Children of a Vanished World by Mara Vishniac Kohn, Roman Vishniac and Miriam Hartman Flacks (1999, Hardcover)

Synopsis
Roman Vishniac's photographs of life in the shtetl are beautiful in themselves and are a visual record of the rich world of Polish Jewry, which was virtually destroyed by the Nazis. At great personal risk, Vishniac took his photographs with a hidden camera.

Key Details
Author:	Roman Vishniac, Mara Vishniac Kohn, Miriam Hartman Flacks
Language:	English, Yiddish
Publisher:	Univ of California Pr
Series:	S. Mark Taper Foundation Book in Jewish Studies
Format:	Hardcover
ISBN-10:	0520221877
ISBN-13:	9780520221871

Size
Length:	141 pages
Thickness:	0.8 in
Weight:	33 oz

Publisher's Note
Between 1935 and 1938 the celebrated photographer Roman Vishniac captured Jewish life in the cities and villages of Eastern Europe. His daughter now offers his last-minute look at a people just before the fury of Nazi brutality exterminated them. 70 duotones.

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.