefully in the
archives of the YIVO Institute for
Jewish Research in New York.
With the encouragement of the
photographer's daughter, Sulamita
Kacyzne-Reale, chief YIVO archivist
Marek,Web put together some 160
photos representative of the artist's
work. He also wrote an introduction
and some caption information, and is
glad the materials are being published
this month as a book, titled Poyln:
Jewish Life in the Old Country
(Metropolitan Books; $50).
"We've been trying to produce an
album devoted to Kacyzne's art for
quite a while, and we've finally realized
that," says Web, who picked works
conveying many different scenes.
"Readers can look to the artistry of the
work and the history of the Jews. It
rescues the images from oblivion, and
it puts the artist on the map."
Kacyzne was born in 1885 to a
family of Wilno laborers who lived in
perpetual poverty. An avid reader, he
became fluent in Yiddish, Hebrew,
Russian, Polish, German and French.
At 14, after his father's death, he was
sent to Ukraine, where he became a
photographer's apprentice. He also

11/5
1999

32 Detroit Jewish News

began to write and publish Russian
poetry.
The Yiddish stories of Isaac Leib
Peretz inspired Kacyzne to move to
Warsaw, the center of Yiddish culture,
and Kacyzne went on to write plays,
short stories, a novel, film scripts, cul-
tural and social essays, travel journals
and news articles. From 1937-39, he
published a 16-page biweekly filled

— as if he were doing a painting,
according to Web. The photos were
influenced by the Dutch masters;
Kacyzne's use of light, placement of
people and the general mood depicted
are reminiscent of paintings by
Rembrandt, Vermeer and others.
"Kacyzne had a contract of sorts for
sending photos planned for the art
section of the Forverts," Web says.

"The newspaper made the captions
more chatty and colorful as well as
longer, but we thought it would be
better to reinstate the originals,
although sometimes we add historical
information. Ultimately, the photos
speak for themselves.
Web remains a Kacyzne fan.
"I change my choice of favorite pic-
ture from day to day because they are

acyzne, Warsaw,
w;tii
t
diitou
iw vh
as
a orskaw ke

in 1941. He died a er endurin
hours of unspeakable torture an
beatings by Ukrainian guards at
larnapol's Jewish cemetery, where be
had been marched with thousands
of other Jews. The young Yiddish
poet Nakhrrian Blitz, a survivor of
the massacre, published a han-owin
account of Kacyzne's last hours in
one ofthefirst issues of "Dos nave
lebn" (-The N w Lift"), a Yiddish
daily. It was among the earliest
Holocaust testimonies to appear in
print after the fall of the Nazis.
Alters wife, Khana, died in the
Belzec death camp. His daughter;
Sulamita, survived the war dis-
guised as a gentile. In 1946, she
married the Italian ambassador to
Poland, Eugene Reale, and moved
to Italy, where she lived until her
death earlier this year She devoted
much of her life to> preserving her
father's literary and artistic gag.

'

with his own literary writings and
political commentary.
Kacyzne continued working as a
photographer and traveled around the
country to find a vast range of people
to immortalize for the Forverts —
blacksmiths, spinning women, khey-
der boys and politicians.
His association with the American
newspaper came after a 1921 commis-
sion from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid
Society, which asked that he illustrate
the plight of Jews trying to leave Poland.
In 1925, he traveled to Palestine as the
official Forverts photographer.
Kacyzne sold his works to the
Forverts for 10 years. He approached
that assignment as he did all his work

"Many of the pictures were quite pop-
ular and well known. During the
Holocaust, his pictures became the
images of the destroyed world."
Besides looking for photos that
seemed the best artistically and techni-
cally, Web wanted to emphasize
Kacyzne's interests in Working people,
shtetl people and poor people. "The
photos were sent to the Forverts with the
barest of captions," reveals Web, who
was born in Poland before the war but
does not remember the world shown by
Kacyzne. "He wrote very brief captions
on the backs of the pictures as if he were
telling Americans that these people were
their brothers and sisters and should be
known to them.

all unusual," the archivist says. "They
are beautiful, nostalgic and heart-rend-
ing when you think that most of the
people did not survive the Holocaust.
"Kacyzne's connection with people
was complete, and he brought them
out in such a way that viewers see
their external beauty and the internal
richness of their souls. They evoke
feelings that make viewers understand
them as humans whose lives are worth
knowing." E.

Poyln: Jewish Life in the Old
Country will be published Nov.
8 by Metropolitan Books.