A photographic tribute that highlights the stories behind remnants of Jewish communal life in post-war Poland, western Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia.
In 1992 Canadian documentary filmmaker and photographer David Kaufman travelled to Poland to produce a television program about hidden child survivors of the Holocaust. A decade later, he returned to make films about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Łódź Ghetto. Kaufman was deeply moved by the quality of Jewish material culture—the physical remnants of Jewish life—that he saw on these early visits. In 2007 he set out on the first of many trips over two decades to record images of tenements, factories, synagogues, and cemeteries that were part of everyday Jewish life in pre-Holocaust eastern Europe. He also made photos of some of the places of despair and death where Jews were killed during the war.
The Posthumous Landscape is more than an act of preserving memory. Kaufman brings his decades of documentary storytelling experience to bear, illuminating these places left behind. His photographs and accompanying texts describe a historic community that played a major role in the development of eastern European society and which left behind grand industrial complexes, urban neighbourhoods, architectural landmarks, beautiful synagogues, as well as vast cemeteries, and haunting memorials. The photographs also tell the stories of the afterlives of those places, many repurposed, some lovingly cared for by non-Jews who remember, and others slowly returning to the earth, but which are preserved in this book’s pages.
Some readers will find here names from their own family histories. All will discover a visual landscape that bears witness to the vitality and creativity of Eastern European Jewry before its destruction.
With introductory essays by political commentator Bernard Avishai and Polish journalist and heritage activist Joanna Podolska, The Posthumous Landscape is a tribute to a community that met a tragic end and a testament to how our internal landscapes are inextricably bound to the places of our past.
“As a stone on a Jewish grave represents the permanence of memory that will not die, Kaufman’s sadly telling photographs of Jewish sites of memory in Eastern Europe—photographs of remnant stones, bricks and mortar—serve as visual testament to the existence of a vibrant Jewish world that once was but is no more. The Posthumous Landscape is a moving, human document, artfully delivered and devastatingly compelling in its impact.”
—Harold Troper, historian, professor emeritus, University of Toronto
“A luminous silence radiates from these pristine photographs. They record at this precise moment what can and cannot be recovered from a world destroyed with the disappearance of those who created it. An inspiring volume that invites the reader to follow in the photographer’s footsteps.”
—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator, Core Exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
“The Posthumous Landscape will be deeply meaningful to any person with a personal tie to, or interest in, the civilization that was created by Eastern European Jewry. As someone whose parents grew up in and survived the entire war in Poland/Ukraine, and who has researched issues related to the Holocaust, this book has spoken to me like no other.”
—Morton Weinfeld, Professor of Sociology, McGill University, co-author with John Sigal of Trauma and Rebirth: Intergenerational Effects of the Holocaust