On Thursday, November 13 at 7 p.m., we welcome photographer David Kaufman, whose book, The Posthumous Landscape: Remnants of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe, a photographic tribute that highlights the stories behind the remnants of Jewish communal in post-war Poland, western Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia.
This free program will be presented via Zoom and is part of Jewish Literary Voices: A Federation Series in collaboration with The Jewish Book Council. Register on the calendar of events page at jewishberkshires.org.
Canadian documentary filmmaker and photographer David Kaufman was deeply moved by the quality of Jewish material culture — the physical remnants of Jewish life — that he saw on his work trips to Poland so he set out to record images of tenements, factories, synagogues, and cemeteries that were part of everyday Jewish life in pre-Holocaust eastern Europe, as well as the places of despair and death where Jews were killed during the war. The images tell 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.
About David Kaufman
David Kaufman writes that his work has been inspired by the early 20th century photographs of Paris taken by Eugene Atget and painter Edward Hopper’s “beautiful renderings of 19th century urban structures in clear, raking, morning and evening light.” Since the 1980s, he has worked exclusively in color, photographing in full sunlight which “gives a chiaroscuro effect on the building and helps delineate what is unique about the architecture,” he says.
About his project, he adds. “I'm 77 years old. I think that part of my impulse for doing this project was similar to the impulse of people of my generation to reconnect with the Europe that existed prior to the establishment of the state of Israel and prior to the Holocaust. Almost all Canadian Jews are first generation. All of us in my generation, where I grew up in Montreal, were the children of immigrants. So there was a very strong desire as the Soviet Union collapsed and it was possible to travel more freely to Eastern Europe, to go there and to seek out the places where our parents and grandparents came from.”
In September, Kaufman spoke to the BJV about his work.
Let me start with a quote from Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, curator at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw, about your 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.” So I want to turn that quote into a question - what can and cannot be recovered from a world destroyed with the disappearance of those who created it?
We only have the bare, bare, bare remnants of a very rich civilization that lasted more than 850, some say 1,000 years in Poland and in surrounding countries, of course, in Belarus and in Ukraine and in other countries in the area. When you go to these places and you see a remnant of a synagogue, often in ruins, sometimes restored, or you see Jewish cemeteries, sometimes preserved, much more, often heavily destroyed, where there are only a few monuments left, you get an inkling, one of the vast size and reach of Jewish civilization in Eastern Europe. And at the same time, you also get a clearer understanding of the huge enterprise that the Holocaust was and the fact that to destroy so many Jewish communities in so many countries required the cooperation of people in each of those communities, not only direction at the hands of the Nazis from Berlin. You see the vastness of once what was. At the same time, you also see the extent of the destruction. It's a very bittersweet journey to visit these places that have remnants of Jewish life.
Your cemetery pictures are so arresting. The carving is magnificent and intricate. And can you shed any light about the tradition of the Jewish tradition of creating tombstones like that? Is that intricacy something that's reflected in Christian cemeteries of the region, or is this a distinctly Jewish form of expression?
From what I've seen, elaborate carvings on tombstones are very much the case for both Christian and Jewish cemeteries of the 19th century. In particular, after World War I, it basically starts fading out. And before, I'd say the mid-18th century, it really doesn't exist very much. It seems to be a particular feature of tombstones for about 150 to 200 years. Of course, the themes and motifs in Christian and Jewish cemeteries of the 18th and 19th century are completely different. I do not know historically if whether there were Masons who worked both in Christian and Jewish cemeteries at the same time.
Clearly the artistic motifs in Jewish cemeteries are very distinctive, and most of them hark back to the Bible for inspiration. You see a lot of use of animal imagery which comes from the Bible. Deer, lions, eagles on male graves in particular. You also see the use of fanciful animals, griffins, even dragons on some tombstones. And on women's graves, you see candelabras, charity boxes, birds, flowers, sometimes griffins as well. The other interesting thing I can say about gravestones is that you do not have the use of the Star of David on any Jewish gravestones until the late 19th century in the advent of the Zionist movement.
Earlier in the interview you said that by being there you understood that there had to be complicity of the local populations beyond just the Germans who came in and did what they did. How did you feel as a Jew in these places among the descendants of the people who were part of this, the catastrophe that, in a sense, you're documenting?
There were sharp differences between Poland and Western Ukraine. In Poland, everywhere we went, you could always find, even in the smallest town, where the local synagogue or cemetery or yeshiva had been prior to the war simply by asking someone in the street. And if the person you encountered in the street didn't know, they would get on their cell phone and gladly call someone who they knew would know.
Contrast this to Ukraine, where in Lviv, we were trying to photograph the entrance to the outdoor marketplace, which is built on the ruins of the old Jewish cemetery. There, a woman who had something to do with public relations for the market and two rather intimidating men came out and told me I could not photograph the entrance because they were involved in litigation with Jewish activists in Lviv who were trying to reclaim the land. There's a difference in atmosphere between Poland and Western Ukraine, which historically was a hotbed of right-wing nationalism. And even today in independent Ukraine, there's a lot of very strong nationalism in western Ukraine. Historically, right wing nationalists collaborated with the Nazis in murdering Jews immediately after the occupation in June and July 1941. In Poland, many individuals may have betrayed Jews, but many individuals also rescued Jews. And there was no organized paramilitary or militia in Poland that collaborated with the Nazis. So, there's a big difference historically. And you felt that even as a tourist at the time when I was there, which was about 10 years ago.
IMAGE: Cultural center of Vyzhnytsia, formerly the town’s largest synagogue, Ukraine, 2016 (PHOTO © DAVID KAUFMAN)