Creator Bio
Alter-Sholem Kacyzne
1885–1941
In addition to writing Yiddish fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism, Alter-Sholem Kacyzne was also a photographer of East European Jewish life in the interwar period. Born into a working-class family in Vilna, he opened a photography studio in Warsaw in 1910. In 1921, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society of New York commissioned him to photograph the misery of Polish Jews who were seeking to immigrate to the United States. Soon after Abraham Cahan hired him to contribute photographs on a regular basis to the Forverts. Most of his photographic archive was lost during the Holocaust. Kacyzne was murdered by Ukrainians in July 1941.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
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Teacher and Students in a Heder, Lublin
This photograph of a heder, a traditional Jewish boys’ elementary school, has become an iconic photograph of pre-World War II Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The heder was often a one-room classroom…
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The Duke
A porch stage left, a little window. A tree at right. Under the tree a table on a wooden beam. Two solid old benches. In the background, a fence with an entrance in the middle. Behind the fence,…
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Shayke
Once this was the heart of Warsaw—this labyrinth of sad narrow streets between tall tenement houses. Now this is a remote place, an ancient tumor on the body of the modern city, where its blood flows…
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Midos
A Jewish Wedding
Deep in fields the klezmers can be heard
Driving horses foaming at the mouth,
Relatives, both poor and rich, arrive
To Reb Sane’s daughter’s wedding feast. [ . . . ]
But from a…
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Screams in Ukraine
How can it be told in simple, quiet words?
How can you gloss over the sharp outcry
So that people will listen to it and be silent,
With mute eyes, even without a sigh?
Without a sigh, since every…
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Thieves
This scene is from the 1917 Vilna Troupe production of Fishl Bimko’s Ganovim (Robbers), featuring, from left to right, Morris Tarlov, Avrom Teytlboym, Herts Grosbard, Luba Kadison, and Noyekh Nakhbush…